Owners and marketers who want AI search visibility without chasing hype or abandoning SEO basics.
Three acronyms, used interchangeably by people selling all three. Here is what each actually refers to, where they genuinely differ, and which of them describes work you should be paying for.
SEO earns position in a list of links. AEO earns inclusion in a generated answer. GEO is used interchangeably with AEO by most practitioners, though some reserve it for generative systems specifically. The distinctions are real but narrower than the marketing suggests, and all three rest on the same foundations.
A prospect forwarded me three agency proposals last year. One sold SEO, one sold AEO, one sold GEO. The deliverables lists were close to identical.
That is not necessarily dishonest. The underlying work genuinely does overlap a great deal. But it makes the terms almost useless for deciding what you are buying, which is a problem when they are the headline on the invoice.
So this is the plain-language version, including where the distinctions are real and where they are packaging.
What each term refers to
SEO, search engine optimization, is the older and broadest of the three. The objective is position in a ranked list of links, and the mechanism is a search engine deciding which pages best match a query.
AEO, answer engine optimization, aims at being the source a system uses when it generates an answer rather than a list. That includes Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. The objective is not position, it is inclusion and attribution.
GEO, generative engine optimization, is the newest term. Most practitioners use it interchangeably with AEO. Some reserve it specifically for generative systems, treating AEO as the broader category that also covers featured snippets and voice answers.
If you find that distinction unsatisfying, that is because it is. GEO and AEO are, in practice, the same discipline under two labels, and anyone insisting on a hard line between them is usually differentiating a product rather than describing reality.
Where the difference is genuinely real
The meaningful split is not between AEO and GEO. It is between ranking and being cited, and that one matters.
Ranking is competitive and positional. You are above or below a competitor for a query, and the click goes to whoever is higher and more persuasive in a two-line listing.
Citation is neither. There is no position, only inclusion. Several sources can be cited in the same answer. And the decision appears to weigh whether a model already knows your brand at least as heavily as anything on the page itself.
That difference changes what you measure. Ranking is a state you can check. Citation is a rate you can only observe across repeated trials, because generated answers vary between sessions.
What all three share
This is the part most sales material understates, because it is not new.
All three depend on your content being reachable and readable by machines. All three reward genuine topical depth over breadth. All three benefit from clear structure and unambiguous identity. All three are helped by other credible sites referencing you.
If a provider proposes AEO work that has nothing in common with competent SEO, that is a warning sign rather than innovation. Roughly eighty percent of what makes a page citable is what already made it rank.
Which one describes work you should buy
A practical way to decide.
If your site has technical problems, none of these labels matter yet. Crawlability, speed, indexing, and rendering come first, and they are prerequisites for all three.
If you sell something people compare before buying, weight toward the ranking side. Commercial queries still produce clicks, because people evaluating a vendor want to look at the vendor. AI Overviews appear on roughly 22% of commercial queries compared with about 39% of informational ones, so the click survives better here.
If your visibility comes from informational content, you need the citation side, and urgently. That is the category losing clicks fastest as answers get generated in place.
If nobody has heard of you, the highest-value work is off-site presence, whatever the label on the proposal. Being known is what gets you considered in the first place.
How to read a proposal that uses these words
Three questions cut through the terminology.
Ask what they will do differently for AEO than for SEO. A good answer involves specifics: answer capsules, structured data, entity consistency, off-site citation building, measurement across a prompt set. A weak answer is the word AI attached to the same service.
Ask how they will measure it. If the answer is rankings, they are selling SEO with a new label. Citation work needs mention-rate tracking across repeated trials.
Ask what they think is uncertain. This field is roughly two years old and much of the published advice is untested assertion. A practitioner who claims certainty is telling you they have not looked closely.
The honest summary
The terms are converging, and within a couple of years I expect all of this to be called search again, because that is what it is.
What has actually changed is not the discipline. It is that a portion of search demand now resolves without a click, so visibility and traffic have partly decoupled, and your reporting needs to catch up. That is a measurement problem more than a methodology problem.
Frequently asked questions
Is GEO different from AEO?
For practical purposes, no. Most practitioners use them interchangeably. Some reserve GEO for generative systems specifically and treat AEO as the broader category including featured snippets and voice. The underlying work is the same either way.
Do I need to hire someone specifically for AEO?
Usually not separately. The work belongs inside your search program, because it depends on the same foundations. What you should expect is that whoever runs your search work has added citation-side measurement and structure to what they already do.
Has SEO been replaced?
No. Most of what makes content citable is standard SEO practice. What changed is that traffic has become a worse proxy for visibility, so judging a search program on sessions alone will now mislead you.
Which term should I use when briefing an agency?
Describe the outcome rather than the acronym. "I want to appear when someone asks an assistant who to hire for this" is clearer than any of the three letters, and it makes evasive answers easier to spot.
The acronyms are mostly packaging. The real question underneath them is whether you want to be found in a list or quoted in an answer, and for most businesses the honest answer is both.
For the practical side of the citation half, read the full guide to what actually earns citations in AI answers. If you want a read on which half your business should prioritise, email allan@adph-consulting.com.