SEO vs AEO vs GEO: what's the difference?
SEO gets you found on Google. AEO gets you served as the direct answer in answer engines and voice assistants. GEO gets you cited inside AI-generated answers like Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. They overlap, but each needs its own setup, and I build for all three at once.
For years, getting found online meant one thing: ranking on Google. That's SEO, and it still matters. But how people search is changing fast. More of them now ask an AI a question instead of scrolling a page of blue links, and that has created two newer disciplines, AEO and GEO, that decide whether you show up in those AI answers at all.
Here's how the three compare, side by side.
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full name | Search Engine Optimization | Answer Engine Optimization | Generative Engine Optimization |
| Goal | Rank in the search results | Be the direct answer | Be cited inside AI answers |
| Where you appear | Google and Bing results pages | Featured snippets, voice assistants, Q&A boxes | Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini |
| What it rewards | Relevance, speed, authority, and keywords | Clear, direct answers to real questions | Authoritative, quotable, well-structured content |
| Key setup | Clean structure, titles and meta, fast pages, links | Question-as-heading, answer up top, FAQ and QA schema | Entity clarity, schema, an llms.txt file, being referenced widely |
| Best for | Steady organic traffic over time | Voice and quick-answer queries | Anyone whose customers ask AI for recommendations |
SEO is the classic one: making sure your site ranks when someone types a query into Google. It rewards clean, fast, well-structured pages that clearly match what people search for, backed by other sites linking to you. It's still the biggest source of steady traffic for most businesses, and it's the foundation everything else builds on. Is Webflow good for SEO? →
AEO is about being the direct answer, not just a link. When someone asks a question, out loud to a voice assistant or in a search box, answer engines pull a single clear response. To win that spot you need pages that pose the real question and answer it immediately, in plain language, backed by FAQ and QA schema so machines can read it cleanly. This whole Answers section is built that way on purpose. What is AEO? →
GEO is the newest of the three: getting your business surfaced and quoted inside AI-generated answers, like Google's AI Overviews or a ChatGPT recommendation. These tools don't just rank pages, they synthesise an answer from sources they trust. To be one of those sources you need authoritative, well-structured, genuinely quotable content, a clear description of your business as data, an llms.txt file that points AI to your key pages, and consistent mentions of you across the web. How to show up in ChatGPT →
The good news is these aren't three separate projects. They share the same core: clean structure, fast pages, schema markup, and content that answers real questions clearly. Build that well, and you're most of the way to all three at once. On top of the shared foundation, I add the specifics each one needs, the FAQ and QA schema for AEO, the llms.txt and entity setup for GEO, and the technical SEO basics that hold it all up.
That's exactly how this site is built, and it's how I build yours. If your customers are searching Google, asking Siri, or asking ChatGPT, you want to show up in all three places, not just the one that's shrinking.