SEO vs AEO vs GEO: what's the difference?

Three acronyms are floating around digital marketing right now: SEO, AEO and GEO. They’re related, they overlap, and most agencies use them interchangeably — which is how people end up paying for three things and getting one.

Here’s the plain-English version, plus what the 2026 data actually shows about each.

The one-line difference

SEO wins you a position. AEO wins you a citation. GEO wins you a recommendation.

SEO — Search Engine Optimisation

The original discipline, and still the foundation. You optimise a page so Google ranks it well for a query, and you get clicks.

What it involves: keyword research, on-page optimisation, technical health (speed, crawlability, indexing), content, backlinks, and — for local businesses — Google Business Profile and Maps.

Measured by: rankings, impressions, clicks, organic traffic, conversions.

Is it dead? No, and be sceptical of anyone who says so. Every AI engine retrieves from an index. If you can’t be found and crawled, you can’t be cited either. SEO is now the entry ticket rather than the whole game.

AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation

AEO is about being the source an answer gets assembled from. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews a question, the engine pulls passages from several places and synthesises a response, citing some of them. AEO is the work of being one of those cited passages.

What it involves in practice:

• Answer-first structure. Every H2 is a real question; the first 40–60 words underneath are a complete, standalone answer. If you cut that paragraph out and paste it into a chat window with no surrounding context, it should still read as a finished answer.
• One idea per passage. Merged topics don’t get extracted cleanly.
• Self-contained language. Write “Searchmetric, a Mumbai SEO agency” rather than “we” — a lifted passage carries no antecedent for a pronoun.
• Structured data — FAQPage, Organization, Person, Article — so the machine can parse what the page is about.
• Covering the sub-questions. Google’s AI Mode uses query fan-out: it breaks one query into many sub-queries and retrieves for each. Content answering the whole cluster gets cited across several of them.

The counterintuitive part: you don’t need to rank #1. Google’s retrieval pipeline routinely pulls cited sources from positions 4–20 based on passage quality and trust signals rather than blue-link rank. A business that can’t realistically win the top spot can still win the citation. That’s the single best commercial argument for doing this work.

Measured by: citations per engine, AI Overview appearances, and — since June 2026 — the Generative AI performance report in Google Search Console.

GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation

GEO is about being the business named when someone asks an AI for a recommendation. “What’s the best SEO agency in Mumbai?” “Which cardiologist should I see in Kochi?” The AI returns two or three names. GEO is the work of being one of them.

This is a different job from AEO, because it’s mostly not about your website at all.

We tested this rather than assumed it. In July 2026 we asked ChatGPT to recommend Mumbai businesses across five categories and logged every source it cited. It cited zero business websites — almost everything came from Google Business Profiles and Reddit. We ran a parallel test in Kochi through Perplexity and Google AI Overviews: in four categories (hotels, restaurants, CBSE schools, IT companies) not one business’s own website was cited.

So GEO is entity and reputation work:

• A complete, active Google Business Profile with genuine reviews
• Consistent information — name, address and phone identical everywhere
• Third-party corroboration — reputable directories, industry bodies, earned press
• Entity anchoring — connecting your business to places, accreditations and organisations that already exist in Google’s Knowledge Graph
• Original data worth citing
• Real participation in communities where your buyers are, under a transparent identity

What GEO is not: fake reviews, sockpuppet Reddit accounts, or paid “AI visibility” listing schemes. Those work briefly and then cost you the listing your business runs on.

The thing most people get wrong: the engines behave differently

This is where a single “AI visibility score” falls apart.

Two 2026 findings worth knowing:

• In a large-scale citation analysis, only about 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT were also cited by Perplexity. Visibility in one tells you almost nothing about the other.
• A study of 34,234 AI responses found ChatGPT cited brands roughly 0.59% of the time versus Perplexity at about 13.05% — a 46× gap.

Averaging those into one number produces a metric that describes nothing. Any agency reporting a single blended “AI visibility score” is reporting a fiction. Ask for per-engine data.

Which does your business need?

Everyone needs SEO first. If Google can’t crawl and index you, nothing else is possible. No exceptions.

Add AEO if your customers ask questions before buying — services, healthcare, education, B2B, anything with a research phase. If people search “how do I…” or “which is better…” before they search your category, AEO pays.

Add GEO if you’re in a category where people ask for recommendations — restaurants, clinics, schools, agencies, contractors, hotels. If a buyer would plausibly ask a friend “who’s good for this?”, they’re now asking an AI the same thing.

Most businesses need all three, in that order, and the foundations overlap heavily. Good structured data serves SEO and AEO. A strong Google Business Profile serves SEO and GEO. That’s why we don’t sell them as three separate retainers — the entity and schema work sits in every plan, and only dedicated AEO/GEO campaign work is quoted separately.

Common questions

Is AEO just SEO with a new name? No, though there’s overlap. SEO optimises a page for a position. AEO optimises a passage for extraction. A page can rank #3 and never get cited; a page at #12 can be cited constantly. Different target, different work.

How long does AEO or GEO take? Perplexity can pick up new content within hours of it being indexed. AI Overviews typically take weeks. ChatGPT is slowest and least predictable. Anyone giving you a firm date is guessing — there’s no reliable public data on this yet.

Can I skip SEO and go straight to AI? No. Every engine retrieves from an index. Uncrawlable means uncitable.

How do I know if it’s working? Three layers. Google Search Console’s Generative AI performance report (rolled out June 2026) gives first-party AI impressions — though not clicks, CTR or query data yet. A manual monthly citation study across all four engines gives specifics. Third-party tools supplement both. Lead with Google’s own data; it’s the least arguable.

Should I pay extra for “AI SEO”? Be careful. Much of what makes AI engines cite you — clean schema, good structure, a complete business profile, genuine authority — is competent SEO. If an agency charges a separate premium for what should already be in the base work, ask exactly what’s different.

What about Claude, Copilot and Gemini specifically? Same principles, different retrieval. The practical move is to allow every AI crawler in your robots.txt — both the indexing bots and the user-triggered fetch bots — and to publish an accurate llms.txt. Blocking half of them by accident is more common than people realise.

Not sure which you need? Get a free audit — we’ll check where you stand on all three, per engine, and tell you honestly which one deserves your money first.