SEO optimises for a page of links. AEO and GEO both optimise for a direct answer — AEO with the emphasis on answer boxes and extraction, GEO with the emphasis on the prose a generative model writes. The two newer terms overlap so heavily that treating them as separate budgets is usually a mistake.
what each one actually optimises
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| the output | Ranked list | Answer box, snippet, voice reply | Generated prose naming a few options |
| the win | Position | Being the extracted answer | Being named and cited inside the sentence |
| content shape | Depth and coverage | Short, self-contained, marked up | Quotable claims plus a verifiable entity |
| measurement | Positions, sessions | Snippet ownership | Prompt panel, verbatim answers, cited sources |
| what kills it | Thin, unlinked pages | Answers buried mid-page, markup that contradicts the text | Unreadable site, unverifiable company, nothing quotable |
the shared third
Roughly a third of the work is identical across all three: one canonical host, clean redirects, pages that return their content in the initial response, valid structured data. If that layer is broken you are paying three times for the same failure. Half the sites in our 100-audit dataset were unreadable to AI crawlers to some degree — that is the shared third failing.
where the money actually differs
SEO spends on depth and links. Long pages, topical coverage, earned references.
AEO spends on structure. Short answers placed where they can be lifted, markup that matches the visible text exactly. The most common AEO failure we find is not missing markup but markup that contradicts the page — ratings with no reviews, FAQ answers that differ from the text. That gets structured data discounted entirely.
GEO spends on entity and sources. Being confirmable as a specific company, and being present in the places engines read. Close to 100% of audited sites had no entity anchor, which is why this is where most of the money goes first.
the naming argument, settled
Nobody has won it and the terms will keep drifting. What matters for your own site is consistency: whichever label you use, use it in your title, your description, your llms.txt and your profiles identically. We publish under GEO and mention AEO as an alternate name in our own markup, which is the honest way to be findable under both without pretending they are different products.
Definitions for each term are in the glossary; the deeper comparison of the two that actually differ is in GEO vs SEO.