The definitions, without the buzzwords
SEO (search engine optimization) is the established discipline: making pages that rank in Google's list of links. AEO (answer engine optimization) targets the direct answers, featured snippets, AI Overviews, voice results, where the engine answers instead of listing. GEO (generative engine optimization) targets generative systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, where the "result" is a synthesized paragraph that may never send a click at all.
Vendors treat these as three products. They are better understood as three surfaces reading from one underlying record: your content, your entity, and your third-party authority.
Where traditional SEO ends
SEO's core assets, crawlable pages, relevant content, links, still matter everywhere. But SEO's scoreboard is position in a list, and lists are shrinking. When an AI Overview or a chat answer sits above the links, position three of ten is position three of a list fewer people scroll to.
Where AI visibility begins
Answer and generative engines do not rank your page. They decide whether to mention you. That decision leans on signals classic SEO underweights: entity clarity, independent citations, consistent descriptions across the web, and repeated topical association. A company can rank well in Google and be invisible in ChatGPT because it optimized pages, not its public record. The full signal list is in How ChatGPT Decides Which Companies to Recommend.
What businesses actually need
- Keep the SEO foundation. Crawlable site, real content, clean titles. Every engine, generative or not, starts from the crawl.
- Add the entity layer. Schema markup, consistent naming, one description repeated everywhere. See Schema and Structured Data.
- Build third-party authority. Placements, interviews, and reference presence, because generative engines weight what others say about you. This is where press placements and a podcast footprint earn their cost.
- Monitor the answers, not just the rankings. Ask the engines about your category monthly and track who they name. The how is in Search and AI Monitoring.
The one-sentence version
SEO gets your pages found. AEO and GEO get your company named. The record that feeds all three is the same, and building it once serves every surface at the same time.
One record, every engine
Media Morpheus builds the placements, interviews, and entity work that feed search and AI answers together.
See authority services