02 · Visibility decision
What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO — and which does a website need?
A website needs all three, because they share one foundation. SEO (search engine optimisation) earns a ranked link in Google and Bing. AEO (answer engine optimisation) shapes a page so an answer engine — Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, a voice assistant — can lift a direct, attributable answer from it. GEO (generative engine optimisation) is the wider practice of making a whole business legible and citable to large language models. Crawlable server-rendered HTML, clear structure and plainly stated facts serve all three.
Three acronyms, sold as three services. In practice they are one body of work seen from three angles, and splitting them into separate projects is the most reliable way to pay for the same foundations twice.
What does differ is the unit being optimised. SEO works on the page and the query. AEO works on the individual question and its answer. GEO works on the business itself — whether the facts a model has about you are consistent, current and confirmed by sources other than your own site.
Side by side
| Dimension | SEO | AEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | A ranked position and a click. | Being the answer that gets quoted. | Being described accurately — and cited — by language models. |
| Where it shows up | Google and Bing results pages. | AI Overviews, featured snippets, answer boxes, voice replies. | ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and the AI layers inside search. |
| Unit of work | The page and the query it targets. | The question-and-answer pair inside a page. | The entity — your business — across your site and other sources. |
| What moves it | Crawlability, relevance, internal links, inbound links, speed. | A real question as a heading, a direct answer right beneath it, tables and definitions. | Consistent facts everywhere, AI crawlers allowed in, specifics instead of adjectives, third-party corroboration. |
| How it is measured | Rankings, impressions and clicks in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. | Appearances in AI Overviews and snippets — partly visible in search tools. | Whether assistants mention and cite you, checked by asking them and by referral traffic. Tooling is still immature. |
| Shared foundation | Server-rendered HTML, a sitemap, structured data, fast pages. | The same, plus answer-first page structure. | The same, plus robots.txt and firewall settings that let AI crawlers through. |
- Your buyers search with short, high-intent phrases and click through to compare.
- You sell in a local or niche market where ranked results still drive most discovery.
- The site is new and not yet indexed well — nothing gets quoted before it gets crawled.
- Your buyers ask full questions — "how much does it cost to build a marketplace app?" — rather than typing keywords.
- You sell to businesses that research with AI assistants before they contact anyone.
- Your category is explained badly elsewhere, and a clear, specific answer would stand out.
- Facts about your business are inconsistent across the web and models are getting them wrong.
Questions
About this decision.
Does a website have to choose between SEO, AEO and GEO?
No. The foundations are shared, so a website built properly serves all three. The choice is only about where to put extra effort once the foundations are in place.
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. Several answer engines retrieve from conventional search indexes before they compose an answer, so a page that is not indexed and reasonably ranked is rarely the one that gets quoted. AEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it.
Is GEO just a new name for SEO?
Partly. The technical base is the same. What GEO adds is attention to the business as an entity — consistent facts, corroboration on other sites, and access for AI crawlers — because a model's answer draws on more than any single page.
Does structured data get a page cited by AI?
Not on its own. Structured data helps engines confirm who you are; what gets quoted is a specific answer stated plainly in the visible text of the page.
Related service
SEO & AEO
Search engine optimisation and answer engine optimisation, built into the websites we deliver and managed after launch.
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