If you have read anything about search this year you have met three acronyms and probably suspected they are the same thing wearing different hats. They mostly are. Here is the honest version, and then the short list of work that serves all three.
What do SEO, AEO and GEO each mean?
SEO (search engine optimization). Getting pages to rank in the list of results on Google and Bing. Crawlable pages, good titles and descriptions, fast loading, internal links, relevant content. The foundation everything else sits on.
AEO (answer engine optimization). Getting an engine to extract a direct answer from your page and show it as the answer: featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, Google's AI Overviews, an assistant's citation. The unit of success is a quotable passage.
GEO (generative engine optimization). Getting your brand named or recommended inside an answer a model writes: "for a small business, tools like X and Y…" The unit of success is being the entity the model trusts.
Where do they overlap?
Almost everywhere. Every one of them wants pages that a crawler can reach and read, that say clearly what they are about, that answer the question in the first lines under a heading, that carry an author and a date, and that belong to a site whose identity is unambiguous. A page built for SEO in 2019 usually needs only restructuring, not rewriting, to do well in the other two.
Where do they differ?
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank in the list | Be the extracted answer | Be the recommended brand |
| Judged by | Relevance and authority signals | Whether a passage answers cleanly | Whether the entity is trusted and reachable |
| Key extra work | Titles, links, speed | Question headings, FAQ schema | Crawler access, entity schema, llms.txt, consistent naming |
| Failure looks like | Page three | Competitor's snippet | Not mentioned at all |
The ten changes that serve all three
- Allow AI search crawlers in robots.txt. OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Applebot, DuckAssistBot. Block training bots separately if you choose to.
- Put the question in the heading and the answer in the first sentence. On every page that exists to answer something.
- Add a short FAQ section to product and service pages, with FAQ schema.
- Add Organization and WebSite schema to the homepage, with
sameAslinks to your real profiles. - Name your authors and date your articles, in the page and in BlogPosting schema.
- Server-render your content. If it only appears after JavaScript runs, most AI crawlers never see it.
- Publish an llms.txt describing your site and linking its best pages.
- Use one name everywhere. If your brand is shared with other companies, your own consistency is what disambiguates you.
- Keep titles and meta descriptions honest and specific. They are still what the list of links shows, and still what many engines read first.
- Fix the basics you already know about: broken links, missing alt text, slow pages, duplicate titles. Nothing above compensates for a site that is hard to crawl.
How do I check where I stand?
Run a crawl that looks at both. RankRocket's audit produces a classic SEO score and an AI readiness score from the checks above, then puts the fixes from both into one prioritised list with the page affected and the change to make. If you want to know whether the engines actually mention you today, AI mention monitoring runs your customers' questions through Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity and reports who they name.
Frequently asked questions
Which should a small business do first?
SEO basics, because everything else depends on being crawlable and clear. Then the two structural changes with the biggest AI payoff: allow the search crawlers, and restructure your main pages to lead with answers. Schema and llms.txt are an afternoon after that.
Do AI Overviews use a different crawler?
No. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode use Googlebot. Google-Extended is a separate token that only controls use of your content for training Gemini models; blocking it does not remove you from AI Overviews.
Is GEO just a vendor term?
The term is young and definitions vary, but the behaviour it describes (engines writing answers and naming sources) is real and growing. Treat the acronym lightly and the work seriously.