AEO vs SEO vs GEO: what is the difference?

01The short answer: SEO, AEO and GEO side by side

SEO, AEO and GEO are three names for getting found when someone searches. SEO aims for a high position in a list of links. AEO aims for a mention inside the answer an AI tool writes. GEO is the academic name for that same AI goal. The table sets them side by side.

The rest of this page explains each column, where the three overlap, and how to decide what to do first. For the deeper guide to the AI side, read what is answer engine optimisation.

02What is SEO, and what does it still do?

Search engine optimisation is the work of helping search engines crawl, understand and rank your pages so people click through to your site. It still does two jobs nothing else replaces: it sends the clicks that remain, and it puts your pages into the indexes that most AI engines search before they answer.

Google still dominates search here. Statcounter's September 2026 figures give Google 89.02% of New Zealand search engine market share, with Bing at 7.71%¹. In a smaller survey, IAB New Zealand's March 2025 poll of 250 upper North Island adults found 96.8% named Google as their main search engine and 69.2% go to a search engine often or always before a purchase². The sample is small and regional, but it matches what owners see in their own analytics.

What has changed is the click. Pew Research Center's March 2025 study of 68,879 Google searches by 900 US adults found people clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, and 15% when one did not³. Clicks fall without AI summaries too: Seer Interactive's data from 42 client organisations showed organic click-through fell 41% between June 2024 and September 2025 even on queries with no AI Overview⁴. SEO still earns visibility. It earns fewer visits per ranking than it used to.

The glossary entry for search engine optimisation has the short definition, and SEO for small business in New Zealand covers the local playbook.

03What is AEO?

Answer engine optimisation is the work of making your business easy for AI answer engines to find, trust and name. Where SEO chases a position, AEO chases a sentence: "for a heat pump install in Hamilton, people often recommend..." followed by your business. The engines build that sentence from pages, listings, reviews and mentions across the web.

AEO began as a term for featured snippets and voice assistants, the boxes and spoken replies that gave one answer to a question. It now covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. The work splits into two halves. On your own site, it means pages that answer questions directly, facts stated plainly, and structured data. Off your site, it means Bing indexing, AI crawler access, reviews, directories and other people mentioning you.

The off-site half is where AEO and SEO part ways most. An Ahrefs correlation study of 75,000 brands found branded web mentions had the strongest link to AI Overview visibility (0.664), against 0.218 for backlinks⁵, the classic SEO signal. Ahrefs sells SEO tools and correlation is weaker evidence than an experiment, but it points the same way as the research on GEO.

04What is GEO, and where did the term come from?

Generative engine optimisation is the practice of adapting content so generative AI engines include, quote and cite it in their answers. The term comes from a research paper by Aggarwal and colleagues, first posted in November 2023 and accepted at KDD 2024, which built a benchmark to test which page edits made AI engines cite a source more often.

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of adapting web content so generative AI engines, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, are more likely to include, quote and cite it in the answers they write.

The paper gives GEO its evidence base. The researchers, from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi, tested 10,000 queries across 25 domains and found GEO methods boosted a source's visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%⁶. Adding quotations, adding statistics and citing sources performed best, each improving visibility by 30 to 40%, while keyword stuffing offered little to no improvement⁷.

The result most useful to a small business: citing sources lifted visibility by 115.1% for sites ranked fifth in search results, while the top-ranked site's visibility fell by 30.3% on average. That comes from a lab benchmark of simulated searches, so read it as a sign of direction. It suggests a smaller site with well-sourced pages can be quoted ahead of a bigger one. The glossary entry for GEO has the one-line version.

05Is GEO just another name for AEO?

For practical purposes, yes. AEO came from the SEO industry and GEO from academic research, and both now describe getting cited in answers written by AI. Some writers use GEO for chat tools and AEO for Google's answer boxes, but the industry has settled on no firm line, and the work for a small business is identical under either label.

A few other acronyms circulate. AIO stands for either AI Overviews or "AI optimisation". LLMO means large language model optimisation. Vendors coin new ones regularly, often to name a product. A useful test for any acronym in a proposal: ask which engines it targets and how results will be measured. If the answers match AEO, it is AEO.

This page uses AEO as the umbrella term and GEO when referring to the research, which is how most practitioners write about it.

06Where do SEO, AEO and GEO overlap?

They overlap on almost everything a small business does first. Crawlable pages, a clear page for each service, honest answers to real questions, matching business details and steady reviews count towards all three. Google says AI Overviews need nothing beyond core SEO, so for Google's own AI the overlap is close to total.

Google is direct about this. Google Search Central's guidance on AI features says there is no special schema.org structured data, AI text file or markup needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no requirements beyond core SEO⁸. That is a fair statement for Google's products, and owners should take it at face value: good SEO is the entry ticket to AI Overviews.

The engines outside Google draw on other indexes, and the overlap thins there. Ahrefs' 2025 analysis of 15,000 prompts found only 12% of URLs cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt⁹, and 28.6% for Perplexity. Even inside Google, Ahrefs' March 2026 update found 37.9% of pages cited in AI Overviews ranked in the top 10 for that keyword¹⁰. A page one ranking helps, and plenty of cited pages sit well below it.

07Which tasks serve which discipline?

Most tasks serve all three disciplines at once, and a handful serve only one. Sorting the work this way stops a business paying twice for the same job under different names. The table below lists the common tasks for a 5 to 50 person business and marks where each one pays off.

The tasks that sit only on the AI side are short: Bing indexing, AI crawler rules and the prompt log. They take an afternoon between them. Flow AI's free AI crawler access check covers the crawler rules, and the AEO checklist lists every task in order.

08Which should a small business prioritise first?

Most small businesses should fix the SEO basics first, then add the AEO tasks that happen off Google, then refine pages with GEO methods. The right mix depends on how customers buy. A local trade lives on Google Maps and reviews. A consultancy whose buyers research for weeks gains more from pages that AI tools can quote.

Buying-intent searches are where AI answers increasingly appear. Semrush's study of more than 10 million US desktop keywords found commercial, transactional and navigational queries made up 42.8% of AI Overview triggers by October 2025¹¹, when in January informational queries had made up 91.3% of them. For a business that sells, that is the reason to start now. InternetNZ's late 2025 survey of 1,003 New Zealand adults found 55% had used AI in search engines in the past year¹², so the habit is already local.

09Where Flow AI fits

Flow AI is an AI marketing transformation practice: the strategy, the systems and the agents that run a marketing function, engineered end to end. It treats SEO, AEO and GEO as one search system, installed through the AI search sprint, and the written scope names which part to fix first on your site.

The tools are public. The free agent templates include the AI crawler check and a full GEO audit, and the open-source GEO skills are in the skill library for anyone who prefers to run them in-house.

10The short version

SEO ranks your pages. AEO gets your business named in AI answers. GEO is the research term for that same AI goal, and the two are used interchangeably. Most of the work is shared, and Google says its AI Overviews need nothing beyond core SEO.

The extra AI work is small and mostly off Google: Bing indexing, AI crawler access, reviews and mentions, and a monthly check of what the engines say. Do the shared basics first, then add those.

To see which of the three needs attention first on your site, talk to Amber.