Agencies have an incentive to make these sound like three separate disciplines requiring three separate retainers. Mostly they are not. But there is one genuine distinction underneath the acronyms, and it does change what you prioritise.
What each term claims to mean
SEO optimises for position in a ranked list of links. Established, well understood, and still the majority of discovery in most categories.
AEO, answer engine optimization, optimises for being cited in a direct answer — featured snippets historically, AI-generated answers now.
GEO, generative engine optimization, optimises specifically for generative systems that synthesise rather than retrieve.
In practice AEO and GEO describe nearly the same work. The distinction is largely which era of the problem the person naming it entered from.
The one difference that actually matters
It is not between the acronyms. It is between optimising for selection and optimising for synthesis.
Selection means a system picks your page from a set and shows it. You control what the user sees, because they land on your page. Ranking higher gets you more of that.
Synthesis means a system reads many sources, builds a new answer, and may name you inside it. You control almost nothing about presentation. What matters is whether your claim is corroborated elsewhere, whether your content is extractable, and whether the system can identify you confidently.
That difference — not the acronym — is what changes the work.
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What to do about it
Do not buy three services. Ask any provider how their work changes for synthesis rather than selection. The good answers involve entity consistency, corroboration across third-party sources, and passage-level content structure. The weak answers involve publishing more blog posts.
Budget-wise, the fundamentals are shared. The incremental spend for AI search is smaller than the terminology implies, because most of it is work you should be doing anyway.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
In practice very little. Both describe optimising to be cited by AI systems that generate answers. AEO came from the featured-snippet era and GEO from the generative one, but the work overlaps almost entirely.
Is AEO replacing SEO?
No. Traditional search still drives most discovery, and the fundamentals feed both. AEO is an additional layer with its own requirements, not a successor.
Should I pay separately for SEO and AEO?
Usually not. Most of the work is shared, and the genuine incremental effort is entity consistency, third-party representation and monitoring. Be sceptical of anyone selling them as wholly separate retainers with separate scopes.