SEO vs. GEO vs. AEO: Understanding the Nuances of Modern Search Optimization

Quick Summary:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization), AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are three modern search optimization strategies to improve your content’s visibility.

• SEO focuses on optimizing a website and its content so that it ranks higher on search engines like Google.

• AEO is a way to optimize your content to make it answer-friendly, with the goal to get content featured in AI-powered search features like Google’s AI Overviews or voice assistants.

• GEO focuses on making content easy for LLM AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to find and reference to gain visibility in their responses.

Understanding these differences is key to building content that performs well across search engines and AI systems. This comprehensible article shares key differences between SEO, AEO, and GEO to help you keep up with the ever-evolving digital marketing industry.

SEO vs AEO vs GEO

SEO is a widely known marketing practice. It involves increasing your website’s visibility on the web through certain practices, like keyword insertion.

But what are AEO and GEO? How do these differ from SEO? Are these as vital as SEO? Is SEO being replaced with these new practices? We have answered these questions below.

In this article, we will take a closer look at two relatively new emerging marketing practices — AEO and GEO — alongside SEO and learn their differences.

What Is SEO?

SEO means Search Engine Optimization. Most web content writers are familiar with a thing or two about SEO.

It is the practice of making your web content — and by extension, your website — rank higher on search engine result pages for increased visibility when people search for anything related to your business. This helps the website get more clicks and traffic, which translates to more potential customers.

Most SEO practices are learned and discovered through trial and error, because search engines don’t directly disclose how exactly their algorithms rate and rank content. This means SEO involves a lot of guess work. This is also true for other kinds of search optimization practices like AEO and GEO.

Additionally, SEO is always done on a particular search engine, like Google, Yahoo, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. However, Google, being the most widely used search engine, has the most well-understood SEO practices compared to others.

So, most of the time, whenever SEO is discussed generally, it is discussed with the assumption of Google being the target search engine. (This is likely the case with AEO as well — more about it later.)

Key Practices of SEO:

• Keyword Research:
  Keyword research is at the heart of SEO. It is based on billions of users’ data based on their internet search history — what they search for and how they phrase their query.
  Keyword research involves finding keywords or search queries relevant to your business (or content’s topic) before placing them in your content to make it relevant to Google.
  Google scans the content, identifies target keywords, and ranks the page for those specific keywords on its SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
  

• On-Page Optimization:
  On-page optimization refers to the practices that involve optimizing the elements within your website’s pages to increase its ranking.

On-page SEO could include changing your website’s content, structure, or HTML code to make it more understandable for both users and search engines. For example, on-page optimization of a blog article includes the practice of inserting a target keyword (aka keyword insertion) to make it more relevant to users and search engines for that particular query.

• Link Building: Linking is considered one of the key aspects of SEO, as it is speculated to be one of Google’s ranking factors, and also has proven to be true through testing and research.
  Link building means getting other websites to link to your website (by placing a hyperlink in their content), which acts as a vote of confidence in Google’s eyes. If this vote is coming from an authoritative site, it helps increase the website’s ranking on SERPs, which is getting linked.
  

• Technical SEO: Technical SEO involves working “behind” the website to increase its speed and user experience. For example, making the website mobile-friendly, improving its architecture, and implementing schema markup.

These are core aspects of SEO, and all of them are aimed to make the website be more visible in Google’s search results.

Now, what is AEO and GEO?

What is AEO and GEO?

AEO stands for “Answer Engine Optimization,” while GEO stands for “Generative Engine Optimization.”

While the acronym AEO has surfaced the internet and SEO-related discussions for a while now, GEO is relatively new in marketing.

Let's take a look at both of these ideas.

What's AEO?

AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — means optimizing your content for AI answers and voice search answers. It aims to make the content as comprehensive as possible so that it gets featured in Google’s AI Overviews and voice search.

What's the Origin of AEO?

The term AEO was coined back when Google, and other tech giants like Amazon and Apple, introduced voice search assistants that used to answer search queries through voice. The major difference is that users didn't have to click through a website to get the necessary information.

This somewhat revolutionized the search, as to how people look up information and consume it without even going through a source, leading to a marketing phenomenon “zero-click searches.”

However, the term picked up pace not long ago when Google introduced AI-based overviews in the search results, which are like summaries or synthases of information pulled from various websites.

So now, websites, in addition to traditional SEO, are leveraging AEO to optimize their content for a slightly different purpose.

What's the Purpose of AEO?

While traditional SEO aims to increase your website’s visibility in SERPs to drive traffic through top positions, AEO serves a slightly different goal.

The purpose of AEO practices is to make your content AI-answer–friendly, so that Google’s AI overview section relies on it to formulate its answers and features your website in them.

In other words, AEO is about making your content easily understandable and accessible for AI systems like Google’s AI Overviews or voice assistants.
So, instead of just ranking at the top, the goal here is to provide clear, concise answers that AI can use directly, which can lead to being featured in AI summaries, answer boxes, or spoken results.

This visibility can help drive traffic when fewer people click through websites in today’s search environment.

What Are Some Key Strategies for AEO?

• Find Relevant Keywords: As always, content should be based on what users are searching for. So, research relevant keywords, including secondary and semantic queries.

• Write Clear & Direct Answers: Start paragraphs with clear topic sentences. Include a comprehensible paragraph in the introduction that makes the topic clear from the get-go to answer questions early and simply.

• Use Structured Formats: Lists, bullet points, subheadings, and FAQs help AI identify and extract content easily.

• Add Schema Markup: Use structured data (like FAQ or HowTo schema) to make your content machine-readable.

• Cover Search Intent: Ensure your content addresses all angles of the topic a user might be searching for.

• Update Frequently: Fresh content is more likely to be selected by AI systems like Google’s overviews.

• Write Factually and Neutrally: Avoid fluff or heavy sales talk. Make sure your content is trustworthy and accurate.

• Include People-Also-Ask Queries: AI overviews tend to ask relevant questions by breaking down a topic. Incorporating Google’s queries in the People-also-ask section can make your content more comprehensive.

What's GEO?

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is the practice of optimizing your content for large language models’ search answers, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity.

What's the Origin of GEO?

Generative AI tools had already impacted search results when they rolled out, when people found out that AI can answer their questions and even engage in a conversation without them needing to search everything. However, OpenAI took things a step ahead and introduced AI searching, in which ChatGPT could search the internet, read blog posts and content, and synthesize all the information to the user, presenting it in a structured yet conversational style.

This is when marketers experienced another “zero-clicks–search” wave, and many have already started optimizing their content to suit AI search engine’s preferences to get features — a practice given many names, including AIEO (AI Engine Optimization), LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization), and GEO.

What's the Purpose of GEO?

The goal of GEO is to make your content easy for AI models to find, understand, and use when generating responses.

Traditional SEO targets humans using search engines, but GEO targets AI systems that gather and summarize content from across the web.

The core idea is to structure and phrase your content in a way that makes it more likely to be quoted or referenced by AI systems — like ChatGPT and Claude — in their answers, even outside of traditional search platforms.

What Are Some Key Strategies for GEO?

Following are some key practices for GEO:

• Find Relevant Keywords: Do keyword research to find all relevant queries.

• Focus on Long-Tail Keywords: Long tail keywords are usually how people ask questions to generative AI.

• Add Context and Examples: Helpful explanations, analogies, and examples make content more useful for generative tools.

• Write in Conversational Style: Write content like AI systems answer user queries.

• Avoid Thin Content: Generative engines ignore low-value pages or vague content with no real depth.

• Make Your Site Crawlable for AI: Use proper formatting (h1, h2, h3, h4, paragraphs, and alt tags) and avoid content hidden behind paywalls, scripts, or logins.

• Make It Comprehensible: AI systems highly value comprehensible content, rich with comparison tables, bullet points, key takeaways and FAQs.

• Produce Valuable, Relevant Content: One of the ways to get featured in LLM answers is by producing content relevant to your business that will be used in their training data. The more authoritative and relevant content your website has, the more likely it is to be used in LLM training, leading to increased chances of recognition and getting featured in their answers.

What's the Difference Between AEO and GEO?

AEO and GEO are both very similar search optimization strategies, with little differences in each other (as well as SEO). Here’s their key differences:

• AEO is focused on AI-driven features inside search engines, like Google’s AI Overviews, Bing Chat, and voice assistants.

• GEO applies to all generative AI systems, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc., even outside search engines.

But these two strategies try to do the same thing: Make your content more readable, structured, and direct for AI systems. And optimizing content using one strategy optimizes it for the other as well.

So, it is safe to say that AEO and GEO are pretty much the same things — making content AI-first — with two different names. There’s only just a minor difference in the perceived idea. That’s why there’s a lot of overlapping in their strategies.

What's the Difference Between SEO, AEO and GEO?

We can put AEO and GEO on one side and compare the two strategies to SEO.

SEO, compared to AEO and GEO, focuses on optimizing your content for “humans” and search engines to “rank” high on the SERPs using traditional optimization methods — keyword research, backlinks, content quality, user experience, etc. — factors that help search engines understand and rank your pages.

AEO and GEO are strategies that focus on optimizing your content for “AI systems.” These are structure-, questions-, and answer-focused strategies to make the content preferable by AI and try to appear in LLM-generated answers.

So, while SEO focuses on humans and ranking, AEO and GEO focuses on AI tools — whether it’s voice assistance or generative text — and getting featured.

Here’s a comprehensive comparison table covering all three search optimization strategies:

These are some of the key differences between SEO, AEO, and GEO.

Is SEO Getting Replaced by AEO and GEO?

Not really. SEO is still shining, though it’s changed quite a lot after the release of AI tools, like it’s always changing. It is still valuable and thriving, just differently.

And while it is true that many people are skipping clicking through websites and relying on AI Overviews, a good majority of users still prefer reading unstitched, solid blog posts. This is especially true for niche and exclusive content, like 101 SEO guides and courses, some of which require logins or sign ups.

One important thing to note is that AEO and GEO aren’t as mainstream and successful as SEO yet. And SEO already encompasses much of what AEO and GEO are — optimizing your content to be easily understood.

How Vital Are AEO and GEO?

AEO and GEO have gained some importance and attention, but they’re still largely in their initial phases.

SEO still remains foundational, and as stated earlier, it already encompasses most of what AEO and GEO are. It is also possible that SEO takes a bigger shift and fully encompasses AEO and GEO if the lines in between these strategies blur further.

But it is undeniable that AI is changing how people search and get answers. So, there’s definitely some unrest in this digital marketing ocean, with AEO and GEO being its natural response, which are gaining importance.

So, while SEO still forms the foundation, AEO and GEO are newer strategies to try and future-proof content by making it accessible to both search engines and AI systems.

Conclusion:

SEO, AEO, and GEO are all search optimization strategies. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the most well-known and -understood marketing strategy of the three. On the other hand, AEO and GEO are relatively new, especially GEO.

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization, which focuses on making your content easier to understand and parse by AI systems so that it gets featured in web sections like Google’s AI overview or Bing Chat and voice search.

GEO, on the other hand, is vastly the same thing as AEO except a little. GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It focuses on making your content easier to comprehensive for AI search engines like ChatGPT search to make it visible in LLM answers.