If you've heard SEO, AEO, and GEO thrown around in the same sentence and weren't quite sure whether they're three different jobs or three names for the same thing, you're not alone. Here's the plain version.
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of getting your website to rank well on traditional search engines like Google and Bing. It's the ten blue links, the Maps pack, the shopping results. This has been around since the late 1990s and most marketers already know the basics: keywords, backlinks, page speed, mobile-friendliness.
AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, is newer. It's about getting your brand mentioned or cited when someone asks a question to an AI assistant, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or a voice assistant, rather than typing a search query into a box. The output isn't a list of links. It's a synthesized answer, and your brand either gets included in that answer or it doesn't.
GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, is closely related to AEO and the terms often get used interchangeably. If there's a distinction worth keeping, GEO tends to refer specifically to optimizing content so it gets pulled into generative AI outputs, things like Google's AI Overviews, which sit inside a traditional search engine but generate a written answer instead of just links.
In practice, we treat AEO and GEO as one discipline: making sure AI systems can find, understand, and trust your content enough to cite it. And we treat it as a companion to SEO, not a replacement for it. Most AI answer engines still draw heavily on the same signals that make a page rank well in classic search: authority, structure, and clarity. The difference is what happens after a page ranks. SEO gets you found. AEO and GEO get you quoted.
The short version: SEO gets you onto the results page. AEO and GEO get you into the answer itself.