SEO vs AEO vs GEO: What's the Difference?

SEO: the foundation

Search Engine Optimization is the practice most people already know: making a website easy for search engines to crawl, understand, and rank. It covers things like page titles, site speed, mobile-friendliness, useful content, links from other sites, and — for local businesses — a well-kept Google Business Profile.

SEO hasn't gone away because of AI. It has become the entry ticket. Google's own documentation says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet in Google Search before it can appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. If search engines can't find and read your site, AI systems that rely on those indexes can't either.

AEO: being the answer

Answer Engine Optimization is about the moment someone asks a direct question — "Does this practice take my insurance?" or "Who's open Saturday near me?" — and gets one answer back instead of ten links. That answer might come from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google's AI Overviews.

AEO work makes your information easy to pull out and quote with confidence: pages that state plainly who you are, what you do, and who you serve; questions answered directly near the top of the page; and structured data that states the facts outright instead of leaving AI to guess.

GEO: being cited in the bigger answer

Generative Engine Optimization is the newest of the three terms. It was introduced in a 2023 research paper by Princeton researchers and others (Aggarwal et al., published at KDD 2024), which looked at how content can become more visible in answers that AI systems generate by pulling together several sources.

Where AEO focuses on the single direct answer, GEO focuses on being one of the sources an AI system chooses when it writes a fuller response — "What should I look for in a chiropractor?" or "Best vets in Morris County for anxious dogs." That depends heavily on what other sites say about you: reviews, directories, local press, and professional associations. I call this third-party corroboration.

Which one does your business need?

All three, in this order — because each one builds on the last:

• SEO first. If search engines can't crawl and index your site, nothing else matters.
• AEO second. Make it unmistakable what your business is, what it does, and who it serves — on your site and in your structured data.
• GEO third. Make sure independent sources agree with you, so AI systems trust your information enough to repeat it.

This is also why the reports score SEO, AEO, and GEO separately: a business can rank well on Google and still be missing from AI answers — or the reverse. If you want the full framework, the free guide walks through the three questions AI systems ask before they name a business.

Glossary of AI search terms

The terms you'll run into most, in plain language.

AI Overviews

Google's AI-generated summaries that appear above the traditional results, with links to the sources they drew from.

AI hallucination

When an AI system states something false with confidence — wrong hours, services you don't offer, a closed location. More on this.

Answer engine

Any system that replies to a question with an answer instead of a list of links. The four that matter most right now: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews.

Citation

A source an AI answer links to or names as the basis for what it says. Being cited is the AI-search version of ranking.

E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — how Google's guidelines describe content people can rely on.

Entity

A uniquely identifiable person, business, product, or concept — not a keyword. AI systems need to recognize your business as a clear entity before they'll name it. More on this.

Google Business Profile

Your free Google listing. It controls how you appear in Google Maps and local results, and it's one of the most important sources for local businesses.

llms.txt

A proposed file, suggested by Answer.AI in September 2024, that summarizes a website for large language models. It's a proposal, not an adopted standard, and there's no public confirmation that the major AI tools read it. It's cheap to add, so I include one — but it's not a shortcut.

NAP consistency

Keeping your business Name, Address, and Phone number identical everywhere online. Small mismatches make it harder for machines to confirm all those listings are the same business.

Schema markup

Also called structured data. Code added to a page that states facts — business name, address, hours, services — in a format machines read directly instead of inferring.

Share of Model

How often your brand shows up in AI answers for the questions that matter to you, compared with competitors. More on this.

Third-party corroboration

Independent sources — reviews, directories, associations, press — that confirm what you say about yourself. More on this.

YMYL

"Your Money or Your Life" — Google's term for topics like health, finances, and safety, where content is held to a higher standard of trust. Healthcare practices fall squarely in this category.

Zero-click search

A search that ends without a click to any website, because the answer was shown right on the results page.