GEO vs SEO vs AEO: What Actually Changes

The comparison in one table

The labels differ mainly in what you count. The work underneath overlaps far more than most proposals admit.

What changes in practice

Four things differ once you do the work, and none of them is mystical.

1. The unit of competition shrinks. Classic SEO competes page against page. AEO and GEO compete passage against passage, so a strong paragraph on a mediocre page can still be quoted.
2. More bots matter. Google needs Googlebot only. ChatGPT search, Claude and Perplexity each use their own search-related user agents, which OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity each document separately and which you can allow or block one by one.
3. The scoreboard is statistical. A ranking is a position. A citation is closer to a probability. You measure a prompt several times and report a rate, which is why one screenshot proves little.
4. Evidence counts for more. The 2023 Princeton-led study found that quotations, statistics and cited sources raised visibility on its benchmark, while keyword stuffing lowered it. The study is old and narrow, but it points the same way as Google's request for non-commodity content.

What Google says about the labels

Google's guide addresses the alphabet soup directly. It treats optimizing for generative AI search as optimizing for the search experience, and so counts it as SEO. It says a service sold as AEO or GEO should be judged against Google's existing advice on third-party SEO providers. That is a useful test in practice: if a GEO proposal would fail the questions you would put to an SEO provider, the new name does not rescue it. The guide also lists several tactics it says you can ignore, among them special files, rewriting content for AI, splitting pages into small chunks and chasing manufactured mentions.

What does not change

• A page must be crawlable, indexed and eligible to show a snippet before Google's AI features can link it.
• Content still has to be useful, accurate and written for people.
• Mass-produced pages for every query variation are still spam, and Google names fan-out variations in its warning.
• Nobody can promise placement. Google says indexing and serving are not guaranteed, even for pages that meet every requirement.

Three illustrative cases

These are invented to show how the same labels lead to different work.

In none of the three is there a separate budget line called GEO that does work the others do not. In each, the work is a different mix of the same activities.

Which label to use when

• Briefing a writer: say AEO or "answer-first". It tells them exactly what to produce.
• Talking to a developer: say crawl access. Ask for a review of robots.txt, firewall and CDN rules for named bots.
• Reporting to a board: say AI visibility, and define it as a measured rate across a fixed prompt set.
• Buying a service: ask for the deliverables and ignore the acronym.

How to read a proposal that sells GEO as separate from SEO

Ask five questions. Good answers are specific and match documented behaviour.

1. Which pages will change, and what exactly will change on them?
2. Which bots will be allowed or blocked, and who will verify it in server logs?
3. Which prompts will be measured, how often, and how many runs per prompt?
4. What happens to the work if the AI engines change their behaviour next quarter?
5. What is promised, and is any of it a guaranteed citation? If yes, walk away.

Google's own hiring guidance includes a question aimed at this exact market: whether any AI optimization advice aligns with Google's official guidance. Our guide to choosing an AI SEO agency uses that and the other questions.

What this means for a small business

Keep paying for the foundations, then add the thin layer on top. If you already invest in SEO, the AI layer is a matter of days, not a second retainer. If you have no SEO foundation, a GEO engagement will mostly be SEO under another name, and you should price it that way.

The whole picture is in the AI search optimization guide, and our AI search optimization service is built on the same split. Start by writing down which of the four changes above you have not yet handled.