What is the difference between SEO and AEO?

SEO optimises to rank in a list of links, where success is a click through to your site. AEO — answer engine optimisation — optimises to be the passage an engine quotes when it answers a question directly, where there may be no click at all. SEO rewards comprehensiveness and authority; AEO rewards a self-contained, clearly bounded, attributable answer.

What is GEO in marketing?

GEO stands for generative engine optimisation: making your content likely to be retrieved and represented accurately by generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. In practice it begins with crawler access — whether those systems are permitted to fetch your pages at all — and extends to whether your content is machine-readable once they do.

Do I need to do all three?

The foundations are shared, so most sites are already doing much of all three without naming them. Fast, crawlable, well-structured pages serve every one. The divergence is at the margin: SEO wants depth and authority signals, AEO wants extractable question-and-answer structure, GEO wants permission and machine-readable content. Get the shared foundation right first; the specialisations are worth far less on a site that fails it.

AI Visibility27 July 20268 min read

AEO vs SEO vs GEO: what the terms actually mean

Three acronyms for overlapping but genuinely different goals — ranking in a list, being quoted in an answer, and being represented in a generated response. Here is where each one applies.

By Sapun Lamichhane · Arcetis

Three acronyms arrived within about two years of each other, and the marketing industry has been using them interchangeably ever since. They are not interchangeable. They describe three different destinations, and confusing them leads to work that optimises for a place your customers are not.

SEO: ranking in a list

Search engine optimisation is the oldest and best understood. The destination is a position in a ranked list of links, and the measure of success is a click that lands on your site. Everything classical SEO rewards follows from that: relevance to a query, authority signals that distinguish you from ten thousand other candidates, and a page experience good enough that the click does not immediately bounce.

The important structural fact about SEO is that it is a competition for ordering. There is a list, you are somewhere in it, and the work is moving up.

AEO: being the quoted answer

Answer engine optimisation targets a different destination: the passage an engine lifts when it answers a question directly, in a featured snippet, a voice response, or an AI-generated summary. There may be no list, and frequently no click.

That changes what the work rewards. There is no ordering to climb — there is a passage that either can or cannot be extracted. An engine has to locate the answer, decide it is self-contained enough to lift without distorting it, and find something to attribute it to. So AEO rewards question-shaped headings, answers stated in the first sentence rather than built up to, explicit FAQ and HowTo markup, and visible authorship and dates.

This is where the most common mistake lives. A page can be genuinely excellent, rank first, and be useless for AEO — because it is written as a flowing argument rather than as a set of bounded answers. Depth and extractability are not the same property, and a page optimised only for the first will lose the second.

GEO: being represented accurately by a model

Generative engine optimisation is the newest and the least settled. The destination is a generated response — what ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity says when someone asks about your category, your product, or you by name.

Its first constraint is not editorial at all. It is permission. A model can only represent content it was allowed to fetch, and that is governed entirely by which user-agent tokens your robots.txt admits. A site with superb content and a blanket AI disallow has a GEO score of approximately zero, and no amount of writing changes it.

Its second constraint is machine readability in the plainest sense. AI crawlers generally do not execute JavaScript. Content that appears only after client-side rendering is reliably visible to Googlebot and reliably invisible to them — which is why a site can have strong SEO and effectively no GEO, with no symptom anywhere to indicate it.

SEO fails visibly: you check your ranking and it is low. GEO fails silently: nothing errors, nothing drops, you are simply never mentioned.

What they share, and where they part

The shared foundation is larger than the differences, which is why most sites doing good SEO are already partway to the other two:

Crawlable, fast pages that return real HTML. Every one of the three depends on this and none can compensate for its absence.
Clear heading hierarchy and semantic landmarks, so any consumer can tell your content from your navigation.
Accurate structured data describing what the page actually is.
Content that is genuinely correct — the one input no technical work substitutes for.

They part at the margins, and the margins are where the specialised effort goes:

SEO alone rewards depth, internal linking and external authority — the things that decide an ordering.
AEO alone rewards a question-shaped heading with a self-contained answer directly beneath it, plus explicit FAQ or HowTo markup.
GEO alone rewards permissive, deliberate robots.txt tokens and server-rendered content, because those decide whether a model ever sees you.

Where to spend your effort

1Fix the shared foundation first. It is worth more than all three specialisations combined, and every specialisation is worth nothing without it.
2Audit your robots.txt per AI token. This is the cheapest possible GEO work and the most common single point of failure.
3Serve substantive content in the initial HTML response. One change, and it helps every crawler discussed here.
4Convert your best pages to question-shaped headings with the answer in the first sentence.
5Add FAQ or HowTo markup where the content genuinely takes that shape, and never where it does not.

Our answer engine checker tests extractability, and the AI crawler checker resolves your robots.txt per token. Both are free and neither needs an account.