What is the difference between SEO, GEO and AEO?

RushilFounder, Ru Visibility19 October 2026

Short answer

SEO gets your pages found and ranked by Google. GEO gets your business named in answers from AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. AEO is the writing in between: shaping a page so a direct answer can be lifted from it. They share one foundation, and in our audits most websites were furthest behind on GEO.

What does SEO cover?

Search engine optimization is everything that lets Google crawl a page, index it and rank it for the searches your customers type: titles, headings, links, speed, and pages that are allowed to appear at all. It is the oldest of the three and still the base. Google says “the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search” (Google Search Central).

The basics are still missed often. In our audits, 44.3% of sites had a page with no search description and 39.6% had a page with no main heading.

What does GEO cover?

Generative engine optimization is about the AI answer itself: whether the tools that write answers can reach your site, recognise your business as one entity, and find other sites that mention it. Much of that never affects a Google ranking, which is why SEO work rarely checks it. OpenAI, for example, runs a separate crawler for ChatGPT search (OpenAI).

In our audits, 14.4% of sites refused OpenAI's GPTBot, and 47.5% never linked their own social profiles to their website in a way a machine can read.

What does AEO cover?

Answer engine optimization is the shape of the writing. A short, direct answer under a heading phrased as the question; sections that make sense on their own; lists, tables and plain sentences an answer can be lifted from. It helps featured snippets in Google and answers from AI tools alike. In a study of AI answers, adding quotes, figures and sources made pages measurably more likely to be quoted (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024).

In our audits, 64.3% of sites answered no questions anywhere on the pages we checked, and only 17.1% used a table.

Are LLMO, AIO and AI SEO something else?

No. LLM optimization, AI optimization (AIO) and AI SEO are other names for the same work as GEO and AEO. A provider using a new name is not selling a different thing.

Which one should a business work on first?

Whatever blocks all three. A page told to stay out of search engines can't appear in Google or in its AI Overviews, and 9.2% of the sites we checked had at least one. After that, write answers to the questions customers actually ask (AEO), then work on being mentioned and recognised (GEO). For the longer comparison, see SEO vs GEO: How Search Is Changing for Businesses.

Sources

Find out what AI says about you.

Send us your web address. We run our own tool on it, free, and send you what it says. The whole thing — not a taster with the useful bits taken out.

Whether AI can even read your site

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google and Bing all send a small program to read your pages. We knock on your door as each one and see who gets let in. If they are being turned away, nothing else matters until that is fixed.

Two scores out of 100 — one for Google, one for AI

Plus what is behind each number. Where we could only make a fair guess, we say so instead of dressing it up as a measurement.

A list of fixes, best one first

Ordered by what gives you the most for the least work, so the top of the list is the quickest win. It is yours either way — use it with us or without us.

We ran it on our own site too. It told us what we were getting wrong, and we published that. A tool you will not point at yourself is not worth much.

One thing the free check does not do: actually ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for businesses like yours, dozens of times, and count how often your name comes up. That costs us real money each time we run it, so it comes with paid work.