On being found: SEO, GEO, and AEO
For twenty years, visibility on the web had one grammar: rank on Google, earn the click. That grammar is fracturing. People still search, but increasingly, they ask. And the thing answering is no longer a results page. It's a machine composing a response.
That shift split one discipline into three. The names are clumsy, but the distinctions matter.
SEO - Search Engine Optimization
The original discipline. Technical health, domain authority, content matched to what people actually type. SEO optimizes for a human scanning a page of links and choosing one.
It isn't dead. Search still drives more qualified traffic than any other channel, especially for local and service businesses. But it now describes only part of how people find things.
AEO - Answer Engine Optimization
A discipline of format. Featured snippets, voice assistants, "People Also Ask" contexts where a single answer is delivered, and only one source gets to be it.
AEO optimizes for the question, not the keyword. It rewards precision: a direct answer high on the page, headings written the way people ask, structured data a machine can parse without guessing. It's writing for extraction.
GEO - Generative Engine Optimization
The newest, and the least understood. Generative engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, don't return links. They read across sources, weigh credibility, and compose. Sometimes they cite you. Often they don't mention you at all.
GEO optimizes for being trusted by the machine doing the reading. It favors original thinking over volume, clear structure over cleverness, and a point of view distinct enough to be quotable. Generic content is invisible to a system built to synthesize.
The part that doesn't change
Held together: SEO gets you found when people search. AEO gets you chosen when people ask. GEO gets you cited when machines answer.
Three mechanisms, but not three strategies. All of them are downstream of the same thing: a position clear enough to be summarized, and expertise real enough to be quoted. A machine can't cite what you never demonstrated. A snippet can't capture what you never made clear.
The engines changed. The discipline underneath them didn't. Say something precise, say it where it can be read, and be the kind of source worth pointing to. That was true when the output was ten blue links. It's truer now that the output is a sentence.
Good positioning!
Luis V.