The short version
- ✓SEO, AEO and GEO are not competing strategies. Each one depends on the layer below it.
- ✓SEO is about your pages ranking. AEO is about your pages being quoted. GEO is about your brand being named.
- ✓SEO and AEO work happens mostly on your own website and listings. GEO work happens mostly on other people's sites.
- ✓Rankings do not exist inside an AI answer. GEO is measured by running buyer prompts on a schedule and tracking how often and how favorably you appear.
- ✓Fix the foundations first. A site that crawlers cannot read, or a business listed three different ways, caps every layer above it.
How search changed
For twenty years a buyer typed a phrase into Google, got ten links and clicked a few. The job was to be one of those links. That still happens, but two things now sit in front of it.
First, search engines answer the question themselves. Google's AI Overviews, featured snippets and map results often give the buyer what they need before they click anything. Second, a growing share of buyers skip the search engine and ask an assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot. The assistant replies with a short written answer and, for "who should I hire" questions, a short list of names.
So there are now three places to be found: in the list of links, in the engine's own answer, and in the assistant's recommendation. SEO, AEO and GEO are the names for the work that gets you into each one.
SEO: get your pages ranked
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving where your pages appear in search results. It is the oldest of the three layers and the one the others depend on, because both search engines and browsing assistants have to find a page before they can quote it or recommend the business behind it.
What to do
- ✓Make the site fast and crawlable: clean HTML, working sitemap and robots.txt, no broken links, good mobile speed.
- ✓Target the phrases buyers use when they are ready to hire, and give each one a page that fully covers it.
- ✓Write unique title tags and meta descriptions for every page.
- ✓Link related pages to each other so both people and crawlers can follow the topic.
- ✓Earn links from relevant, trusted sites: industry directories, associations, partners and press.
- ✓For local businesses, complete and maintain the Google Business Profile and keep name, address and phone identical everywhere.
How to measure it
Track rankings for the terms that lead to revenue, organic clicks and conversions in Google Search Console and GA4, and the number of quality sites linking to you. Traffic that never turns into an inquiry is not the goal.
AEO: become the answer
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your pages and listings so an engine can lift a clear answer and credit you as the source. Where SEO asks "does this page rank?", AEO asks "if an engine reads this page, can it quote one clean paragraph and know exactly who said it?"
What to do
- ✓Open every key page with a direct 40 to 60 word answer to the question the page is about.
- ✓Add FAQ blocks that use the wording buyers use when they ask an assistant.
- ✓Mark up the page with schema: Organization or LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, Article and BreadcrumbList.
- ✓Serve static or server-rendered HTML. Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so a client-rendered page can look empty to them.
- ✓Publish an llms.txt file and allow the major AI crawlers in robots.txt.
- ✓Keep facts specific and checkable: prices, timelines, service areas, named examples.
How to measure it
Track which of your pages are cited in AI Overviews and featured snippets, whether schema validates on every key page, and for local businesses your position in the map results. More detail is on our what is AEO page.
GEO: become the brand AI names
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving how often and how favorably AI assistants name your brand in the answers they write. An assistant forms its view of a business from everything it can read about it: the company's own site, but also news coverage, reviews, directories, social profiles and what other sites say. That is why most GEO work happens off your website.
The terms AEO and GEO are often used interchangeably, and the work overlaps. The useful line between them is this: AEO is about how a page is built, and GEO is about how a brand is represented across the web. A well-formatted page can still lose the recommendation to a competitor with more independent coverage.
What to do
- ✓Decide the handful of things you want to be known for and describe them the same way on every channel.
- ✓Earn mentions on sites the engines already cite for your category: news outlets, trade publications, roundups, associations and chambers.
- ✓Run a steady review program. Recent, real reviews give an assistant language to use about you.
- ✓Make every profile agree: website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, directories and data aggregators.
- ✓Establish your entity with a referenced Wikidata item and a matching schema graph on your site.
- ✓Publish on a fixed cadence so there is always something new for the engines to find.
How to measure it
There are no rankings inside an AI answer, and the same question can produce a different answer each time. GEO is measured by running a fixed set of buyer prompts across the major engines on a schedule and recording four things: whether you appear, how prominently, in what tone, and which competitors and sources appear with you. Our GEO program is built around that monthly measurement.
Side-by-side comparison
| Factor | SEO | AEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank pages in search results | Be the cited answer | Be the brand the assistant names |
| Where it shows up | Google and Bing result lists | AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice and local answers | ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot answers |
| Where the work happens | Your website and backlinks | Your website and listings | Mostly other sites, plus your own |
| Main levers | Keywords, technical health, links, content depth | Answer-first copy, FAQ blocks, schema, entity data | Third-party mentions, reviews, consistent facts and messaging |
| How it is measured | Rankings, clicks, organic traffic | Citations and snippet appearances | Prompt visibility, share of voice, sentiment |
| Who usually owns it | SEO or web team | SEO and content team | Marketing, PR and content together |
The short form of this comparison is on our GEO vs AEO vs SEO answer page.
What to do first
Work from the bottom up. Each layer limits the one above it.
- Make the site readable. Fast pages, static HTML, working sitemap, no broken links. Nothing else pays off until this is done.
- Lock your facts. One name, one address, one phone number, one description, identical on your site, your Google Business Profile and every listing.
- Answer the buyer's questions on your own pages. Answer-first copy, FAQ blocks and schema on the pages that sell.
- Collect real reviews, continuously. They help the map results, the conversion rate and the way an assistant describes you.
- Earn mentions elsewhere. Press, trade publications, associations, partners and roundups.
- Measure all three layers monthly and let the gaps set the plan.
A local service business will get the most from steps 1 to 4 and the map. A national or B2B brand competing for "best provider" questions will find steps 5 and 6 decide the outcome.
A 90-day plan
Foundations and baseline
- ✓Run a technical crawl and fix speed, broken links, missing titles and descriptions.
- ✓Check what an AI crawler sees with JavaScript turned off.
- ✓Lock one canonical name, address, phone number and business description.
- ✓Record a baseline: rankings for priority terms, plus answers to 20 to 50 buyer prompts across the major AI engines.
Answers and corroboration
- ✓Rewrite key service pages answer-first and add FAQ blocks and schema.
- ✓Publish the first answer pages for questions where you should appear and do not.
- ✓Correct every listing that disagrees with your canon and fill the directories you are missing from.
- ✓Start asking every satisfied customer for a review.
Distribution and first measurement
- ✓Pitch two or three third-party placements: a trade publication, a local business journal, an association listing.
- ✓Settle into a publishing cadence you can keep up every month.
- ✓Re-run the rankings and the prompt set and compare both with the baseline.
- ✓Use the gaps in that report to set the next month's pages and outreach.
The monthly scorecard
Review the same short list every month. If a number is not on a report, it does not get managed.
| Layer | What to track | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | Priority keywords in the top 10 | Rank tracker, Google Search Console |
| SEO | Organic clicks and conversions | Search Console, GA4 |
| SEO | Referring domains | Backlink tool |
| AEO | Pages cited in AI Overviews and featured snippets | SERP tracking |
| AEO | Schema valid on every key page | Rich Results Test |
| AEO | Local pack position and GBP actions | Local rank tracker, GBP insights |
| GEO | Prompts where the brand appears | Monthly prompt battery |
| GEO | Share of voice against named competitors | Monthly prompt battery |
| GEO | Sentiment of the description | Monthly prompt battery |
| GEO | New third-party mentions and reviews | Mention and review monitoring |
| All | Leads and sales that started from search or an AI assistant | Form source tracking, CRM |
Common mistakes
Treating GEO as a replacement for SEO
Assistants that browse the web still find pages through search indexes, and a recommendation still sends the buyer to your site. Dropping SEO weakens the layer GEO stands on.
Publishing volume without a position
It is now cheap to publish hundreds of pages. If they do not say something specific and consistent about who you are and what you are best at, they add noise and no association.
A beautiful site that crawlers cannot read
Client-rendered pages often return an almost empty document to AI crawlers. Check the raw HTML before investing in content.
Three versions of the same business
A different phone number on a directory, an old address on a profile, a second business name on a listing. Each mismatch lowers an engine's confidence that these are all you.
Judging by a single answer
AI answers vary from run to run and from person to person. One good or bad screenshot tells you very little. Track the same prompts over time.
Fake reviews and paid mentions passed off as editorial
They are against platform rules, they can be removed without warning, and they put the whole entity at risk. Earn the real ones.
Glossary
- SEO
- Search engine optimization. Improving where your pages rank in search results.
- AEO
- Answer engine optimization. Structuring your pages so an engine can extract an answer and cite you.
- GEO
- Generative engine optimization. Improving how often and how favorably AI assistants name your brand. Not related to geography.
- AI Overview
- The AI-written summary Google shows above the regular results for many searches.
- Citation
- A source an engine links or credits in its answer. In local SEO the same word also means a directory listing of your business.
- Entity
- The single, unambiguous identity of your business as search engines and AI models understand it.
- NAP
- Name, address and phone number. The basic facts that must match everywhere your business is listed.
- Schema
- Structured data added to a page, usually as JSON-LD, that tells engines what the page and the business are.
- llms.txt
- A plain-text file at the root of a site that points AI assistants to its most useful pages.
- Prompt battery
- A fixed set of buyer questions run across AI engines on a schedule to measure visibility.
- Share of voice
- How often your brand is the featured or cited brand in answers, compared with competitors.
- Sentiment
- Whether an engine describes your brand in positive, neutral or negative terms.