The short version
- SEO: be found in a list of results. AEO: be the extracted answer. GEO: be a source the generative engine draws on and trusts.
- They share roughly 75% of their requirements. The shared part is ordinary competent SEO.
- The acronym proliferation is mostly commercial. The underlying shifts are real, smaller than claimed, and worth acting on.
- If you can only do one thing: make your pages unambiguous about what they are and what you do. That serves all three.
Three acronyms for what is largely one job is a reliable signal that an industry is selling something. That does not make the underlying distinctions worthless — there are real differences in emphasis — but it is worth having them laid out plainly rather than as three separate disciplines you are apparently failing at.
The three, defined without marketing
Read the last column downward. Relevance and authority; direct answers; entity clarity and corroboration. Those are not three different jobs — they are three emphases within one job, and a page that does all three is simply a well-made page.
The shared 75%
- The page must be crawlable and indexable. Generative answers are largely built on indexed content.
- The content must genuinely be good on the subject. None of these techniques manufactures expertise.
- The HTML must be semantically clean — headings that reflect structure, not styling.
- Structured data must be present and valid.
- The site must be consistent about who it is and what it does.
- Other credible sources should corroborate you, whether by link or by mention.
Every item on that list was standard SEO advice before generative search existed. If your site fails on these, no amount of AEO formatting or GEO tactics will compensate — you are optimising the last 25% of a job you have not started.
The genuine 25%
Extractability (AEO’s contribution)
Answers that stand alone when lifted out of the page. Question-shaped headings. The answer before the elaboration. This is a formatting discipline and it is cheap to adopt — see SEO vs AEO.
Entity clarity (GEO’s contribution)
An assistant summarising your category needs an unambiguous statement of what you are. "The leading platform for modern teams" is unusable. "An MCP server that connects an SEO knowledge base to AI coding tools" is usable. Most companies have the first kind of sentence on their homepage, and it costs them.
Checkability
Claims that carry a source and a date are more useful to a system that has to decide whether to repeat them. This is why a blog that cites its figures is doing GEO by accident, and why one that publishes confident unsourced numbers is a weaker candidate for citation regardless of how well it ranks.
What to actually do about it
These proportions are our editorial judgement for a typical business site, not a measured finding. They are offered as a sanity check against spending half your quarter on the last row.
The percentages above are a judgement, not a study
We have labelled them as such deliberately. A great deal of GEO content presents allocations, uplift figures and weighting claims as if they were measured. Where this blog gives you a number, it either carries a source or carries this kind of disclaimer.
The part that is all three at once
Every recommendation above resolves to the same underlying activity: making the meaning of your pages explicit in the markup and the prose. Headings that describe content. Schema that matches the page. Sentences that state what you do without metaphor. Answers placed where they can be found.
That work lives in templates and content, which is why it so often does not happen. It is not hard and it is not expensive; it is just nobody’s job. See technical SEO vs content SEO for where that effort tends to pay best.