AI SEO vs GEO vs AEO: What's the Difference?

What is GEO?

GEO — generative engine optimisation — targets generative engines specifically: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. On these surfaces the output is a written answer, not a list of links, and success means being named inside that answer.

That changes what "winning" looks like. There is no position one. There is a paragraph that either mentions your business or mentions a competitor. The work concentrates on entity clarity — making it unambiguous who you are, what you do and where — and on producing passages an engine can lift verbatim with confidence.

What is AEO?

AEO — answer engine optimisation — targets direct-answer surfaces: Google's AI Overviews, featured snippets and voice assistants. Here a single concise answer is extracted and displayed, often without a click.

AEO is the most format-sensitive of the three. A question posed as a heading, answered directly in the next two sentences, in under about sixty words, is far more extractable than the same information buried in paragraph four. Google's decision to retire FAQ rich results changed the tactics here but not the principle.

The three side by side

Read the bottom row carefully — it is where most confusion lives. The three disciplines share most of their inputs and differ mainly in what you can legitimately measure.

Where they overlap, and where the money goes

The technical foundations are close to identical: clean schema, consistent business information, unambiguous entity data, and content that answers questions directly. Roughly speaking, most of a first engagement's effort goes into that shared base regardless of which acronym is on the invoice.

What genuinely differs is measurement and format. That shared foundation is also the ground covered by algorithmic signal engineering, and the market-level dynamics — why the same content performs differently in competitive versus emerging markets — are set out in our longer piece on how AI search, AEO and GEO are reshaping digital growth.

Which one does your business need?

Sequence rather than buy everything at once.

• Start with AI SEO if your fundamentals are unproven. It covers both surfaces and nothing is wasted.
• Prioritise GEO if buyers in your category ask an AI assistant for recommendations before contacting anyone, and a competitor is currently the name it gives.
• Treat AEO as a layer, not a separate program — it is largely a discipline of formatting what you already publish so it can be extracted.

The honest answer for most Australian businesses is AI SEO as the base, GEO where the category is already contested. If you want to know which applies to you, get a free AI audit and we will show you which surfaces name your competitors instead of you.