Working definitions
SEO — search engine optimization
Making pages findable, crawlable, and relevant so they can appear in a ranked list of links. Mature discipline, decades of documentation, measurable in Search Console.
AEO — answer engine optimization
Structuring content so a direct answer can be extracted and displayed: question-shaped headings, answer-first paragraphs, visible FAQs, and structured data matching what is on the page.
GEO — generative engine optimization
Working toward broader discovery, accurate summarization, and — where systems cite sources at all — citation of your business by generative systems. Accurate, consistent, machine-readable facts are the foundation, but GEO is not only entity accuracy. The newest and least settled of the three. Google documents how its own AI features use ordinary Search content in AI features in Google Search.
The overlap is larger than the difference
All three depend on the same foundation: content that is accurate, reachable, server-rendered, internally linked, and consistent with itself. There is no AEO tactic that rescues a page Google cannot crawl, and no GEO tactic that outweighs a site contradicting its own phone number.
In practice, a well-executed local SEO program already covers much of what AEO and GEO require. The additional work is mostly about phrasing and consistency, not a separate channel.
- Shared: crawlability, indexing, server-rendered HTML, internal links, accurate facts
- AEO adds: question inventories, answer-first writing, visible FAQs, matching structured data
- GEO adds: an agreed business description used consistently, entity-level structured data, and optionally a plain-text summary such as llms.txt (no AI-specific schema is required by Google)
What is well supported, and what is not
Well supported
Search engines document crawling, indexing, canonicalization, and structured data. You can verify the state of your own pages in Search Console. Cause and effect is imperfect but observable.
Reasonably supported
Clear, direct, well-structured answers are easier for any system to extract, and easier for people to read. That argument holds regardless of which engine is fashionable.
Not supported
Claims that a specific technique will get you cited by a named AI assistant. Model training data, retrieval sources, and citation behavior are undocumented, change between versions, and are not verifiable on demand. Treat guaranteed 'AI placement' offers as a warning sign.
A sensible order of work
- Fix indexing, speed, and contact paths — nothing else matters until a page can be found and acted on
- Write one strong page per service, answering the real buying questions
- Keep every business fact accurate and consistent across the site
- Add structured data that mirrors visible content
- Add answer-first FAQs where you genuinely have questions to answer
- Keep a plain-text business summary current
- Measure inquiries, not impressions
How you would even measure this
SEO has Search Console. AEO has partial signals: impressions on question queries, and manual checks of how search features present your content. GEO has almost no reliable instrumentation — periodically asking assistants about your business is an anecdote, not a metric.
So judge the work by what you can verify: are the facts right, is the content reachable, are the answers clear, and are inquiries arriving. Measuring whether your website produces leads covers the last one.
Questions about this page
- Should I pay separately for AEO and GEO?
- Usually not as separate products. They are extensions of the same content and technical work. Be skeptical of pricing that triples because of two acronyms.
- Is SEO obsolete now that people use AI assistants?
- No. Assistants draw on indexed, crawlable content, and people still use conventional search constantly. The foundation is the same.
- Can anyone guarantee my business appears in AI answers?
- No. Prime Local Media does not make that promise, and we would treat any provider who does as unreliable.
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