Understanding SEO, GEO and AEO: how search and AI discovery work

Buyers now meet businesses in three places. They see ranked links in Google and Bing. They see AI summaries above those links. And they ask assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, which reply in conversation and may name brands. SEO, AEO and GEO are the disciplines behind each of those moments. This guide explains what each one is, how they overlap and what the evidence does and does not support.

Search is splitting, but the groundwork is shared

• Search still leads. Organic search sent 42.75% of website visits in 2026. AI platforms sent 0.32%, up from 0.02% in 2024 (SE Ranking, 101,574 websites)

• AI answers take clicks. With an AI summary on the page, US users clicked a result in 8% of visits, against 15% without one (Pew Research Center, July 2025)

• Assistants are mainstream. ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly users in February 2026 (OpenAI, via TechCrunch). In Australia, 77% of people aged 16 and over use AI and 12% say it is now their main way to find information, up from 5% (Telsyte, 2026)

• SEO is the base. Google says its AI features draw on the same search index and need no special markup

What each discipline does

SEO, search engine optimisation, makes pages easy to crawl, index and rank, so they appear in results and earn the click. It covers technical health, on-page relevance, content, site structure, authority and local search.

AEO, answer engine optimisation, makes a page the clearest answer to one specific question, so it can be chosen for AI Overviews, AI Mode and People also ask. In practice that means answer-first writing, one owner page per question and facts that are kept current.

GEO, generative engine optimisation, makes a brand known, trusted and cited by AI assistants. Assistants retrieve sources, often by splitting one question into several searches, extract facts and entities, then write an answer that may name brands. Crawler access, consistent brand facts across the web, credible third-party sources and original data all appear to matter, though no platform publishes its full method.

Most of the work overlaps

All three depend on crawlable, indexed, accurate and trusted pages with clear answers. What differs is the moment each one wins and how it is measured: rankings and clicks for SEO, AI feature impressions and citations for AEO and the share of AI answers naming you for GEO. That is why we plan them as one organic visibility programme rather than three separate services.

The technical detail in plain English

• Crawling, indexing and rendering. If a page cannot be fetched, stored or read, no other optimisation will help it

• robots.txt and AI crawlers. Blocking Googlebot removes you from Search, including AI Overviews. Blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from ChatGPT search. Blocking GPTBot only signals that content should not be used for training

• Structured data. Schema.org markup labels organisations, products and locations. Google says it is not required for AI features and must match the visible text

• Intent, relevance and authority. Match what the person wants first. Relevance and trust then separate the pages that fit

How the work is measured

Platform data is more reliable than third-party estimates. Search Console reports organic clicks and, since 2026, generative AI performance for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Prompt tracking and rank tracking are estimates and AI referrals in analytics undercount influence because assistants often answer without a visit.

AI answers also vary from run to run. Research from SparkToro in early 2026 found that AI brand recommendation lists rarely repeat, so any single answer should be treated as a sample. A credible report compares against your own baseline, uses the same prompts each period and pairs visibility with enquiries and sales.

What no provider can promise

• Guaranteed rankings in Google or Bing

• A set number of AI mentions or citations

• The same answer across platforms or over time

• Fixed timelines for changes in AI answers

Questions to ask any provider

• How do you define GEO and AEO and what evidence supports your method?

• Which measures come from platforms and which are your own estimates?

• How many prompts or questions do you test and how often?

• Which changes will you make to our site and how will we verify them?

• What results should we not expect in the first six months?

Related services: SEO · AEO and GEO · Content

If you would like a baseline of how your business appears across search and the major AI assistants, talk to us.

Sources

• Google Search Central, AI features and your website and SEO Starter Guide, accessed October 2026

• Google Search Central blog, Search generative AI performance reports in Search Console, June 2026

• Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears, 22nd July 2025

• SE Ranking, AI traffic grew 16x from 2024 to 2026, 101,574 websites, January 2025 to April 2026

• Telsyte, Australian Artificial Intelligence Study 2026, 2,023 respondents aged 16 and over

• TechCrunch, ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users, 27th February 2026

• SparkToro, research on AI brand recommendation lists, early 2026

• Microsoft, From discovery to influence: a guide to AEO and GEO, January 2026

• OpenAI, crawler documentation, accessed October 2026

• Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, arXiv:2311.09735, 2023