GEO vs SEO vs AEO: what actually differs

What do SEO, AEO and GEO each mean?

The three terms were coined at different times, for different screens, and that history explains most of the confusion.

SEO, search engine optimization, is the oldest. It is the work of helping search engines find, understand and rank your pages, so that people click through from a list of results.

AEO, answer engine optimization, grew out of featured snippets and voice assistants, where a person got one spoken or highlighted answer rather than ten links. It is about writing pages that can be quoted. We cover the craft in our guide to answer engine optimization.

GEO, generative engine optimization, is the newest and has a precise origin: a research paper posted on arXiv in November 2023 and accepted at KDD 2024, which measured how rewriting a page changed its use in AI-written answers. It covers the whole chain from bot access to citation, and our GEO guide walks through that paper.

Read that table as a difference of emphasis. No one is doing one of these without the others, and a page that fails at SEO rarely succeeds at the other two.

What does Google say about GEO and AEO?

Google answered this directly on May 15, 2026, in a guide called “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search”, last updated in July. Its words: “From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”

That is not only a position on vocabulary. Google says its AI features are rooted in its core ranking and quality systems. They use retrieval-augmented generation, where ranking systems fetch relevant pages from the Search index and the model answers from them, and query fan-out, where the model runs several related searches to gather more material. Google’s example: a question about a lawn full of weeds can fan out into searches about herbicides and about removing weeds without chemicals. A page therefore still has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and it competes through the same systems as any other result.

The same guide then lists things you can ignore for Google Search, under a heading on what you don’t need to do:

• llms.txt and other “special” markup. Google Search ignores these files, so they neither help nor harm there.
• “Chunking” content. There is no requirement to cut content into tiny pieces, and no ideal page length.
• Rewriting content just for AI. The systems understand synonyms, so you need not capture every variation of a question.
• Seeking inauthentic “mentions”. Google’s spam systems apply here too.
• Overfocusing on structured data. It is not required for AI search, and no special schema is needed.

Keep the limit of that list in mind: it says “for Google Search”. It says nothing about what ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity do, and those are separate systems.

What does Microsoft say?

Microsoft’s answer is close to Google’s in spirit and different in detail. In a post dated October 8, 2025, Krishna Madhavan of Microsoft’s Bing team opened with “Whether you call it GEO, AIO, or SEO, one thing hasn’t changed: visibility is everything”, and wrote that there is no secret strategy for being picked.

Then it gets specific in a way Google does not. Microsoft says assistants such as Copilot break content into smaller pieces, a process it calls parsing, and that those pieces get ranked and assembled into answers. It recommends question-style headings, lists and tables, title and description that match the H1, and schema. It warns against walls of text, answers hidden in tabs and expandable menus, key details only in images, and PDFs.

So the two companies seem to disagree on chunking. Google says you need not break content up, because its systems can find the relevant piece. Microsoft says pieces are what get picked, so write pieces that stand on their own. Both can be true at once: Google is telling you not to reshape pages for a machine, and Microsoft is telling you that clear sections travel better. A page with clear headings and direct answers satisfies both, and it reads better for people, which is the test Google keeps returning to.

Where is the work the same?

Most of what any of the three labels asks of you is identical:

• Pages open and load. No errors, no redirect chains, a server that answers quickly.
• Text is reachable. Pages are crawlable, indexed, and not hidden behind a login.
• Titles and headings say what the page is. A person and a machine should both know within a line.
• The content has something of its own. Google asks for “non-commodity” content: first-hand experience, real numbers, a point of view. Its example of the opposite is a generic “7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers”.
• The business is identifiable. One name, a real address and contact details, an About page, consistent profiles.

If your SEO is healthy, you already have most of this. That is why GEO is rarely an entirely separate job, and why a site with neglected SEO should not start with anything labeled GEO.

What actually changes outside Google?

Four things are truly different, and they are the reason the separate words stuck.

Other bots have to get in. A site can rank well on Google while OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot are turned away, by robots.txt or by a firewall. When we tested the MWY checker on 36 business websites in seven countries on November 3, 2026 (a hand-picked sample, not a market figure), 4 refused the checker itself. Of the 32 we could read, only 1 blocked an AI search bot in robots.txt, but 4 refused a request sent under those bots’ names. A rule at the firewall never shows in a Google report. Our guide to LLM SEO covers how to find it.

Other bots may not run JavaScript. Google says it can process JavaScript as long as it is not blocked. The AI search bots have not made that promise, and Vercel’s December 2024 analysis of its network found that the major AI crawlers it studied did not render JavaScript. In the same 32 sites, 6 had too little readable text in the raw HTML of the home page, so a page that looks fine in Google can be nearly empty to another reader.

The result is a sentence, not a position. A ranking gives you a place on a page. An assistant’s answer names a few sources or none. OpenAI says ChatGPT rewrites a question into one or more targeted queries sent to search providers and ranks results by multiple factors, and that placement is not guaranteed. There is no position 4 to climb from.

Measurement is thinner. Google now reports AI impressions in Search Console, rolled out to all sites on August 31, 2026. For the other assistants there is no equivalent shared report, answers vary from one try to the next, and you are left with asking them yourself and reading referral traffic.

Which should you do first?

The labels matter less than the order. For a typical small business website, this order puts the failures that close a site completely before the ones that merely weaken it:

• First, access. Check robots.txt and the firewall, then the raw HTML. A blocked bot makes everything else irrelevant, and the fix is often one setting.
• Second, the SEO basics. Indexing, titles, headings, speed. They serve Google directly, and every other engine benefits.
• Third, identity. Business schema, one consistent name, contact details in plain text, links to your profiles.
• Fourth, answers. Write down what buyers really ask, with real prices, times and limits. This is where AEO’s craft pays off.
• Fifth, measurement. Search Console’s AI report, a fixed list of questions you ask the assistants each month, and referral traffic.

The type of business shifts the weight. A local business gets more from its Google Business Profile, which Google names for local details in AI responses, and a restaurant has a further reason to be on OpenTable, Resy or Yelp, since ChatGPT’s help page names those for reservations. An online shop should look at Merchant Center. A software company or publisher will usually get more from original research and clear comparison pages. None of that replaces the order above, and our how-to guide for Google’s AI features goes further on that side.

What goes wrong when the three are treated as separate jobs?

Splitting the work by label tends to produce the same few failures, and each is easy to spot once you look for it.

• An SEO plan alone can miss the AI bots. Rankings look healthy in Google while a firewall rule turns away OAI-SearchBot, because nothing in a Google report shows it. Nobody notices until someone asks why ChatGPT never mentions the business.
• An AEO plan alone can write answers nobody can read. Good answers loaded by a script, or tucked into an expandable menu, can be invisible to a bot that does not run JavaScript. Microsoft warns about exactly this.
• A GEO plan alone can skip the foundations. A tool that counts mentions achieves little if pages are not indexed and titles are vague. For Google’s AI features in particular, a page that is not indexed cannot be used at all.
• Separate teams can do the same work twice. If one agency handles SEO and another handles GEO, you may pay both to rewrite the same titles, and they may give opposite advice on page structure.

One owner with one list avoids most of this. The list can use whichever label you prefer.

How do you judge GEO and AEO advice?

The field is young, and few effects have been tested in public. A few questions help you weigh any advice:

• Which engine does it apply to? “AI” is not one system. Advice proven on one assistant may mean nothing on another, and Google’s list of things to ignore applies only to Google Search.
• Where does the claim come from? A company’s own documentation or a published test is evidence. A chart with no method is not.
• Does it promise an outcome? Google writes: “No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems.” Nobody outside these companies can promise a citation, so treat any promise as a warning.
• Could it get you in trouble? Google warns that creating separate content for every variation people might search, primarily to manipulate its results or AI responses, violates its scaled content abuse policy. Plenty of “GEO tactics” amount to exactly that.
• Is it asking you to redo work you already have? If a provider’s checklist is mostly your SEO checklist with new names, you can compare the two and pay only for what is new.

Apply those questions to us as well. MWY sells a checker with GEO in its description, so we have an interest in the word.

What the MWY checker covers across the three

The MWY checker tests the parts of this work a machine can verify from outside. It reads your site the way AI search bots do, with no JavaScript, and scores 24 items: whether bots can get in and read the text, whether they can tell which business the site belongs to, and whether pages hold answers worth quoting. Some of those items are classic SEO, such as titles, sitemaps and indexing; others matter more for assistants, such as AI bot access and firewall behavior.

It does not measure your Google rankings, and it does not look inside any AI company’s index. A high score means the inputs are in order. It does not mean an assistant will name you, and nobody outside those companies can tell you that it will.