SEO, AEO and GEO explained: what actually changed and what to do about it

You can rank first on Google and still lose the customer. Someone types a question, an AI-generated answer appears above your listing, they read it, and they never scroll. Your ranking was fine. The click simply never happened.

Here are the three terms, plainly:

• SEO — search engine optimisation — is the work of getting a page ranked in a list of links.
• AEO — answer engine optimisation — is the work of getting your content used as the answer itself.
• GEO — generative engine optimisation — is the work of getting your brand mentioned and cited inside what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews generate.

In practice the last two mean nearly the same thing and people use them interchangeably. There’s no settled taxonomy yet, and anyone telling you otherwise is probably selling a course.

None of this replaces SEO. It sits on top of it. But if your entire visibility plan is still “rank for the keyword,” you’re optimising for a behaviour a lot of your buyers have already stopped doing.

What actually changed?

The numbers are worth looking at directly, because the shift has been faster than most sites have adjusted to.

Two things stand out.

Google is still enormous. ChatGPT is not replacing it — 72 billion against 417 billion is not a changing of the guard. Anyone announcing the death of search is doing engagement, not analysis.

But the behaviour inside Google has changed a great deal in two years. Nearly seven in ten searches now end with the person getting what they wanted on the results page itself. They were served. You just weren’t visited.

SEO vs AEO vs GEO: what’s the actual difference?

That last column is the part people consistently underestimate. With SEO you can check your rank on Tuesday and it’ll be roughly the same on Wednesday. With generated answers, almost every response differs from every other response — the same question asked twice can produce different sources entirely. Search Engine Land has reported that 40–60 % of cited sources shift month to month.

So you can’t bring a rank-tracking mentality to this. You can only make yourself a more likely source, more often, and measure it in aggregate over months rather than days.

What actually gets you cited by AI?

Most of it is unglamorous, and most of it is things a decent site should have been doing anyway.

Let the crawlers in. AI systems use their own crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot-Extended among them — and a great many sites block one or more of them without ever having decided to. Usually it’s inherited from an old robots.txt, or a security plugin treating an unfamiliar user agent as a threat. Go and read the file. This is the cheapest thing on the list and the one most likely to be silently costing you everything.

Answer first, then explain. Put the direct answer in the opening paragraph, and make every heading a self-contained answer to the question it poses. This is a genuine change in writing habit. Journalism teaches you to build towards a point. Extraction rewards you for leading with it. If your best sentence is in paragraph nine, it may as well not exist.

Make the content extractable. Semantic HTML, a real heading hierarchy, lists and tables instead of dense blocks, and text rather than pictures of text. A language model cannot read a screenshot. If your pricing lives inside a beautifully designed image, it is invisible.

Add structured data. JSON-LD for articles, FAQs, how-tos, products and organisation details. It’s the difference between a machine inferring what your page is about and simply being told.

Say who and when. A named author, a publication date, an honest modified date. Undated content is harder to trust and gets treated accordingly.

Be discussed elsewhere. This is the part you can’t do on your own site. Answer engines lean heavily on places where humans talk about things — Reddit in particular, along with review sites, forums and industry publications. A brand that exists only on its own domain has exactly one source vouching for it, and that source is you.

The uncomfortable part nobody puts on the sales page

Doing all of this well may not increase your traffic.

Major publishers report under 1 % of their referral traffic coming from AI platforms, despite being cited constantly. The citation happens. The visit frequently doesn’t.

But there’s a genuinely interesting counter-figure. The Washington Post found that visitors arriving from AI platforms converted to subscriptions at four to five times the rate of visitors from traditional search.

That makes sense if you think about what happened before the click. Someone asked a question, got a considered answer that mentioned you specifically, and then chose to come and look at you anyway. They arrive halfway sold. A person landing from a keyword search is at the start of something; a person landing from a recommendation is near the end of it.

So the honest framing is: less traffic, warmer traffic. Which also means the metric you’ve been reporting for a decade is now measuring the wrong thing, and you’ll need to get comfortable with a fuzzier one — brand mentions, cited answers, and people who arrive already knowing your name.

What should a small site do first?

If you’re a one-person operation or a small business, most advice in this area is written for enterprises with a content team and a budget for a monitoring platform. Here’s the short version for the rest of us, in order.

1. Read your robots.txt. Decide deliberately which AI crawlers you allow. Most small businesses should allow all of them — you want the exposure more than you want to protect the content.
2. Rewrite the opening paragraph of your five most important pages so the answer sits in the first three sentences.
3. Add proper structured data. On most stacks this is a small job, often a single component.
4. Write the things people actually ask you. Every question a client sends by email is a page.
5. Go and be useful somewhere public — answer questions in the forum where your buyers already are, without dropping links.
6. Once a month, ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the questions your customers would ask. Note who gets named. That’s your competitive set now, and it may not be the same list as your Google competitors.

That’s the whole programme. No platform subscription required.

The caveat I’d want if I were reading this

This field is about two years old. The playbooks are largely inference rather than evidence — people watching outputs and reasoning backwards about what caused them. Some of the confident numbers circulating about AEO come from companies selling AEO services, which is a decent reason to hold them loosely.

What I’d trust: the behaviour data on zero-click search, because it’s measured from actual clickstreams rather than inferred. What I’d treat as a sensible bet rather than a law: everything in the section above about what gets you cited.

The good news is that the sensible bets all make a site better anyway. Clear structure, direct answers, honest metadata and being genuinely useful in public were good ideas long before any of this. If AEO turns out to be a two-year fashion, you’ll have spent the time making your site clearer. As downsides go, that’s not much of one.

Common questions

Is SEO dead? No. Google still handles roughly six times the monthly volume of ChatGPT, and classic ranking work still feeds the systems generating the answers. What’s dead is the assumption that a good rank reliably produces a visit.

What’s the difference between AEO and GEO? AEO is about being extracted as the answer — featured snippets, AI Overviews, direct responses. GEO is about being named and cited inside generated text. They overlap heavily, most of the tactics are shared, and the distinction matters less than the people naming it would like.

How do I track whether AI is citing me? Imperfectly, and in aggregate. Ask the assistants your customers’ questions on a monthly schedule and log who gets named. Watch referral traffic from chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai and similar. Watch for people arriving who already know your name. There’s no rank tracker for this and you should be suspicious of anything claiming to be one.

Should I block AI crawlers? Almost certainly not, if you’re small. Blocking them protects content nobody was going to steal at the cost of visibility you badly need. Large publishers with licensing leverage are playing a different game to yours.

How long before this shows results? Months, not weeks — and the first signal is usually qualitative. People mentioning they found you through ChatGPT, or arriving already briefed. Treat the six-step list as maintenance rather than a campaign.

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I’m building tuomo.co with all of this applied from the start rather than retrofitted afterwards, and I’ll write up what happened once there’s enough data to say something honest. Until then, treat this post as reasoning rather than results — because that’s exactly what it is.

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Sources:

• Google zero-click searches reach 68% in early 2026: Study — Search Engine Land, reporting SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb clickstream data
• FAQ on GEO and AEO: Where AI search and SEO overlap in 2026 — eMarketer
• How AI Answer Engines Decide Which Sources to Cite — Chudi.dev