SEO vs AEO vs GEO: What Changes and What Does Not

Three names, three targets

SEO targets a ranked list of links. The unit is a page, the goal is a position, the metric is clicks.

AEO targets an extracted answer — featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice results. The unit is a passage, the goal is being the chosen answer, the metric is answer presence and the clicks that survive it.

GEO targets a synthesised answer inside an AI assistant. The unit is a retrievable chunk plus off-site consensus, the goal is being cited, the metric is citation share and assistant referrals.

What stays the same

Crawlability, speed, clear information architecture, internal linking, genuine expertise and a trustworthy brand footprint. None of that changed. Sites winning in AI answers are overwhelmingly sites that already had solid fundamentals.

What genuinely changes

• Granularity. You optimise sections, not just pages.
• Formatting. Answer-first openings, steps, tables and definitions matter more than prose flow.
• Off-site weight. Reviews, forums and roundups influence AI answers more than they influence classic rankings.
• Freshness signals. Visible dates and cited sources raise reuse probability.
• Measurement. No positions. You track citations and assistant referrals.

How to run all three without tripling the work

Build one checklist and tag each item by the surface it serves. Most technical and content items serve all three. Then add a small AEO layer (answer-first blocks, question headings, schema) and a small GEO layer (prompt-set tracking, third-party consensus, comparison pages).

A realistic sequence for a small team

1. Fix access and rendering — nothing else works without it.
2. Fix structure on your top 20 pages: one intent, answer-first, clean headings.
3. Ship Organization, WebSite and page-type schema.
4. Publish one piece of original evidence per quarter.
5. Start a monthly prompt-set check and fix the gaps it exposes.

Run that loop for two quarters and you will have covered SEO, AEO and GEO with one workflow instead of three strategies.