What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?

With more acronyms come more questions: “what's the difference between SEO and GEO?” and “is SEO dead now that there's AI?” The short answer: it is not dead, but where you appear has changed. Here is each term, where it comes from, and what it means for you.

What is SEO?

Google defines search engine optimisation (SEO) as helping search engines understand your content and helping users decide whether to visit your site. It says best practices make it easier for search engines, not just Google, to crawl, index and understand your content, and that there are no secrets that will automatically rank your site first.

What is AEO?

AEO, answer engine optimisation, is a marketing term with no official definition from Google or any other engine. It means making your page the direct answer an engine shows, in a featured snippet, a voice assistant or a short summary. Its tools are mostly SEO's own: a clear question, a direct answer at the top of the page, and structure that makes the answer easy to extract. Google says its systems decide automatically whether a page makes a good featured snippet, and that you cannot mark a page to become one, so no markup guarantees AEO.

What is GEO?

GEO, generative engine optimisation, comes from an academic paper published in November 2023 and accepted at KDD 2024. The researchers built a benchmark of 10,000 queries and found that some methods raise content visibility in generative engine answers by up to 40%. The best were adding quotations, statistics and citations to sources, while keyword stuffing gave little to no improvement, and the paper notes that effectiveness varies by domain.

What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?

The difference is where you appear and how you measure it, not the foundation underneath:

Does appearing in AI Overviews need special optimisation?

No, according to Google. Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimisations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, no new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup, and no special schema.org structured data. Google does not name llms.txt, but it is exactly this kind of file. The condition is that the page is indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, and Google says all SEO fundamentals remain worthwhile.

The llms.txt site describes the file as a “proposal” to standardise how agents are guided to a site's content, first published in September 2024, not an adopted standard. Google says its features need no AI text files. If you add one, it never replaces an indexed page that answers clearly.

What should you do in practice?

One plan serves all three terms, because they rest on the same foundation:

1. Make sure your pages are indexed in Google and eligible for a snippet, and that AI engines' crawlers are not blocked.
2. Write for people, not engines, and put the direct answer at the top of the page.
3. Add numbers with their sources and attributed quotes, the methods that worked in the GEO paper.
4. Show who wrote the content and when it was updated; Google says trust is the most important part of E-E-A-T.

Is SEO over?

No. Google says SEO fundamentals remain worthwhile for AI features, and traffic from those features is counted in overall search traffic in Search Console. What has changed is that the answer may appear before the links, so a clear, sourced answer now matters as much as ranking.

Injaz AI by Injaz Digital applied these standards to Injaz Digital's own site first, then brought them to clients: content that fully answers the question, trusted sources, consistent presence beyond the site, and regular measurement of results.

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