The acronyms have multiplied faster than the practices behind them. Most proposals now define all three, price them as a single line, and then deliver search engine optimisation with a paragraph about ChatGPT attached.
That is not always dishonest. There is real overlap between the three. But the overlap is not total, and the parts that differ are the parts that decide whether you show up in the places your buyers are actually looking.
Here is the distinction in one line each. SEO gets you ranked. AEO gets you quoted. GEO gets you recommended.
SEO: rank
The job is to earn a position on a results page for a query with commercial intent. The unit of success is a position, and the surface is a conventional search engine.
What the work involves. Technical health, site architecture, internal linking, content depth, authority building and local presence. The mature end of this discipline is well understood and has been for fifteen years.
How you measure it. Non-brand visibility, qualified organic sessions, conversion rate from organic, and revenue or pipeline attributed to it. Rankings alone are a diagnostic, not a result.
AEO: answer
The job is to be the direct answer rather than a link to one. That means featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, voice responses and the answer portion of an AI Overview.
The important difference from SEO is what gets rewarded. Ranking rewards comprehensiveness, so long pages that cover a topic thoroughly tend to win. Answering rewards precision. A two-sentence response placed early on the page can beat a three-thousand-word guide, because the engine needs something it can lift cleanly.
What the work involves. Question-led content architecture, direct answers placed high on the page, structured data, and entity clarity so the engine knows who is answering.
How you measure it. Answer coverage across a defined question set, placement counts, structured data health, and assisted conversions from those placements.
GEO: get cited and recommended
The job is to be named when someone asks an assistant which providers to consider. This is the newest of the three and the one most often sold without being delivered.
It is also structurally separate from the two other options. You are not optimising a page just for a crawler to index and rank. You are trying to become something a model has reason to name, which depends heavily on what exists about you elsewhere.
Muck Rack's analysis of millions of AI-cited links found that more than 95 percent came from non-paid sources, and 85 percent of those non-paid citations came from earned media. That single finding should reset where you expect the effort to sit. GEO is more off-site than most SEO teams are set up to handle.
What the work involves. Entity consistency across the web, third-party and earned presence, original data and research worth citing, and content specific enough to be quoted rather than summarised.
How you measure it. Brand mention rate and share of answer across a tracked prompt set, citation counts, recommendation position, sentiment and context, and AI referral and assisted conversions.
What genuinely overlaps
A large shared foundation, and it is worth being honest about how large. Technical health, crawlability, entity consistency, content depth and topical authority serve all three disciplines. If your website is slow, poorly structured or lacking the right content, no GEO retainer can simply fix that for you.
This is why sequencing matters more than most proposals admit. Running generative engine optimisation on a broken foundation is expensive theatre.
Where they genuinely diverge
- Link building against earned citation. Links you acquire and mentions a model chooses to cite are not the same asset and are not won the same way.
- Keyword targeting against prompt coverage. A keyword list and a prompt set look similar and behave differently. Prompts are conversational, multi-part and often comparative.
- Position tracking against share of answer. There is no position one in a generated answer. There is whether you were named, in what order, and in what context.
- Comprehensiveness against precision. The instinct that serves SEO well works against you in AEO.
- The page as the unit against the passage as the unit. Answer engines lift passages. That changes how you structure a page before you write a word of it.
How to sequence the three
- Fix the foundation once. Technical health, structure, entity consistency. This is not optional and it serves all three.
- Build the answer layer. Define the questions your buyers ask before they shortlist, and answer each one directly on a page built for it.
- Extend into recommendation. Track a fixed prompt set, establish a baseline, then work the off-site and citation signals that decide whether you get named.
Each stage makes the next one cheaper. Reversing the order does not work, no matter what the proposal says.
Five questions to ask before you sign
If an agency is charging you for three disciplines, these questions can quickly reveal whether you are actually getting the expertise you are paying for.
- What is the tracked prompt set, and who defined it?
- What is my baseline mention rate today, before any work begins?
- Which buyer questions am I currently the answer to, and which am I not?
- What off-site work sits inside the GEO scope specifically?
- How will the three be reported separately, so I can see what each is contributing?
An agency doing this work properly will have answers ready. An agency selling SEO with a new label will answer the first question with a slide about ChatGPT.
Get named in the answers buyers read
We will define your prompt set, record a baseline, and show you what it takes to move citation share in your category.