What is the difference between GEO, AEO and SEO?

The short version

• SEO: be ranked in a list of results. The outcome is a position and a click.
• AEO: be the answer a search engine extracts into a featured snippet or AI Overview. The outcome is your text appearing above the list.
• GEO: be the business a generative assistant names in prose it composes itself. The outcome is being recommended, often with no link at all.
• The overlap is most of the work: retrievable pages, direct answers, consistent details, trustworthy authorship.
• The genuinely new part is that you are now paraphrased rather than linked, so being described accurately matters as much as being found.

What each term actually means

SEO, search engine optimisation. The original job: earn a position in a ranked list of links. Everything classic belongs here, from crawlability and page speed to internal linking and the words on the page. Success is a rank, and the reader still chooses from a list.

AEO, answer engine optimisation. Optimising to be the extracted answer rather than one of the options. Featured snippets and AI Overviews take a passage from a page and show it directly. Success is your sentence being the one lifted. This rewards pages that answer a specific question in a self-contained way, and it rewards clean structure, because the engine has to identify where the answer starts and ends.

GEO, generative engine optimisation. Being named when an assistant writes an answer in its own words. There may be no link. The assistant retrieves sources, synthesises them, and recommends. Success is being the business mentioned, described correctly, for the questions that precede a purchase.

Where they overlap, and why that matters

The reason these converge is mechanical. Generative assistants do not answer buying-intent questions from training data, because training data cannot know your current hours. They retrieve: they search the live web at the moment of asking, read what comes back, and write from it. That is retrieval-augmented generation, and it means GEO inherits nearly every requirement SEO already had.

Read that table as one mostly-shared column with different scoring. An agency selling GEO as an unrelated discipline is selling the overlap twice.

What is genuinely different about GEO

You are paraphrased, not quoted. A wrong price on a forgotten page becomes a confidently stated wrong price in an answer, with no link for the reader to check. Accuracy across every surface stops being hygiene and becomes the product.

Corroboration is weighted much more heavily. With a link, a reader verifies for themselves. Without one, the assistant has to be confident before stating something, and confidence comes from sources agreeing. One service, one phrase, across your site, your Google Business Profile and your listings.

Authorship carries weight. Content attributable to a named person with a consistent description across the site is treated differently from anonymous copy. This is why the about page on this site exists, and why every answer page carries a byline.

Measurement changes shape. There is no rank to track. You run the questions your buyers ask through each assistant on a schedule and record who gets named. That is a prompt panel, and it is what the audit produces.

What it costs

Two bundles exist, priced below the sum of their parts: website plus audit at Rp 7.550.000, which is the audit included free with a build, and everything except automation at Rp 8.540.000 one-time plus the Rp 1.520.000 monthly profile fee. Only the one-time work is discounted in a bundle; the monthly fee is the same either way.

The website figure covers a revamp or company profile up to about five pages, and a custom multi-page build is quoted per project. The profile work is monthly because a Google Business Profile does not stay fixed: hours change, categories get reshuffled, and reviews and questions keep arriving. A one-off cleanup decays within months, so it is not sold that way.

The audit is where everything starts: whether search engines and AI assistants name your business for buying-intent questions, whether they describe it correctly, and which businesses get named instead of you, by name. Plus a retrieval and consistency test across your site, your Google Business Profile and your other listings. About three days.

When this distinction is a bad idea to care about

Do not reorganise your marketing around the acronyms. They describe three scoring systems over one body of work. The practical question is never "should we do GEO or SEO", it is "are our pages retrievable, direct and consistent", and that question has one answer that serves all three.

Do not buy GEO as a separate line item from someone who will not look at your technical foundations. If a crawler cannot read your service pages, no amount of assistant-specific tactics will help, and you will have paid for the roof before the walls.

Do not optimise for one assistant's quirks. They differ in retrieval and they change without notice. Tuning to the one you personally use produces a page that works in one place and nowhere else.

Do not chase any of it for questions that do not precede a purchase. Being cited on a general-interest topic is pleasant and sells nothing.