Field notes · SEO vs AEO vs GEO
SEO, AEO and GEO — the difference, in plain language.
Three acronyms, one overlapping body of work. Here is what actually differs, what does not, and why you should not be paying three separate invoices for it.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization. Earning position in a ranked list of links. Still the largest source of trackable traffic for most local service businesses.
AEO
Answer Engine Optimization. Being the source quoted in an answer — featured snippets, voice, AI Overviews, assistants — whether or not a click follows.
GEO
Generative Engine Optimization. Being named and cited inside generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews.
How much of it is genuinely different?
Less than the terminology suggests. Practitioners use AEO, GEO and LLMO more or less interchangeably, and the tactics overlap almost completely. GEO came out of a 2023 academic paper; AEO predates it and originally described voice search and featured snippets. Google's own position is that for Google Search, this is still just SEO.
The honest split looks like this:
- Shared foundation. Crawlable, server-rendered pages; accurate entity data; real content that answers real questions; reviews and reputation.
- Different emphasis. Classic SEO leans on links and rankings. AEO and GEO lean harder on earned third-party presence and on being quotable.
- Different measurement. Rankings and sessions on one side; citations, mentions and share of answers on the other.
Buy one program, not three
Splitting this into three retainers pays three teams to do overlapping work and makes the results impossible to attribute. We use the term AI visibility because it describes the outcome rather than staking a claim in a terminology argument with no settled answer.
Related: GEO explained · AEO explained · The AI Visibility program.