SEO vs AEO vs GEO: What’s Actually Different?SEO vs AEO vs GEO:What’s Actually Different?What’s Actually Different?

The search industry issues a new acronym roughly as often as it issues a new consultancy to sell it. AEO and GEO arrived close enough together that most explanations of one are really explanations of the other, and the useful question gets lost somewhere in the middle: what actually differs here, and what is the same thing wearing a new label?

The short version is that SEO, AEO and GEO aren’t three separate marketing disciplines. They are three approaches to the same fundamental problem — how do you make your brand discoverable and credible when people are looking for information? What separates them is narrower than the acronyms suggest: where the answer comes from, and what you are actually trying to optimise for.

Before the definitions, the shape of the thing. Six dimensions where the three genuinely diverge — and one row at the bottom that does most of the work.

That table is a map, not a set of walls. Treat the three as rigid categories and you end up running three strategies where one system would have done. The rest of this is what those columns mean in practice, and where they leak into each other.

The model most marketing plans were built on is simple enough that it never needed writing down. Someone searches on Google, scans a page of results, clicks through to a website, and converts there. Every link in that chain is a place you can intervene, and SEO is the name for intervening in it.

Three newer paths now run alongside it. Google returns an AI Overview above the results. ChatGPT answers directly, and sometimes recommends a provider. Perplexity answers and cites its sources. In each case something has been removed from the middle of the chain.

That distinction is the setup for everything else here. SEO still describes, accurately, how to win a list of links. What it doesn’t describe is what happens when the list is no longer the thing the user is looking at — which is how it stopped being a complete framework without ever becoming wrong.

Worth keeping this short, because it’s the part everyone already knows. SEO breaks into a fairly settled set of components, and none of them have gone anywhere.

What connects those surfaces is extraction. None of them read your page to the user — they lift something out of it and present it on their own terms. So the content has to be clear, direct and extractable: a definition that survives being pulled out of its paragraph, a figure with its unit attached, a list that keeps its shape when it lands somewhere else.

Becoming part of an answer isn’t something a single page achieves on its own. GEO runs on a wider set of signals, and most of them describe your brand rather than your content.

There’s a comfortable version of this argument doing the rounds: just do good SEO, and the AI systems will find you. It isn’t wrong. It’s incomplete, and the gap is wider than it sounds.

Traditional SEO is heavily focused on one thing — your website’s ability to rank. GEO involves the wider information ecosystem surrounding your brand, and your site is only one node in it. The clearest evidence that these are not the same job is that ranking no longer reliably predicts being cited.

Industry publications, reviews, directories, expert commentary, third-party articles, other authoritative sources — all of them feed how an AI system understands who you are and what you can credibly speak to. Almost none of them are yours to edit. That creates a genuinely interesting shift in what the work is.

Having drawn the lines, it’s worth blurring them on purpose. These are not rigid categories, and treating them as three separate workstreams is its own failure mode — three briefs, three owners, three sets of overlapping work.

Good technical SEO helps AEO and GEO for an entirely unglamorous reason: search engines and AI systems still have to crawl your site, understand what’s on it and retrieve it later. A page that can’t be parsed is invisible to all three at once.

There is significant overlap between all three, and the overlap is the cheap part — most of the work that makes a page extractable also makes it rankable. That 38% figure cuts both ways, too: a top-10 ranking is nowhere near sufficient for a citation, but it still accounts for more than a third of them, which is a long way above chance.

All three — but not equally, and not as three projects. In practice it collapses into three questions, asked in this order, of any page before it ships.

The order matters more than the labels. A brilliantly extractable answer on a page nothing can crawl is worth nothing. A perfectly crawlable page with no clear answer wins the position and loses the click. And a site that does both, for a brand with no presence anywhere else, still gets left out of the response a model writes.

None of this makes SEO obsolete. It makes SEO too small a word for the job. The work still starts with a site an engine can read; it just no longer ends there, because the answer is increasingly assembled somewhere you don’t own, out of sources you didn’t publish.