AEO vs GEO vs SEO: what's the difference and which do you need?

Side by side

	SEO	AEO / GEO
Goal	Rank a page in search results	Be named or cited in an AI answer
Where it shows	Google and Bing results pages	ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, Google AI Overviews
Unit of success	Position and clicks	Mention, position in the answer, citation, sentiment
Main signals	Relevance, links, technical health, intent match	Clear facts, consistency across sources, third-party mentions, extractable passages, crawler access
Measurement	Rank trackers, Search Console	Repeated prompts across AI engines, tracked over time
Click-through	Expected	Often none: the answer is the outcome

Where they overlap

• Crawlable, fast pages with clear headings help both.
• Pages that rank well are more likely to be retrieved by engines that search the web.
• Structured data (Organization, Product, FAQ, Article) clarifies facts for both.

Where they differ

• Brand-level vs page-level. SEO is about pages. AEO is about how your brand is described everywhere, including sites you do not own.
• Answers, not keywords. AEO content leads with a direct answer that can be quoted in one or two sentences.
• Consistency. Conflicting prices or descriptions across the web make engines less confident about you.
• Multiple engines. Each assistant behaves differently, so you measure each one.

Which do you need?

If buyers research your category online, you need both. A practical split for a small team: keep core SEO healthy, then add an AEO loop: track buyer questions monthly, fix wrong facts, publish answer-first pages for the questions you lose, and earn mentions on the sources AI cites.

Get AI Vizible covers both sides in one place: AI visibility across six engines, plus Google rank tracking, keyword research, competitor and backlink data, and Google Analytics and Search Console reports.