SEO vs AEO vs GEO: which one actually gets you found now?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) gets you ranked

This is the one everyone already knows: backlinks, technical health, keyword strategy, the work that gets you onto page one of a traditional results page. It's still the foundation. Nothing below works without it, since AI systems still lean heavily on well-ranked pages as their source material.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) gets you chosen as the direct answer

Featured snippets, knowledge panels, voice search, and increasingly, the AI Overview box sitting above the results you spent years ranking for. AEO is about structuring content so it can be lifted straight out and shown to someone who never clicks through: clear Q&A formatting, concise answers, semantic structure that makes a system's job easy. Win here, and you can show up first, and still get skipped entirely, since the person gets their answer without visiting your site. More visibility, less traffic per view.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) gets you cited as the authority

The newest and least understood of the three: whether tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity name you, your product, or your data when they're building an answer from scratch, rather than pointing at a search result. The uncomfortable part: most brand mentions inside AI answers come from third-party pages, not the brand's own website:  reviews, comparison articles, analyst coverage. You can't SEO your way into that. GEO is closer to reputation building than page optimisation, more strategy than technical work.

None of these replace each other. They stack. A page that ranks well feeds the systems doing AEO and GEO. An AEO-structured answer is more likely to get picked up and cited by GEO. A strong GEO presence makes the whole system trust you more. Miss one and you're invisible in a growing share of how people actually find businesses now, even while you're still winning at the other two.

What this could mean for you: if your team is still measuring success by rankings alone, you're watching one of three scoreboards, and the other two are growing faster.