SEO vs AEO vs GEO: what’s the difference?

SEO, AEO, and GEO are often talked about as though they are completely separate disciplines. In practice, they overlap more than many people think. A clear, well-structured website can support all three, while a weakly structured website can undermine all three.

SEO is about discoverability in search results. AEO is about answer-readiness, which means whether content is easy for answer engines to extract and summarise. GEO is about recommendation-readiness, which includes whether a business is easy for generative AI systems to understand, compare, and surface in relevant contexts.

The goal is not to chase acronyms. It is to build a site that is clear, structured, credible, and useful enough to perform across modern discovery environments.