SEO: ranking in search results
Search Engine Optimization is the original discipline: making your pages rank in a list of results on Google and Bing. It rewards relevant content, good on-page signals (titles, headings, structure), fast and mobile-friendly pages, and authority from backlinks.
SEO is still the foundation — most of what helps AEO and GEO starts with a well-optimized, trustworthy page.
AEO: winning the direct answer
Answer Engine Optimization targets the direct-answer features — featured snippets, People Also Ask, and voice answers — where a search engine lifts a concise answer straight onto the results page. It rewards clear, question-and-answer content and structured data like FAQ markup.
If SEO is about ranking, AEO is about being the answer that gets pulled out of the ranking.
GEO: getting cited by AI engines
Generative Engine Optimization is the newest layer: optimizing to be read and cited inside AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. It leans hardest on machine-readable structure, clear definitions, quotable facts, and letting AI crawlers reach your content.
As more searches end in an AI answer instead of a click, GEO is where a growing share of discovery — and citation traffic — now happens.
Where to focus
You don't have to choose — they share a foundation. A fast, secure, well-structured page with clear, quotable content and good markup helps all three at once. Start with solid SEO, add FAQ-style answer content for AEO, and make sure your structured data and crawlability are in place for GEO.
WebAnalizer scores SEO and GEO together (alongside performance, accessibility and security), so you can see in one report where you stand across the whole spectrum.