SEO, AEO and GEO: what actually changed

The acronyms are new and mostly marketing. The shift underneath them is real: a growing share of searches now end with an answer on the results page or inside a chat window, and never reach a website at all.

What the three actually mean

SEO: being in the list of links, ranked as high as possible. Keywords, links, technical health, content quality. Still the foundation, because everything downstream reads the same pages.

AEO, answer engine optimisation, is being the answer the engine displays: the featured snippet, the “People also ask” panel, the AI Overview at the top. Success looks like your text appearing on the results page, sometimes with a link and sometimes without.

GEO, generative engine optimisation: being cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Gemini a question in your domain. Success is your name in an answer that never involved a search results page.

What is genuinely different

Three things, and they are not the ones most articles emphasise.

Passages are retrieved, not pages. A model looking for an answer pulls a paragraph. If that paragraph only makes sense in the context of the two above it, it is a bad candidate. Self-contained is the requirement: each answer should survive being lifted out and read alone.

Specificity beats persuasion. “We deliver best-in-class solutions” is unquotable; there is no claim in it. “A first production AI feature typically takes three to six weeks” is quotable, because it says something a model can attribute. Vague marketing copy is invisible to this entire class of system, which is a pleasant development.

Corroboration matters more than authority. A model resolving whether you are a real company looks for the same facts stated consistently in several places: your site, your profiles, your directory listings. Identical name, address, VAT number and one-sentence description everywhere. Inconsistency here is the most common reason a small company fails to be recognised as an entity at all.

What has not changed

Nearly everything else, which is the part worth saying plainly.

Pages still need to be crawlable, fast and well structured. Headings still need to describe what follows. Internal links still tell a crawler what your site is about and which pages matter. Accurate schema still helps a machine parse a page: FAQPage and Article in particular, because they map directly onto what an answer engine is looking for. Content still has to be worth citing.

If a site is technically sound and genuinely useful, the AEO and GEO work is largely a writing change rather than an engineering one.

The writing change, concretely

Answer first. After the H1, put 40 to 60 words that answer the page’s primary question completely, with no preamble. That block is what gets lifted. Everything else on the page is for the reader who wants more.

Question-shaped headings. Where the intent is informational, make the H2 the question a person would actually type or ask. It matches the retrieval query and it forces the section below it to answer something.

One idea per paragraph. Two to four sentences. A paragraph covering three topics is not a good retrieval unit for any of them.

Numbers with units. Ranges, timeframes, prices, percentages. Concrete claims are what get quoted, and they are also what make a page useful.

A real FAQ block. Not padding: the questions people genuinely ask, answered in the first sentence. Marked up as FAQPage, and always present in the DOM rather than rendered on click, or a crawler never sees the answers.

What to actually do

If you have not done the SEO fundamentals, do those; there is no AEO shortcut past a slow, unstructured site. If you have, the additional work is a rewriting pass with the rules above, a FAQPage and Article schema check, and making sure your company facts are byte-identical everywhere they appear.

Then measure it the only way currently available: a fixed list of questions a prospect might ask, run monthly across the major assistants, with the results written down. It is manual, it is unglamorous, and it is more informative than any tool currently claiming to score your GEO performance.