The vocabulary arrived faster than the clarity. Agencies now sell GEO and AEO alongside SEO, often without explaining what changes in the actual work. The distinctions are real, and they matter for where you spend first.
SEO competes for a position
Traditional search optimisation competes for a ranked slot on a results page. The user sees ten links and chooses one. Success is a position, and the lever is a combination of technical health, content quality and authority. This has not stopped working and is not about to.
AEO competes for extraction
Answer engine optimisation is structural. It makes an individual page machine-readable enough that a system can lift a direct answer from it with confidence: question-led headings, the answer stated immediately beneath, validated schema, unambiguous claims. It is mostly work on your own site, and it is usually the fastest of the three to show movement.
GEO competes for inclusion
Generative engine optimisation is about what the model says when someone asks it a question, and models synthesise from many sources rather than reading one page. That makes GEO substantially an off-site discipline: consistent entity information, accurate presence on the directories and publications the models cite, and deliberate decisions about crawler access.
Where they overlap
More than the acronyms suggest. Pages that rank well are disproportionately the pages that AI systems cite, so classical SEO remains the foundation. Clean structure serves both extraction and ranking. Consistent entity data helps all three.
Where to start
If your technical foundation is weak, start there, because nothing else compounds on a site search engines struggle to crawl. If your foundation is sound but you are absent from the answers your buyers see, start with AEO for the speed, then build GEO alongside it. Treating GEO as a replacement for SEO rather than a layer on top of it is the most common and most expensive mistake we see.