AEO vs SEO vs GEO: What Founders Actually Need to Know

Three acronyms keep landing in founders' inboxes: SEO, AEO and GEO. Agencies sell them as three separate services, usually with three separate invoices. I sell one of them myself, so I will be straight about this: they are three names for a connected job, and most of the work is shared.

Here is what each one means, where they genuinely differ, and what I would do first if I were starting from a new site, because I am. My own site is new, so I am working through this myself.

The short version

• SEO (search engine optimisation) is about ranking in the list of results a search engine shows.
• AEO (answer engine optimisation) is about being the source that gets used when a search engine or assistant gives one direct answer instead of a list.
• GEO (generative engine optimisation) is about being named, and described correctly, inside answers that an AI assistant writes for the person asking.

The overlap is bigger than the difference. All three depend on a site that can be crawled, content that answers real questions in plain text, and a business that can be clearly identified. The differences are in the format of the result and in how much you control it.

SEO: ranking in the list

This is the oldest of the three. Someone types a query, a search engine returns ranked pages, and you want yours near the top. The levers are well known: pages that match what people are looking for, a site that loads and works properly, and other credible sites that point to you.

SEO is still the foundation. If a page is not indexed, none of the other two can use it.

AEO: being the answer

Answer engine optimisation grew out of featured snippets, "People also ask" boxes and voice assistants: places where the search engine picks one passage and shows it as the answer. Writing for AEO mostly means being direct. Put the question in a heading, answer it in the first sentence or two, then add the detail.

I do this on my own service pages. The GEO and AEO page on this site opens with the question a customer would actually type, "How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT and Google AI answers?", and answers it straight away.

GEO: being named, correctly, in a generated answer

Generative engine optimisation is the newest. Here an AI assistant reads many sources and writes its own answer. You are not a position in a list. You are either mentioned or you are not, and if you are, the description may be right or wrong.

That changes what matters. A ranking can be a bit imperfect and still send traffic. A generated answer that names the wrong founder, the wrong city or the wrong service does damage quietly, because nobody tells you it happened. GEO is mostly the work of making your business easy to identify and hard to get wrong: consistent names, clear facts on your own site, and the same facts repeated on credible profiles elsewhere.

What Google itself says

Because the advice online is noisy, it helps to go to the source. Google's documentation on AI features and your website says that no additional requirements or special optimisations are needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. It also says you do not need new machine-readable files, AI-specific text files or special markup. What it points to instead are the ordinary fundamentals:

• allow crawling, in robots.txt and in any hosting or CDN setup;
• make content easy to find through internal links;
• keep important content in text, not locked in images;
• keep Business Profile and similar information current;
• verify the site in Search Console;
• write helpful content for people first.

It also says structured data should match the visible text on the page. That is a useful rule for any schema you add: it describes what is already there, it does not add claims.

That is Google's guidance for Google's products. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude each have their own systems, and none of them publish a checklist you can follow to guarantee a mention. Anyone who promises one is guessing. This is why I do not guarantee results on my audit: rankings and AI mentions are decided by third parties.

What I did on my own sites

I can only tell you what I have done, not what it caused. On 46dc.com, the robots.txt file allows the main search crawlers and the named AI crawlers, with the same short list of private paths blocked for all of them. The site has a sitemap. I aim to describe myself and the company the same way on every page and profile: FourSix46® is the parent brand, and the ventures sit beneath it. If you want the thinking behind that structure, I wrote it up in what a parent brand is and why I built one.

The point is consistency, not tricks. An assistant that reads three sources and finds three different descriptions of you has to guess.

What I would do first, in order

1. Check what is true today. Ask Google and a few assistants about your business the way a customer would, and write down what they say. I made a 15-minute self-check for this. It is free to read.
2. Fix the basics. Make sure your pages are indexed, crawlable and written in plain text. Verify your site in Search Console.
3. Write down who you are, once. One name, one description, one location, the same everywhere.
4. Answer real questions on real pages. Start with the questions customers ask before they buy. Answer in the first sentence.
5. Add structured data that matches the page. Only what is visibly there.
6. Re-check in a month. Not weekly. These systems move slowly enough that weekly checks mostly produce anxiety.

When paying someone makes sense

If you can do the six steps above yourself, do. If you would rather have an outside view first, that is what my AI visibility audit is for: a fixed £295 report, delivered in seven working days, covering how Google and four AI assistants describe your business today, an entity and schema review, content gaps and a 90-day roadmap. It does not make the changes for you, and it does not promise rankings. If your brand itself is unclear, start with brand strategy instead, because no amount of optimisation fixes a business that cannot describe itself.

This is general information, not legal or financial advice.