SEO vs AEO vs GEO: What Should Your Team Actually Do?

What stays the same?

Keep your SEO foundations, add answer-first content structure, then build third-party authority (mentions, reviews, citations) — in roughly that order, whether you call the work SEO, AEO or GEO. The order matters more than the label: a page that's crawlable and ranks (SEO), but gives a model nothing quotable (missing AEO), cited nowhere else (missing GEO), is incomplete at every layer regardless of what your team calls its job. If you want the definitions sorted out first, GEO vs AEO vs SEO vs LLMO covers what each term actually means; this post is about what to do once the labels aren't the question anymore.

Everything that already makes a page crawlable, fast and well-structured. Google states plainly in its generative AI optimization guide that "the best practices for SEO continue to be relevant because our generative AI features on Google Search are rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems." That's Google's own features specifically — it doesn't speak for ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude — but the underlying logic holds more broadly: an uncrawlable, slow, poorly structured page is a bad candidate for any system trying to extract or ground an answer from it, AI or not.

Keep: technical crawlability, page speed, a clean URL and link structure, and ranking for the terms that already send you qualified traffic. None of this gets replaced by "doing AEO" or "doing GEO" — it's the layer everything else sits on top of.

What gets added?

Two layers on top of the SEO foundation:

1. Answer structure (the AEO layer). Content written so a model can extract a direct answer: the answer stated plainly near the top, clear question-style headings, FAQ sections, and — where it genuinely helps — structured data. Google's guide is explicit that none of this is mandatory for its own features ("there's no special schema.org markup you need to add," "there's no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces"), but writing for extraction is still good practice for any system reading your page, including ones Google doesn't control.
2. Third-party authority (the GEO layer). Getting mentioned, reviewed and cited on sites you don't own — the sources an AI engine draws from when it isn't just reading your page directly. This is the layer classic SEO mostly doesn't touch, since backlinks measured for ranking purposes aren't the same signal as being named and described favourably across the web.

In what order?

Foundations first, because nothing above them works without a crawlable page to extract from or cite. After that, the honest answer is "it depends on your current gaps" rather than a fixed universal order — but as a default:

1. Weeks 1–4: fix foundations. Crawlability, page speed, the technical basics covered in the technical AI-readiness checklist.
2. Weeks 5–8: rewrite for answer structure. Add direct answers and clear headings to your highest-intent pages; see answer-first content.
3. Weeks 9–12 and ongoing: build third-party authority. Digital PR, reviews, and citation-gap work — the slower-compounding layer that keeps paying off past the first 90 days.

How to split time and budget?

Nobody has published a validated universal split, so don't adopt one as if it were settled. What's actually documented: in SEOFOMO's 2026 survey of 171 search professionals across 36 countries (fielded 17–27 August 2026), 69% of respondents now have some budget allocated to AI search optimisation, up from 38% the year before. But most of that isn't a separate line item — 54% fold AI-search work into an existing SEO budget rather than funding it independently, and SEO teams lead the effort at 77% of organisations; only 15% maintain a fully standalone AI-search budget. The practical reading: most teams are treating this as an extension of the SEO function's existing time and budget, not a new department.

Don't give your own team a fixed percentage split (for example "20% GEO, 80% SEO") without a source for that number — none of the data above supports a specific ratio, only that most organisations fund this inside SEO rather than alongside it.

How to measure each layer?

Each layer needs its own check, because they measure different things:

• Foundations: classic SEO metrics (crawl errors, Core Web Vitals, rankings) plus the technical AI-readiness checklist's pass/fail checks.
• Answer structure: whether a model can actually extract a direct answer from the page — check with the Direct-Answer Snippet Checker, not a subjective read of "does this look structured."
• Third-party authority: AI visibility itself — whether real buyer-style prompts name, cite and recommend you, logged across repeated runs over time, not one screenshot. See how to measure AI visibility.

Common mistakes: doing the answer-structure rewrite before fixing basic crawlability; treating a rebrand from "SEO team" to "GEO team" as if it changed any actual output; adopting a fixed time-split percentage with no source; measuring only rankings and assuming that covers the AI-answer layer too.

A first-90-days checklist:

• Crawler access confirmed for GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and ClaudeBot.
• Top 10–20 highest-intent pages have a direct answer in the first few sentences.
• At least one digital PR pitch sent and logged.
• Review-site profiles claimed on the two or three sites that matter most in your category.
• A citation-gap check run at least once against your top two competitors.
• Buyer-style prompts logged (named/cited/recommended) as a baseline before and after this 90-day push.

Tools to use: your existing SEO toolset for the foundations layer (no change needed there); the Direct-Answer Snippet Checker for the answer-structure layer; the AI Citation Snapshot for a fast first read on the authority layer. For a longer-form, step-by-step version of this same layered approach, see the SEO, AEO and GEO checklist.

FAQ

Is GEO replacing SEO? No. Google states its own generative AI features are rooted in its core ranking and quality systems, meaning SEO fundamentals remain relevant for at least that engine. GEO adds work SEO doesn't cover (third-party mentions and citations); it doesn't remove the foundation.

Should we rename our SEO team to a GEO or AEO team? That's a labelling decision with no evidence behind it either way. What matters is whether the work — foundations, answer structure, third-party authority — actually gets done, not what the team or the report is called.

What percentage of our budget should go to AI search optimisation? No sourced, validated figure exists for this. The closest available data point is that most organisations (54%, per SEOFOMO's 2026 survey) fund it from an existing SEO budget rather than a separate one — that's a funding-structure finding, not a percentage split.

Do we need to do all three layers at once? No. Foundations should come first since nothing else works without them. Answer structure and third-party authority can run in parallel if you have the resources; in sequence if you don't.

What to do next

1. Run the foundations check first — confirm crawler access and basic structure before spending time on anything else.
2. Rewrite your highest-intent pages for a direct answer, then check extraction with a free tool rather than eyeballing it.
3. Start one digital PR or review-site push, and log a baseline set of buyer-prompt results before you do, so you have something real to compare against in 90 days.

ContextOwl sells one-time AI visibility reports. The AI Citation Snapshot is a free, single-question version of the same check.