SEO vs GEO vs AEO: what each one does

In short

• SEO helps search engines understand your pages and helps people find them in the results. AEO aims for your page to be the direct answer. GEO aims for your brand to be cited or named inside AI-written answers.
• They are layers, not rivals: AI search features still rely on pages that are crawlable, indexed and useful.
• One well-built set of pages, in English and Traditional Chinese, can serve all three if each page answers a real question clearly and backs it up.

Three acronyms, one customer journey

Marketing teams in Hong Kong now hear three terms in the same meeting: SEO, AEO and GEO. They sound like competing services, and they are sometimes sold that way. It is more useful to see them as three ways the same customer question can be answered.

A customer types "how to choose a renovation contractor in Hong Kong". Google may show a list of blue links (the SEO world), a highlighted answer box at the top (the AEO world), or an AI Overview that writes a summary and links to a few sources (the GEO world). The same person might then ask ChatGPT the same question and get a written answer with citations. Your business can be present in some of these and missing from others.

If you are new to the topic, our guide to what GEO is covers the background.

SEO: being found and chosen in search results

Google's own starter guide describes SEO as helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and decide whether to visit it. That definition matters because it has two halves. One is technical: can Google crawl and index the page, and does it understand what the page is about? The other is human: when your result appears, does the title and snippet make someone want to click?

Google also says that creating content people find compelling and useful will likely influence your presence in search more than any other suggestion in the guide. It describes good content as easy to read, well organised, unique, up to date, helpful and people-first.

SEO is also slow to judge. Google notes that some changes take effect in hours and others take months, and that you will usually want to wait a few weeks before assessing whether a change helped.

What SEO measures: rankings, impressions and clicks in Search Console, and the enquiries that follow.

AEO: being the answer, not just a link

Answer engine optimisation grew up around featured snippets, voice assistants and "People also ask" boxes. Google describes a featured snippet as a result where the usual format is reversed, with the descriptive snippet shown before the link.

The important fact for AEO is that you cannot mark up a page to become a featured snippet. Google says its systems decide whether a page would make a good featured snippet and, if so, elevate it. What you can do is write in a way that makes the answer easy to lift: put the question in a heading, answer it in the next two or three sentences, then give the detail.

There is also a control in the other direction. The nosnippet rule blocks all snippets, including featured snippets, and a short max-snippet value makes a featured snippet less likely. Check that these were not added by mistake to pages you want to be quoted.

What AEO measures: whether your page is the one quoted for a specific question.

GEO: being cited when AI writes the answer

Generative engine optimisation was named in a 2023 research paper, published at KDD 2024. The authors describe generative engines as systems that use large language models to gather and summarise information from several sources to answer a question. Their tests found that some content methods could raise a source's visibility in those answers by up to 40%, and that what works varies by subject.

For Google, the entry ticket is the same as SEO. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that there are no additional requirements or special optimisations. It also explains that these features may use "query fan-out", running several related searches across subtopics to build one answer. That is a reason to cover a topic well, not just one keyword.

Outside Google, each AI tool has its own access rules. OpenAI, for example, says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. A site that ranks well in Google can still be invisible in ChatGPT if its robots.txt or firewall blocks that crawler.

What GEO measures: whether AI tools name your brand, describe it correctly and cite your pages, tested with the same questions each month.

How to run all three from one set of pages

You do not need three teams or three websites. A practical order of work:

1. Fix the base once. Make sure your key pages are crawlable, indexed and free of stray noindex or nosnippet tags, and that AI crawlers you want, such as OAI-SearchBot, are allowed.
2. Give every important question its own clear answer. One heading per question, a short direct answer, then detail, examples and sources. This serves the snippet box and the AI summary at the same time.
3. Write each language for its readers. English and Traditional Chinese pages should each answer the questions people ask in that language, not mirror each other line by line.
4. Show evidence. Specific facts, named sources and real work, such as our portfolio, give both search engines and AI tools something worth quoting.
5. Measure all three. Track Search Console for SEO, note which pages win answer boxes for AEO, and re-ask a fixed list of customer questions in AI tools for GEO.

Our AI marketing and GEO service follows this order, starting with an audit of where you appear today.

The short version

SEO gets you found, AEO makes you the answer, and GEO gets you named when AI writes the answer. They share one foundation: pages that machines can read and people find genuinely useful. Build that foundation once, keep it clear and well sourced in both languages, and measure each layer separately. If you would like to know where your brand stands across all three, contact us.