SEO vs AEO vs GEO. What each one means, and which you need.
Three acronyms, one buyer. SEO wins the ranked links, AEO wins the lifted answer, GEO wins the recommendation when someone asks an AI who to hire. Here is the whole picture in plain English.
The short answer
SEO earns rankings in the blue links of Google and Bing. AEO earns the answer itself: the summary an AI writes in AI Overviews, featured snippets or inside ChatGPT and Perplexity. GEO earns the recommendation: being named when a buyer asks a generative engine which provider to choose. They share foundations and work best run as one programme.
| Discipline | Optimises for | Where you win | Measured by |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO | Ranked positions in search results | Google and Bing blue links | Rankings, organic traffic, conversions |
| AEO | Being the answer an engine lifts | AI Overviews, featured snippets, People Also Ask, chat answers | Citations, answer presence, snippet share |
| GEO | Being the provider an engine recommends | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode shortlists | Share of voice across a fixed prompt set |
The disciplines overlap heavily and share the same foundations: clean technical health, honest content, named authors, dates, schema and third-party presence. Reviewed 26 August 2026.
The confusion is understandable, because the industry renamed itself three times in two years. But underneath the acronyms there are just three different moments in the same buyer journey, and each one can be optimised for. This page defines all three, shows where they overlap, and gives you an honest order to invest in.
SEO: winning the list of links
Search engine optimisation earns positions in the ranked results of Google and Bing. The craft is thirty years old and still matters: crawlability, site architecture, content that matches intent, links and authority. When a buyer types a query and scans the results, SEO decides whether you are on the page they scan.
What changed is that the ranked list is no longer the whole page, and for many questions it is no longer even the top of it.
AEO: winning the answer itself
Answer engine optimisation targets the answer that sits above or instead of the links: AI Overviews, featured snippets, People Also Ask, and the responses inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini. The engine reads the web and writes one answer, and AEO is the work of being the source it lifts.
That work is specific: clear sourcing, named authors, dated content, structured data, and copy written in question-and-answer shapes an AI can quote. A page can rank well and still never be quoted, because ranking signals and quoting signals are not the same list.
GEO: winning the recommendation
Generative engine optimisation goes one step further. The buyer does not ask a question about the topic, they ask the engine who to hire, and the engine names providers. GEO is the work of being on that shortlist: fresh, dated comparison content on your own estate, presence on the third-party lists engines cite, a clean entity footprint, and published numbers an engine can repeat.
This is measurable. Fix a set of buyer prompts, run them monthly on the same engines in a clean browser profile, and count who gets named. That share-of-voice number is the honest scoreboard for GEO, and ORRJO publishes its own.
Which one should you invest in?
All three, in the right order, because they share foundations. Technical health and intent-matched content come first: that is SEO, and without it nothing else has anywhere to live. Answer-shaped content, authorship, dates and schema come next: that is AEO, and it usually starts paying within 60 to 90 days. The recommendation layer comes last: comparison pages, third-party presence, entity cleanup. That is GEO, and it compounds.
The mistake to avoid is buying them as three separate services from three suppliers. It is one estate and one buyer. ORRJO runs all three as one programme inside its retainers, which is also why this page exists: our own category visibility is the working demo.
Frequently Asked Questions
SEO earns rankings in the blue links of Google and Bing. AEO earns the answer itself: the summary an AI writes in AI Overviews, featured snippets or inside ChatGPT and Perplexity. GEO earns the recommendation: being named when a buyer asks a generative engine which provider to choose.
Yes. AI engines build their answers from the same web SEO maintains, and clean technical health, intent-matched content and authority remain the foundation everything else stands on. What changes is that ranking alone no longer captures the whole opportunity.
No, though sellers of renamed SEO retainers have muddied the water. GEO has its own deliverables: comparison content built to be cited, presence on the third-party lists engines pull from, entity cleanup, and share-of-voice measurement across engines. None of those are in a classic SEO scope.
AEO by citation presence: how often engines lift your content as the answer. GEO by share of voice: fix a set of buyer prompts, run them monthly on the same engines in a clean browser profile, and count who gets named. ORRJO runs this on its own category and publishes the method.
Standalone UK work runs £3,000 to £15,000 per month, with published US guides quoting mid-market retainers at $3,000 to $8,000. ORRJO folds AEO and GEO into its retainers from £1,250 per month. Our AEO pricing guide has the full breakdown.
In order: SEO foundations, then AEO, then GEO. Technical health and intent-matched content give the answers somewhere to live, answer-shaped content starts earning citations inside 60 to 90 days, and the recommendation layer compounds from there. Buy them as one programme, not three suppliers.
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