In one line: SEO optimises for a ranked link, AEO optimises for being named in an answer, and GEO optimises for being cited as a source by a generative model. In practice GEO and AEO describe nearly the same work from two different angles.
The three terms, defined
| Optimises for | Success looks like | Fails when | |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO Search engine optimisation |
Position in a ranked list of links | Top three organic results | You rank, but the AI answer above you absorbs the click |
| AEO Answer engine optimisation |
Being named inside a generated answer | “Three good options are X, Y and Z” — and you are one of them | The model names competitors and omits you entirely |
| GEO Generative engine optimisation |
Being used and cited as a source by a model | Your page appears in the citation list under the answer | Your content informs the answer but is never credited or linked |
A note on the word “GEO”
Be careful with this one, because it is used two completely different ways and the ambiguity causes real confusion in sales conversations.
- Generative engine optimisation — the discipline in the table above, a term popularised by academic work in 2023.
- Geographic / local optimisation — the much older sense, meaning ranking for “near me” and suburb-level queries.
When an agency quotes you for “GEO,” ask which one they mean. For a Sydney business both matter, but they are different budgets and different deliverables.
Where the work is genuinely the same
It is worth being honest that these three disciplines share most of their foundations. All of them require:
- A technically sound, fast, crawlable site
- Content that actually answers what people are asking
- Credible, corroborating mentions elsewhere on the web
- A consistent, unambiguous business identity
Any agency presenting GEO or AEO as an entirely new discipline requiring an entirely new budget is overselling. Roughly seventy per cent of the work is foundations you should have had anyway.
Where the work genuinely differs
Structured data stops being optional
In conventional SEO, schema markup is a nice-to-have that sometimes earns a rich snippet. For AEO and GEO it is the primary machine-readable description of what your business is. Skipping it means relying on a model to infer your identity from prose, which it will sometimes get wrong.
Content shape changes
SEO rewards comprehensive pages that hold attention. Answer engines reward passages that can be lifted cleanly. That means question-shaped headings, direct answers in the first sentence, short self-contained factual statements, and tables rather than paragraphs where a table will do.
Crawler access becomes a decision
AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended can
be blocked in robots.txt, and a surprising number of sites block
them by default or by accident. If you want to be named by a model, you have to
let its crawler in. This is a single file and it is the cheapest win available.
Measurement is completely different
There is no rank tracker for a generated answer. Measurement means running a fixed set of prompts on a schedule and recording verbatim who gets named. It is more manual, noisier, and genuinely harder to fake than a rankings report.
What a Sydney business should actually do
- Fix the foundations first. They serve all three.
- Check your
robots.txtis not blocking AI crawlers. - Implement real structured data, not a plugin's defaults.
- Rewrite your key pages so each question is answered in its first sentence.
- Baseline what the assistants say about your category, then re-measure monthly.
Do not buy three separate retainers for three acronyms describing one body of work with three emphases.