GEO vs AEO vs SEO: how the terms differ

SEO (search engine optimisation) focuses on ranking and indexing in traditional search, especially Google Search. AEO (answer engine optimisation) emphasises appearing in direct answers — featured snippets, AI Overviews and assistant responses — through clear, citable pages. GEO (generative engine optimisation) prepares your site for AI crawlers and retrieval: robots.txt for GPTBot-class bots, accurate schema.org JSON-LD, optional llms.txt and answer-first copy. The three overlap on crawlability and trustworthy HTML, but none guarantees citations or a fixed position in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google.

Teams should not chase three separate playbooks. Fix shared fundamentals first — public 200 URLs, unblocked crawlers, Organisation and FAQ schema where truthful — then add GEO-specific bot rules and optional llms.txt if you care about non-Google assistants.