SEO vs. AEO vs. GEO: What Each One Does and Which Your Business Needs

If someone has pitched you AEO or GEO this past year, you probably walked away wondering whether it’s one more thing to pay for or just SEO wearing a new name tag. The honest answer: they share most of the same groundwork, but each one targets a different place where your customer makes up their mind. Below, we line them up side by side, using a South Florida service business as the example, so you can see which one you’re missing.

One question, three different places

Picture a mom in Kendall looking for a pediatric-friendly dentist who takes her insurance. She can type that into Google and scan the map with three practices and the list of websites underneath. That’s SEO. Google might answer her at the top with an AI-generated summary, or she might ask her phone out loud. That’s AEO. Or she might open ChatGPT and type, “Recommend a kids’ dentist in Kendall who takes my insurance.” That’s GEO.

Same question. What changes is who answers it, and how. Google hands her options to choose from. The summary and the voice assistant hand her an answer. ChatGPT hands her two or three names with a reason for each. If your practice only shows up in one of those places, the decision gets made without you in the other two.

SEO: getting found in the results and on the map

SEO, or search engine optimization, has been doing its job for more than twenty years: getting your website and your Google Business Profile near the top when someone searches for what you sell in your area. For a local business, half the work happens on the map: a complete profile, reviews, the right categories, and your name, address and phone number written exactly the same everywhere. The other half is your website: a page for each service, fast on a phone, written in the words your customers actually use.

• —You measure it with Google rankings, website visits, and the calls and direction requests that come from your profile.
• —It takes months to build and holds up as long as you keep it maintained.
• —For the full local playbook, here’s our guide to local SEO in Miami.

AEO: making the answer come from you

AEO, or answer engine optimization, is about making sure that when someone asks a specific question, the answer comes from your content. It plays out in the AI summaries Google shows at the top, in featured snippets and in voice assistants. These are the questions people ask before they buy: “How long does a dental crown last?” “What does renters insurance cover in Florida?” “Do I need a permit to replace my roof?”

It matters because people click less when a summary shows up. Pew Research Center tracked real searches by 900 U.S. adults in March 2025. About 18% of those searches produced an AI summary, and when one appeared, people clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits, compared with 15% when there was no summary (Pew Research Center, 2025). If the answer is yours, at least the person read your name, even if they never landed on your site.

GEO: getting named when AI makes a recommendation

GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the newest of the three. The term comes from an academic paper accepted at the KDD 2024 conference. The researchers tested ways of rewriting content so it shows up more often in AI search answers and found visibility could rise by up to 40% (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024). Here you’re not fighting for a spot on a list anymore. You’re fighting to be one of the two or three names the AI actually writes into its answer.

To decide, AI tools cross-check what your website says against what everyone else says about you: reviews, directories, best-of lists, third-party articles. We measured this in our own industry in October 2026 and found that claims that live only on your own site carry little weight unless someone else backs them up. The details are in our study of who AI recommends in Miami.

All three, side by side

What they share, and why you don’t have to pick one

Here’s the part most pitches leave out. Google’s own guidance for site owners says there are no extra requirements or special optimizations needed to appear in its AI features. Your page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, the same as regular SEO (Google Search Central). In other words, AEO is built on top of solid SEO.

GEO works much the same way. AI tools need to be able to read your website, find details that match your Google profile and see that other people talk about you. If your profile is half-finished and your site doesn’t explain what you do, no acronym is going to rescue you. So think of the three as floors of the same building. For the long version of the second and third floors, read the complete AEO and GEO guide, and for the finer line between the first two, see AEO vs SEO.

Which one does your business need first?

• —If your Google profile isn’t verified or your site doesn’t have a page for each service, start with local SEO. Without it, nothing else has anything to hold on to.
• —If your customers ask a lot of questions before they buy (clinics, law firms, insurance, construction), add AEO and write out answers to the ten questions you hear most on the phone.
• —If you compete in a city where customers already ask ChatGPT for recommendations, work on GEO: reviews that mention your service and your neighborhood, plus listings in your industry’s directories and best-of lists.
• —If you serve customers in English and Spanish, do it in both. AI tools pull from different sources in each language, so you can be visible in one and invisible in the other.

Where to start

• —Ask your customer’s question in Google, Gemini and ChatGPT, something like “[your service] in [your city].” Note which of the three you show up in.
• —List the ten questions people ask before they hire you, then check whether your website answers each one in two or three sentences.
• —Compare your name, address, phone number and hours on your Google profile, your website, Facebook and Yelp. Fix any mismatch this week.

Running all three at once is a lot for someone who’s also serving customers and making payroll. At Brito we treat it as one system: your website, SEO, answers built for AI, video we shoot ourselves and BritoCRM, all connected to sales, in English and in Spanish. We’ve been doing it from Miami since 2006. In Miami-Dade and Broward we come to your business; if you’re farther away, we meet by phone or video call. If you’d like to know which of the three you’re missing, you can request a free assessment and we’ll go through it with you, no strings attached.