AEO, SEO and GEO.

If you run a business, you have probably had three acronyms thrown at you in the same meeting. They overlap far more than the letters suggest, and the argument about where one ends and the next begins matters much less than a single question: when a customer asks, does your business get named?

What each acronym means

SEO: search engine optimisation

SEO is the original one, and it is about the classic ranked list of blue links. Someone types a query into Google or Bing, and the engine returns pages in order. SEO is the work of getting your pages into that list, as high up as you can, for the searches your customers actually run. Success is a position and a click: you rank, someone clicks, they land on your site, and you can see them arrive in your analytics.

AEO: answer engine optimisation

AEO moves the target from the list to the answer. An answer engine is anything that responds to a question with one reply instead of a page of options: a Google featured snippet sitting above the results, a voice assistant reading a single sentence aloud, or an AI chat replying in a paragraph. AEO is the work of being the business named in that reply. There is often no list to place in and frequently no click at all, so you are either in the answer or you are not there.

GEO: generative engine optimisation

GEO is the newest of the three and the narrowest. Generative systems, meaning ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, do not look up a stored answer. They compose one, usually after gathering sources and writing a summary in their own words. GEO is the work of being one of the sources gathered, and of being named in the text that gets written. The thing you are optimising is less the page and more the fact: who you are, what you do, where you do it, and whether the rest of the web agrees.

How they overlap, and where they genuinely differ

Read that table across and a pattern shows up. SEO puts you among a set of options and leaves the choosing to the customer. AEO and GEO put you inside the answer, where the choosing has already happened.

The relationship between the last two is simpler than the vocabulary makes it sound. AEO is the broader idea, because a direct answer does not need AI at all: Google has been lifting featured snippets straight off web pages for years. GEO is the part of that which deals with systems that generate their answers rather than quoting them. Every generative answer is an answer, so in practice GEO sits inside AEO, and most of the underlying work is the same work. That is why plenty of capable people use the two words interchangeably and nothing bad happens.

The real break is between the first one and the other two. With SEO you can watch a visitor arrive. With AEO and GEO, a customer can read your name, form an opinion and decide to call you without ever touching your website, which means the old measurement habits stop reporting the thing you care about. If you want that comparison in more depth, we have a longer piece on GEO vs SEOAEO vs SEO vs GEO.

The question underneath all three

If you are deciding where to spend money, the acronym debate is not worth your afternoon. The practical question is this: when a customer asks about what you sell, in whatever tool they happen to open, does your business get named?

Picture the same person twice. In the morning they search "best physio in Geelong" and get a page of listings to compare. In the afternoon they ask an AI assistant the same thing and get three names in a sentence. Same customer, same intent, two very different shopfronts. You want to be present in both, and the good news is that most of the work that gets you into the written answer also helps the ranked list. It is closer to one job with two scoreboards than to three separate disciplines. We call the whole of it AI visibility.

What actually moves each one

Here is the honest, unglamorous version. Four things do most of the work, and they are the same four for all three acronyms, weighted differently.

1. Accurate, consistent information about your business

Your trading name, address, phone number, opening hours, service area and what you actually do, stated the same way everywhere: your own website, your Google Business Profile, industry directories, professional association listings, your social profiles. This is dull and it matters more than almost anything else. When those details contradict each other, no system, human or machine, can state a fact about you with confidence. Fixing it is usually the fastest visible improvement available to a small business.

2. Being mentioned by sources the models read

AI systems build their answers largely out of text that already exists somewhere else: news articles, review sites, industry directories, forums, association registers, local publications. A claim that appears only on your own website has exactly one source vouching for it. The same claim repeated across several independent sites is corroborated, meaning more than one place says it, and corroborated facts are far more likely to survive into an answer. Being genuinely written about is the closest thing this field has to a durable advantage. We should be straight with you though: no one outside the AI companies knows precisely how much weight any particular source carries, and the companies do not publish it.

3. Pages that answer real customer questions clearly

Write the question the way a customer would say it out loud, then answer it directly in the first sentence or two before you add the detail. That habit serves every version of this. It gives a featured snippet something clean to lift, because snippets are pulled more or less verbatim from a page. It gives a generative system a self-contained passage it can quote without having to reconstruct your meaning from four scattered paragraphs. And it happens to be better writing for the human reader, who also wanted the answer first.

4. Technical accessibility to AI crawlers

A crawler is an automated program that visits web pages and reads them. Search engines have run them for decades, and the AI companies now run their own, such as OpenAI's GPTBot and Perplexity's crawler. Two things commonly get in their way. First, robots.txt, a small text file on your site that tells crawlers which parts they may read: it can block AI crawlers specifically, sometimes without anyone realising a plugin or a developer set it that way. Second, pages that build their text with JavaScript in the visitor's browser, because a crawler that does not run that code may see an almost empty page. It is also worth adding structured data, sometimes called schema markup, which is a block of standardised code in the background of a page that states plain facts, such as your business type, address and opening hours, in a format machines read without guessing.

Two guides go deeper on the platform-specific side of this: how to get recommended by ChatGPT and how to show up in Google AI answers.

An honest note about the terminology

This field is only a few years old and the words have not settled. Some people use AEO and GEO as exact synonyms. Some treat GEO as a subset of AEO, which is roughly the position taken on this page. Others have abandoned both in favour of AI visibility, AI search optimisation, or LLMO for large language model optimisation. New coinages appear regularly, and there is a commercial incentive to invent a term and then sell it as a new discipline.

So treat confident definitions carefully, including ours. The systems change often, the companies running them do not publish how sources are chosen or weighted, and much of what the industry believes is inferred from observation rather than confirmed. Anyone who tells you the boundaries are settled and their method is the proven one is selling certainty that does not exist yet. What can be observed, and what we work from, is what these systems actually say about a business today, and whether that changes after the underlying problems are fixed.

Where to start

Start with what is true right now rather than with the theory. A free scan asks AI assistants the questions your customers ask and shows you whether you are named, who is named instead, and what is missing. From there, an audit is $495 as a one-off, ongoing monitoring is $199 a month, and fix work is scoped and quoted against whatever the audit finds. All prices are in Australian dollars.