AEO vs GEO vs SEO: What's the Difference?

Three acronyms, one underlying question

All three disciplines answer the same business question — “when a customer looks for what we sell, do they find us?” — for three different kinds of search:

	Optimises for	Where you appear	Success looks like
SEO	Ranked lists of results	Google & Bing results pages	Your page in the top results
AEO	Extracted answers	Featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice assistants	Your words shown as the answer
GEO	Generated answers	ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews	Your business named and cited in the response

SEO: the foundation layer

Search engine optimisation is the established discipline: technical health (crawlability, speed, mobile experience), on-page relevance (titles, content, internal links) and authority (links and mentions from other sites).

What’s changed is why it matters. SEO is no longer only about winning clicks from a results page — it’s the supply chain for everything above it. AI engines retrieve from search indexes; pages that rank are the pages that get read, quoted and cited by AI. A business with broken SEO is invisible twice over.

This is why our SEO Foundations service is the prerequisite layer for everything else we do.

AEO: from ranking to being the answer

Answer engine optimisation accepts a hard truth: most modern searches end without a click. The answer appears on the results page — in a featured snippet, a People Also Ask box, or a voice assistant’s spoken reply — and the user moves on.

AEO restructures your content to be that answer:

• Headings phrased as the questions customers actually ask
• A concise, direct answer (40–60 words) immediately below each question
• FAQ and HowTo structured data so engines don’t have to guess
• Formats matched to the query — paragraphs, lists, tables

The same structure that wins snippets is what AI assistants quote when they search the web, which makes AEO the content bridge between classic SEO and GEO. Full details on our answer engine optimisation page.

GEO: getting recommended by the machines

Generative engine optimisation targets the newest surface: the answers AI assistants write. When someone asks Perplexity for “the best [service] in Johannesburg”, the engine composes a short answer naming a handful of businesses. GEO is the work of becoming one of them:

• Ensuring AI crawlers can read everything that matters on your site
• Making your business an unambiguous, consistently-described entity
• Publishing quotable, evidence-rich content engines prefer to cite
• Building mentions on the sources AI systems trust
• Measuring your mention rate across engines, month after month

It’s the discipline with the least competition right now — and the most first-mover advantage. See how we run it on our generative engine optimisation page, or read our step-by-step guide to getting mentioned in ChatGPT answers.

Which one does your business need first?

Honest answer: it depends on where you’re weakest, and you find that out by testing.

• Site has technical problems or barely ranks? Start with SEO — nothing above it works without it.
• Ranking decently but never winning snippets or answers? AEO will compound what you have.
• Strong on Google but absent from ChatGPT and AI Overviews? GEO is your gap, and your competitors probably share it — for now.
• Want all three handled under one strategy? That’s our flagship AI Search Optimisation programme.

The fastest way to know is to measure. Our free AI visibility audit tests your visibility across traditional search and every major AI engine, and tells you — in plain language — which layer to fix first.