GEO vs SEO vs AEO — what the terms actually mean

The short version

SEO — search engine optimisation. Getting a page to rank in a list of links. Thirty years old, well understood.

AEO — answer engine optimisation. Getting your content used in a direct answer rather than a list.

GEO — generative engine optimisation. Getting a brand cited inside AI-generated output.

AEO and GEO are used almost interchangeably by most vendors, and the boundary between them is largely a matter of who is selling. Treat anyone drawing a sharp technical line between the two with mild suspicion.

GEO vs SEO: ranked versus named

Not AEO versus GEO. It is ranked versus named.

Ranking is a position in a list of ten. You climb toward the top, and being eleventh still means existing — someone can scroll.

Being named is binary. An assistant asked for a local recommendation returns one to five business names. There is no position eleven, no second page, no scroll. You are in the set or you are not mentioned at all.

That difference changes what the work is, not just where it happens.

AEO vs SEO: why the inputs barely overlap

Traditional SEO works primarily on your domain: content, structure, internal links, technical health, backlinks.

For local recommendations, assistants resolve names from somewhere else entirely — Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Foursquare, Yelp, review platforms, and independent editorial coverage. Studies of AI citation behaviour consistently find brands are around six times more likely to be cited through third-party sources than their own domain.

So an SEO retainer can be executed perfectly and leave you absent from every answer your customers actually see. Not because the agency did bad work — because the work was pointed at a different surface.

AEO vs GEO: is there a real difference?

In practice, not much of one. AEO is usually framed around answering a direct question; GEO around being cited inside generated output. Vendors draw the line wherever their product sits.

The honest answer is that both describe the same goal — getting named rather than ranked — and the work behind them is the same work: listings, reviews, third-party presence, and structured content an engine can extract. If an agency’s pitch depends on the distinction, the distinction is a sales tool.

What this means for a local business

Three things follow.

Your website matters less than you think. It still matters. It matters less than reviews, listings and third-party coverage for the specific question of whether an assistant names you.

Optimising for one engine covers a quarter of the ground. ChatGPT resolves through Bing and Foursquare. Gemini weights Google Business Profile. Perplexity leans on community discussion. Copilot uses Bing plus editorial. They are not reading the same internet.

The metric changes. Sessions and rankings do not tell you whether you were named. The only way to know is to run the queries and record the answers.

Do you need to stop doing SEO?

No — and be wary of anyone who tells you otherwise.

Traditional search still drives the majority of local discovery today. The shift is real and it is fast, but it is a shift in share, not a replacement. Practices that abandon a working SEO programme to chase AI visibility usually end up worse off on both.

The right framing is additive: keep what works, and measure the surface nobody is currently measuring. If you want the practical version of that rather than the terminology, how to get recommended by ChatGPT covers the steps in order.

How to tell whether you have a problem

Open a fresh, signed-out session and ask each of the four engines what a customer would ask:

• best [your category] in [your city]
• where to get [your main service] near me [your city]
• most reviewed [your service] [your city]

Run each three times, because outputs vary between runs and a single result tells you very little. Record who gets named and, more importantly, which source the engine cited.

If competitors come back consistently and you do not, that is the gap. If you are already named, you do not have this problem and should ignore the acronyms entirely.

If paid ads are part of your mix, the platform rules are a separate constraint again — see Meta ad policies for Botox and aesthetics.

For what this looks like in one category end to end, does ChatGPT recommend med spas walks through a worked example.

On the certainty of any of this

No AI platform publishes how it selects sources. Every claim in this piece — including the six-times figure — comes from measured behaviour and industry-published correlation, not from confirmed ranking factors.

The field is roughly eighteen months old and the signals move quickly. Community content’s share of citations has shifted by double digits inside a single quarter. Anything written about this today, this page included, deserves re-checking in three months.