Three acronyms that get used interchangeably by people selling things. They describe three different surfaces, and the fix for one rarely fixes another.
SEO is where your page ranks in a list of results. GEO is whether an AI assistant mentions you when it writes an answer. AEO is whether you own the boxed answer at the top of Google. They are three different places a customer can meet you, and each one is decided by different machinery.
Most people who say "SEO" mean only the first. That was reasonable until about two years ago. It stopped being reasonable when a large share of buying questions started getting answered by something that produces one answer instead of ten links.
Classic search. You rank for a query, someone scrolls, someone clicks. The levers are the ones that have been true for years: content that matches intent, a page that loads, links that signal trust, and a title that earns the click.
The useful property of SEO is that position is observable. You can see where you rank, which page ranks, and whether it moved. That makes it the easiest of the three to report on honestly.
GEO is about being mentioned when an assistant answers. Someone asks for a recommendation, the assistant reads what it can reach, and it writes a shortlist. Often that shortlist names nobody, because the sources it read did not state clearly what anyone does.
Two things follow. First, ranking first does not guarantee a mention — the assistant is summarising sources, not ordering pages. Second, the fix is usually on your own site: say plainly what you do and who for, in words that can be lifted into a sentence.
The awkward property of GEO is that it is not stable. Ask the same question twice and the answer can differ. That's why the only sensible approach is repetition — same questions, monthly — and reading the pattern rather than any single reply.
AEO is the featured answer, the thing above the first blue link. It is usually a paragraph or a short list, and it exists because the search engine decided one page answers the question well enough to quote.
The levers are structural rather than promotional: a heading phrased as the question, a direct answer immediately beneath it, and supporting detail after. If your answer is three paragraphs down inside an anecdote, it will not be extracted.
Treating GEO as a subset of SEO. Doubling down on rankings and expecting assistant mentions to follow. They correlate loosely, not reliably.
Chasing AEO with formatting alone. A question-shaped heading over a vague answer wins nothing. The answer has to be specific enough to be worth quoting.
Measuring only what's easy. Rankings are easy to measure, so most reports contain only rankings — which quietly tells the client the other two surfaces don't exist.
Ask where your customers actually ask. If they search a category and compare results, SEO and AEO carry the load. If they describe a problem to an assistant and take a recommendation, GEO matters most — and it is usually the one nobody has checked at all.
In practice, the same underlying fix serves all three: a page that states clearly what you do, who for, and at what price, written so a sentence can be lifted out of it. That is unglamorous and it is most of the work.
Monthly, $49. We check all three surfaces and send a written list of what to fix.