If you are deciding how AI search fits into your marketing work, you need to understand what the different labels mean in practice. SEO, AEO, GEO and AI SEO describe work that largely overlaps. The differences concern what you measure and which pages you work on.
The labels
SEO, search engine optimization. Being found through conventional search results. Well defined and decades old.
AEO, answer engine optimization. Appearing in generated answers, with the emphasis on answers, citations and how information is presented.
GEO, generative engine optimization. Broadly the same work as AEO. No stable distinction between the two has emerged, and vendors use them interchangeably. Treating them as separate disciplines with separate methods is not supported by anything either term means.
AI SEO, ambiguous and worth clarifying whenever someone uses it. It means either using AI tools to do conventional SEO, or optimizing so that AI assistants represent you well. Those are unrelated activities and the confusion is common enough to derail conversations.
How much of the work is different
This is the question the labels obscure. Most of it is shared.
| Work | Conventional search | AI answers |
|---|---|---|
| Content that answers real questions | Required | Required |
| Being cited by other sites | Required | Required |
| Accurate, current descriptions of what you sell | Helps | Required |
| Appearing in third-party roundups and comparisons | Helps | Matters more |
| Technical crawlability and indexation | Required | Required |
| Keyword targeting for a query | Central | Less applicable |
| Ranking position as the goal | Central | Does not apply |
| Being described correctly by third parties | Minor | Central |
The bottom two rows are where the genuine difference sits, and it is a difference of emphasis rather than of method.
The one real shift
In conventional search you compete for a position with a page you control. In an answer, what is said about you is assembled from sources that are mostly not yours.
An answer recommending your product frequently cites a review site, a comparison article or a forum thread rather than your website. So the material that decides how you are described is on other people's pages, and improving your own site does not directly change it.
That shifts the center of the work from your site to the pages that discuss your market. It is why placement research, unlinked mentions and third-party roundups matter more here than they did, and why an audit of your own site does not answer the question.
What this means practically
Three things follow, and none of them requires adopting a new discipline.
Keep doing conventional SEO. Assistants draw on search results. A site that cannot be crawled or indexed is invisible to both channels, and the technical work serves them together.
Add the question of how you are described elsewhere. Find the pages that answers cite for your topics, check whether you appear on them, and check whether what they say is current. This is where most of the available progress sits, and it is ordinary outreach and content work rather than anything new.
Change how you measure. Position does not apply. What applies is presence across repeated runs, comparison against named competitors, and which sources answers rely on.
On the labels themselves
Use whichever term your audience uses. If a client says GEO, say GEO. The label is not the interesting part and arguing about it consumes time needed for the work.
Be more careful when buying. A vendor claiming AEO and GEO are distinct disciplines requiring separate products is making a positioning argument rather than a technical one. Ask instead what the product measures, how often, across which engines, and what it does with the result.
When planning the work, define the audience, results and pages you intend to investigate. That gives the team a useful assignment regardless of the label used.
See what AI search visibility measures, how citations differ from mentions, or the terminology glossary.