SEO vs AEO vs GEO: which one actually applies to your business
Somebody has probably told you that SEO is finished and you need to buy GEO instead. That is a sales pitch, not a description of what your customers are doing.
This page is the honest version: what the three acronyms mean, which part of the work genuinely changed, and what is worth your time this month. No prior knowledge assumed, and nothing here needs a developer to understand.
The short answer
If people find your business today by typing into Google, or through Maps, that still works and it is still most of the job. Nothing about AI assistants has switched that off.
If some of your buyers have started asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot for a recommendation instead of searching, you now have a second job alongside the first one. AEO and GEO are two names for that second job.
Almost every small business needs both, in that order. Anyone selling you the second one as a replacement for the first is selling you a hole in your own marketing.
What each acronym actually means
Three terms, explained once, in the order they appeared.
SEO
Search engine optimisation
Making your website easy for a search engine to find, understand and show, so that a person sees your link and clicks it. Ranking a page, being in the map pack, collecting the reviews. This is the discipline that has existed for twenty-odd years, and it is the one most of your customers still travel through.
AEO
Answer engine optimisation
Being the source of the answer rather than one of ten links. The phrase comes from the era of answer boxes and voice assistants, where a question got a single response instead of a page of results. It is now often stretched to cover AI chat answers as well.
GEO
Generative engine optimisation
The newest of the three. Generative just means the assistant writes the answer in its own words instead of handing over a list of links. GEO is the work of being the business it names when it does that.
Now the part most comparison pages skip: there is no standards body for any of this. Nobody owns the words AEO and GEO, and no definition anyone is obliged to follow exists for either. You will find them treated as the same thing in one place and carefully separated in another, and neither is wrong, because there is no standard to be wrong against.
So if you are choosing between two agencies and one says AEO while the other says GEO, that tells you nothing about either of them. Ask what they will actually do instead.
The distinction that matters: a click, or a mention
Put the three letters down. There are only two outcomes you can be optimising for, and everything useful follows from which one you mean.
Outcome one: a link a person clicks. They see you in a list of results, they choose you, they arrive on your site. You can watch it happen in your own analytics. You get a page of your own to make the case, show the photos, and put the enquiry form in front of them.
Outcome two: your name inside an answer they never click. Somebody asks an assistant which plumber, which accountant, which supplier. The assistant names three, describes them briefly, and the person picks one. There may be no link. There may be no visit. You may never see it happen at all, and the first sign of it is a caller who already knows your prices.
That second outcome is what the new acronyms are circling. It is genuinely different: no click to count, no page of yours doing the persuading, and a summary of your business written by something that is not you.
Worth separating early
Being named in an answer and having your website read are two different events. An assistant can name your business from what it already knows, without ever fetching a page from your site. Or it can go and read your page and quote it with a link. Same-looking result, different cause, different fix, which is why it is worth measuring the two separately rather than as one “visibility” number.
Side by side
The honest comparison is not three columns of completely different work. It is a shared foundation and a short list of real differences, which the last two rows carry.
| Question | SEO | AEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you want | Your link chosen from a list of results | Your answer used as the answer | Your business named inside a written answer |
| Where it shows up | Search results, Maps | Answer boxes, voice assistants, and increasingly AI chat | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google’s AI answers |
| What success looks like | Clicks and enquiries you can see | Being quoted, often with no click | Being named, sometimes with a link, sometimes not |
| Who sets the rules | The search engine, and it does not publish them | The engine, unpublished | The AI company, unpublished |
| What you can measure | Your own clicks, impressions and positions, from first-party tools | Whether the box quotes you, by checking it | Whether you are named, and whether your page was cited, by asking the engines repeatedly |
| What it cannot do | Guarantee a position | Guarantee the box | Guarantee a mention |
The large part that is the same work
This is the part a “SEO is dead” pitch has to hide: most of what helps in one place helps in the other, because both are systems trying to read your website and work out what you do.
- Your pages have to be readable. The words a customer needs must be in the page itself, not locked inside an image, a PDF, or something that only appears after a script runs.
- You have to be unambiguous about who you are. One business name, spelled the same way, with the same address, the same service area and the same list of what you sell, across your site, your Google profile, your directory listings and your social profiles. Any system trying to be certain about your business gets less certain every time those disagree.
- You have to answer the questions people actually ask, in the words they ask them, on a page rather than only on the phone.
- Other sites mentioning you still matters. Being written about elsewhere feeds both.
None of that is new work. If someone has been doing your SEO properly for the last five years, you have a head start here, and you deserve to be told that rather than sold a fresh emergency.
Where they genuinely differ
Four differences are real and worth acting on.
The unit changed from a keyword to a question. Nobody types “plumber London emergency” at an assistant. They type a paragraph about a leak under the sink on a Sunday. Your pages have to answer whole questions, completely, in one place.
Your competitors are whoever gets named, not whoever sits above you in the results. The two lists overlap less than you would expect, and the named set is the more useful one: it tells you exactly which businesses an assistant treats as interchangeable with yours.
Access is a separate thing you can break by accident. AI companies send their own crawlers, under their own names, so a site can be perfectly visible in Google while an assistant is turned away at the door by one line in a file most owners have never opened. This is the cheapest thing on the list to check, and the answer is a plain yes or no: check your AI crawler access.
Your facts have to be on the page, because nobody is clicking through to find them. If your service area, your price range, your opening hours and the jobs you do not take are known only to your staff, an answer written about you will be vague or wrong. Written down plainly, in a clean question-and-answer form, they are easy to quote correctly.
What can be measured, and what cannot
For classic search you have first-party tools. Your analytics show visits. Google’s own Search Console shows the searches your site appeared for, how often, and how many people clicked. Imperfect, but it comes from the source.
For AI answers there is no console. No AI company hands you a dashboard about your own brand. The only honest way to know is to ask the engines the questions your buyers ask, ask them repeatedly because the same question produces different answers on different runs, and record three things each time: were you named, was your page actually cited with a link, and who was named instead of you.
And the limit that sits over all of it: no engine publishes how it decides. Not Google, not the AI companies. Anyone telling you that a particular tactic causes a mention is describing a guess, however confidently it is delivered.
What can be said honestly is narrower, and still useful: pages that cannot be read cannot be quoted, facts that are not written down cannot be repeated accurately, and a business that is inconsistent about its own identity is harder for any system to be certain about. Nothing on this page, and nothing any vendor sells, can promise you a mention or a ranking.
What to do, in order
- Do not stop your SEO. Most of your customers are still finding you the old way.
- Check that AI crawlers are not blocked. Ten minutes, and it is either wrong or it is not.
- Write down the ten questions a buyer asks before choosing someone like you. Real sentences, the way they say them out loud.
- Answer each one on your site, in plain language, with the first sentence of every answer complete on its own. That is the sentence that gets quoted.
- Make your business details identical everywhere they appear.
- Check whether assistants name you, before you start and again after. Without a before, you will never know whether any of it worked.
That list is the whole of GEO for a small business. Most of it is on the free tools shelf, and none of it needs a new acronym.
The acronym was never the hard part. The page you did not write is.
FAQs
Is SEO dead now that AI can answer questions?
No. Most people still find most businesses through a search engine or a map, and that has not stopped. What has changed is that some buyers now ask an assistant instead, and that route has no click for you to count. The honest position is that SEO is still the larger job for almost every small business, and AI answers are a second job alongside it, not a replacement for it.
What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
In practice, very little, and nobody is obliged to agree with anyone else. AEO stands for answer engine optimisation and came from the era of answer boxes and voice assistants. GEO stands for generative engine optimisation and refers to assistants that write an answer in their own words. There is no standards body for either term, so the label a vendor uses tells you nothing about what they will do. Ask about the work instead.
Do I need to do SEO and GEO separately?
Mostly no. Being readable, being consistent about who you are, and answering real customer questions in plain language help in both places, so the majority of the work is shared. The genuinely separate parts are short: making sure AI crawlers can reach your site, writing answers that can be quoted whole, and checking whether assistants actually name you.
Can I make ChatGPT recommend my business?
Nobody can make it do that, and any promise otherwise is worth walking away from. No AI company publishes how its answers are decided, and the same question can produce different answers on different days. What you can do is remove the reasons you are impossible to recommend: let the crawlers in, put your real facts on your pages in plain words, keep your business details consistent everywhere, and be written about elsewhere.
Which matters more for a small business, SEO or GEO?
SEO, for almost everyone, today. It is where most of the demand still is and it is measurable from your own tools. GEO matters in proportion to how many of your buyers have switched to asking an assistant, which varies a lot by industry. The way to answer it for your business specifically is to measure whether assistants name you at all, rather than to guess from an article.
How do I know whether AI is mentioning my business?
By asking the engines the questions your customers ask, repeatedly, and recording what comes back. One check is not a measurement, because these systems produce different answers to the same question on different runs. What you want is a fixed list of questions, run more than once, with three results kept apart: named, actually cited with a link to your page, and missing while a competitor was named.
Stop guessing which acronym you need.
See whether AI names your business at all, across ChatGPT and Gemini. Free.