SEO vs GEO vs AEO

Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of increasing your rankings in Google (and Bing) organic search results. Users see ranked blue links; you want yours near the top.

Content quality & relevance

Depth, accuracy, and intent match. Google wants the page that best satisfies the query — not just the one that mentions the keyword most.

Technical health

Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP), mobile-friendliness, crawlability, structured markup, HTTPS.

Authority & backlinks

Links from relevant, trusted sites signal that your content is worth citing. Quality beats quantity.

User signals

Dwell time, low bounce, return-to-SERP rate. Pages that send users back to search quickly lose rankings over time.

On-page structure

One clear H1, logical heading hierarchy (H2/H3), descriptive title tags and meta descriptions. Helps crawlers and humans alike.

Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of making your content the source that AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini — cite when generating responses. Unlike SEO, there is no ranked list; either you are cited or you are not.

Citability

AI models learn from what sites across the web cite and link to. A site with strong backlink authority is more likely to be cited in AI-generated answers.

Content length & density

Research suggests AI answers tend to draw from passages around 1,300–1,400 characters. Avoid padding; make every paragraph count.

Clear definitions

State "X is Y" explicitly. AI models favour pages that define terms, rather than pages that assume readers already know.

Concrete data & comparisons

Stats, benchmarks, and side-by-side comparisons are high-signal. "CTR for rank #1 is ~30 %" is more citable than "rank #1 gets more clicks".

Step-by-step structure

Numbered lists, ordered procedures, and decision trees are the preferred format for instructional content in AI summaries.

Lead with the answer

Put the most important sentence first. AI extractors read top-down and often quote the opening passage of a section.

Visible structure

Use headings, bold key terms, and bullet lists. Well-structured HTML gives AI parsers clear section boundaries to quote from.

Answer Engine Optimisation focuses on winning direct-answer surfaces: Google's featured snippets (the boxed answer above organic results), voice assistant responses (Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa), and AI answer panels. AEO and GEO overlap heavily — both reward concise, well-structured content that directly answers a question.

FAQ schema

Mark up Q&A pairs with FAQPage schema. Google uses this for featured snippets and voice answers.

HowTo schema

Step-by-step processes marked with HowTo schema can appear as rich results in both search and voice assistants.

Concise direct answers

Write a one-sentence answer immediately after each heading. Voice assistants read one answer, not paragraphs.

Question-phrased headings

H2/H3 headings written as "What is X?" or "How do I Y?" match voice-search query patterns directly.

Speakable schema

Marks specific sections as suitable for text-to-speech. Emerging but increasingly adopted by voice platforms.

The relationship visualised

SEO is the broadest base. AEO and GEO sit inside it, targeting specific high-value surfaces.