SEO vs. AEO vs. GEO: What Small Businesses Actually Need to Know

If you've searched "how to rank on Google" recently, you've probably run into two newer acronyms sitting next to the familiar one: SEO, AEO, and now GEO. It's easy to assume these are three separate skills you now need to master, sold to you by three separate specialists. They're not. They overlap far more than they compete, and for most small businesses, one of them still matters more than the other two combined.

Here's what each one actually is, honestly.

SEO — Search Engine Optimisation

The established one — and still the foundation. SEO is the practice of helping your business show up in the regular results on Google (and Bing) — the list of blue links, the local map pack, the organic results below the ads. It's built on things that have been true for years: relevant content, a technically sound website, consistent business information, and a healthy set of reviews and backlinks.

For most small businesses, traditional search and local search remain the most established and measurable sources of search visibility.

AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation

The terminology isn't especially settled, either. AEO is commonly used to describe efforts to make content more likely to be surfaced as a direct answer — historically in things like featured snippets and voice search, and increasingly in AI-powered search experiences.

Worth knowing: Google itself has pushed back on treating AEO (and GEO) as genuinely new, separate disciplines. Their own developer guidance states plainly that "from Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." In other words, the fundamentals you'd already want in place for classic search — clear structure, genuine expertise, accurate information — are the same fundamentals doing the work here too.

GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation

The newest of the three, and the least settled. GEO is about being mentioned or cited when someone asks a generative AI system a question directly — ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude. These tools don't return a list of links; they generate a written answer, sometimes with a few sources cited. GEO is the emerging practice of trying to be one of the businesses that answer draws on.

Worth being honest about: nobody — including the platforms themselves — has this fully figured out yet. There's no equivalent yet of the decades of shared understanding that exists around classic SEO. Be sceptical of anyone confidently selling "guaranteed AI ranking."

What about llms.txt?
You may have heard about llms.txt as a way to make your website easier for AI systems to understand. It's an interesting emerging idea, but don't confuse it with an established ranking factor. Google says its Search systems don't use llms.txt, so it's certainly not something a small business needs to prioritise.

The overlap matters more than the differences

Here's the practical point: you don't need three separate strategies. The things that genuinely help across all three are largely the same. Clear, machine-readable information — structured data where appropriate, consistent business information, and well-organised content — all help search engines and other systems understand what your business actually does.

If you do the fundamentals properly, you're already most of the way toward all three. Chasing GEO-specific tactics while your Google Business Profile is half-filled in and your website hasn't been touched in three years is solving the wrong problem first.

Here's what I'd actually do if this were my business

If you have 30 minutes this week:

1. Check your Google Business Profile is complete and accurate.
2. Make sure your website clearly says what you do, where you do it and who you serve.
3. Look at your reviews — are they recent, and do they actually describe your services?
4. Check whether your key services have their own useful pages.
5. Only then start worrying about GEO.

How we approach it

We don't treat AEO or GEO as a separate service to sell you — the honest reality is that this space is still forming, and packaging it as a standalone product right now would be exactly the kind of overpromising we try to avoid. What we do instead: our $67 Digital Presence Audit already checks your AI platform presence as one of its research areas, alongside the same fundamentals (Google Business Profile, search visibility, reviews, website) that support all three of these disciplines at once. Get those right, and you're already in a strong position — however "search" ends up evolving next.