AEO vs GEO vs SEO: the difference and what to do first

SEO (search engine optimization) gets your pages ranked on Google and Bing, AEO (answer engine optimization) shapes them so a search engine or assistant can quote a direct answer, and GEO (generative engine optimization) works on whether AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude mention and cite your business. They are layers, not rivals: SEO makes you findable, AEO makes you quotable, GEO makes you recommendable. For nearly every site the right order is SEO basics first, then AEO, then GEO.

What do SEO, AEO and GEO each mean?

SEO is the established discipline: making pages that search engines can crawl, index and rank, and that people choose to click. Its scoreboard is Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools: impressions, clicks, positions.

AEO grew up around featured snippets and voice search, and now covers Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode and Bing’s AI answers. The question it asks: when a search engine wants to answer this question directly, is my page the clearest source? Our complete AEO guide goes through it in full.

GEO takes its name from a 2023 Princeton and IIT Delhi paper, published at KDD 2024, that measured how much of an AI-written answer draws on a given source. In practice it asks: does ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Copilot know my business, can its crawler read my site, and does it cite me? The complete GEO guide covers the methods and what is still unproven.

How are they different, side by side?

Where do they overlap?

More than the marketing suggests. Google’s own documentation is the clearest evidence:

• Its AI features page says a page only needs to be “indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet” to be a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that there are no special optimizations for them. That makes Google’s AEO largely an SEO question.
• Assistants that cite sources mostly fetch them through a search step. OpenAI says sites opted out of its OAI-SearchBot crawler “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers” (OpenAI crawler docs), and Copilot answers draw on Bing’s index. Crawlability is shared ground.
• Clear, specific, well-sourced writing helps all three. The GEO paper found that adding statistics, quotations and citations made sources more visible in AI answers, while keyword stuffing did not help. That is also what good SEO copy looks like.

The genuinely separate work is narrower:

• Only GEO: managing AI crawlers (training bots versus search bots), tracking mentions across prompts, and working on how review sites, directories and roundups describe you.
• Only AEO: formatting passages for extraction, and the snippet controls (nosnippet, max-snippet) that decide what can be quoted.
• Only SEO: the click itself. Titles and descriptions that earn the click, which matters more as answers absorb more of the query. Pew Research found that people who saw a Google AI summary clicked a result in 8% of visits, against 15% without one (Pew, July 2025).

Why does SEO still come first?

Because the other two sit on top of it. If Googlebot cannot index a page, it cannot appear in AI Overviews. If Bing has not indexed it, Copilot is unlikely to cite it. If a page is blocked by robots.txt or your CDN, no assistant can quote it, however well it is written. And search is still where most site traffic comes from for most businesses; your own Search Console data will tell you how much.

There is also a practical reason: SEO problems are visible in data you already have. Pages that dropped out of the index show in Search Console’s Page indexing report (see crawled, currently not indexed), and queries stuck just off page one show in the Performance report (see striking-distance keywords). GEO has no equivalent report you can pull up in seconds.

What should you do first, for your situation?

What does a sensible first month look like?

1. Confirm the basics: key pages indexed in Google (URL Inspection) and Bing, robots.txt allows Googlebot, Bingbot and the AI search crawlers. The free AI crawler checker covers the last part in one go.
2. List the 20 questions your customers ask most, from Search Console queries, sales calls and support emails.
3. Rewrite the pages that should answer them: question as a heading, the answer in two or three sentences, then the detail.
4. Fix your one-sentence business description everywhere it appears: site, profiles, directories.
5. Ask the same 20 questions in ChatGPT and Claude with web search on, and write down who they name. Repeat monthly.

If you would rather not do step 2 and step 5 by hand, SEO Rank Fixer reads your Search Console data every night, ranks SEO fixes by the clicks they are worth, flags questions your pages leave unanswered, and on Pro checks whether ChatGPT and Claude cite you. It covers those two assistants today, not Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews. The Free plan needs no card; see pricing.

Is it worth hiring for AEO or GEO separately?

For most small and mid-sized businesses, no. Hire or train for good SEO with current knowledge of AI search, and be skeptical of anyone selling GEO as a separate package that skips crawlability, indexing and content quality. Ask what they would measure and how; a credible answer involves repeated prompt checks and your own Search Console and Bing data, not a single “AI ranking” number. Short definitions of the terms above are in the glossary.