What is the difference between AEO, GEO, and SEO?

SEO, search engine optimization, is about ranking a link on the results page and earning a click to your site. It rewards relevance, authority, and backlinks, and you measure it with rankings and organic traffic.

AEO, answer engine optimization, is the on-page work of making a page quotable. It structures content into clear headings, direct answers, lists, and tables so an answer engine can extract a clean passage. The win is a citation and a spot on the shortlist of two or three names.

GEO, generative engine optimization, is the off-page work of making your source trusted, through entities, third-party citations, reviews, and authority. Some in the field treat AEO and GEO as the same thing; the useful split is on-page versus off-page.

The three are not rivals. You do SEO to rank, make those pages extractable with AEO, and build the authority with GEO that gets you cited. You need all three.