AEO vs GEO is the comparison that now interrupts almost every marketing budget conversation, usually about ninety seconds after somebody says “but people just ask ChatGPT now.” Two new acronyms have arrived beside a discipline that took twenty years to mature, three agencies are quoting for three different things, and nobody in the room can say confidently which of them the business actually needs.
The honest answer is that the three services are not rivals competing for the same slot. They are three different surfaces, fed by one shared foundation, and the useful AEO vs GEO question is not which one wins but how much of each your specific business should buy this year.
This guide sets that out properly. It defines answer engine optimisation, generative engine optimisation and traditional search optimisation in plain terms, shows exactly where the work overlaps and where it genuinely diverges, and gives you a five-question test that settles the split for your own company. It then covers what each service costs in the UK, the order to fund them in, how to measure each without fooling yourself, and the mistakes that reliably waste a quarter. A worked example runs through the charts so every number on the page comes from arithmetic you can check rather than a statistic somebody invented.
One framing to carry through: none of this is a replacement cycle. Search engines did not stop existing when natural language processing got good enough to answer a question in a sentence. What changed is that the number of places your business can be found has multiplied, and each new place rewards slightly different work. Budgeting well means recognising the shared 60% before arguing about the rest.
Table of contents
- Why the AEO vs GEO Question Landed on Your Budget This Year
- AEO vs GEO vs Traditional SEO: What Each One Actually Means
- Where AEO vs GEO and SEO Overlap, and Where They Split
- What an Answer Engine Optimisation Service Actually Delivers
- What a Generative Engine Optimisation Service Actually Delivers
- What Traditional SEO Still Does That Nothing Else Replaces
- The AEO vs GEO Decision: Five Questions That Settle It
- Matching AEO vs GEO Spend to How Your Buyers Search
- Sector Patterns in the AEO vs GEO Choice
- What AEO vs GEO and SEO Cost in the UK
- Sequencing: The Order to Fund AEO vs GEO and SEO
- Measuring AEO vs GEO and SEO Without Fooling Yourself
- The Shared Foundation Underneath All Three
- AEO vs GEO Mistakes That Waste a Quarter
- A 90-Day Plan to Get Your AEO vs GEO Mix Right
- Frequently Asked Questions About AEO vs GEO
- References
Why the AEO vs GEO Question Landed on Your Budget This Year
For most of the last two decades, being visible in search meant one thing: appearing in a list of ten blue links, and getting a click. The entire commercial apparatus of search marketing — rank tracking, click-through-rate curves, traffic forecasts, cost-per-click comparisons — was built on the assumption that a search result is a doorway and the visit is the prize. That assumption held long enough for everyone to forget it was an assumption.
It has been eroding for years, and not only because of generative tools. Featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, knowledge panels and local packs all moved the answer onto the results page itself. Google’s own AI features documentation now describes appearing inside an AI-generated response as a distinct outcome from ranking for a query. Meanwhile ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot answer questions by synthesising several sources at once and naming a handful of them.
Three surfaces, not one
So a business now competes on three surfaces simultaneously. It can rank in a conventional results list. It can own the extracted answer on that results page. It can be one of the sources a generative system chooses to cite when it composes a reply. These are related but not identical achievements, and it is entirely possible to be excellent at one and invisible in the other two.
That is precisely why the AEO vs GEO conversation gets muddled. Both acronyms describe optimising for a machine that answers rather than a machine that lists, so they sound like the same thing wearing different labels. They are not, and the AEO vs GEO difference matters enough to spend money differently.
Why the acronyms multiplied
The vocabulary expanded because the surfaces did. In the AEO vs GEO pairing, AEO — answer engine optimisation — names the work of being the extracted answer, while GEO — generative engine optimisation — names the work of being cited inside a synthesised response. You will also meet SXO (search experience optimisation, which folds conversion into the picture) and AIO (AI optimisation, usually an umbrella for the lot). The proliferation is genuinely annoying, but it is not marketing froth: each label points at a measurable outcome that the others do not capture.
AEO vs GEO vs Traditional SEO: What Each One Actually Means
Definitions first, because most disagreements about the AEO vs GEO split are really disagreements about vocabulary. Here is what each service is buying you, stated without hedging, and the table at the end of this section compresses the whole AEO vs GEO comparison into nine rows you can take into a meeting.
Traditional SEO
Traditional search engine optimisation makes a specific page of your website rank for a specific query in a conventional results list, and earns the click. The work is well understood: technical health so pages can be crawled and indexed, keyword and intent research, on-page structure, genuinely useful content, internal linking, page experience, and authority earned through links and mentions. Google’s SEO starter guide still describes this discipline accurately, and Core Web Vitals still describe the performance half of it. Success is measured in positions, impressions, clicks and the revenue that follows them.
Answer engine optimisation
AEO makes your content the answer a search engine extracts and displays directly — the featured snippet, the People Also Ask expansion, the local pack detail, the voice assistant reply, the fact in a knowledge panel. The work is question-led: finding the real questions your buyers type and ask, answering each one in a tight, self-contained, factually clean passage, structuring pages so an extractor can lift that passage cleanly, and using structured data so machines can parse entities and relationships without guessing.
Generative engine optimisation
GEO makes your business one of the sources a generative system draws on and names when it composes an answer. The work reaches beyond your own website: it covers whether AI crawlers can access your content at all, whether your pages contain the kind of specific, citable, verifiable substance a model prefers to quote, and whether your business is described consistently across the third-party sources those systems also read — directories, review sites, industry publications, forums and comparison pages. The academic framing comes from the original GEO research paper; the practical framing is that you are optimising for a corpus, not a page.
The one-line version
Traditional SEO earns a position. AEO earns the answer box. GEO earns the citation. Set out that way, AEO vs GEO stops being a rivalry and becomes a question of which outcome your buyers pass through first. You can buy all three from one team, but you cannot get all three by doing only the first.
| Factor | Traditional SEO | AEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it wins | A ranked position | The extracted answer | A named citation |
| Where it appears | Results list | On the results page itself | Inside a generated reply |
| Unit of optimisation | A page | A passage | An entity and its corpus |
| Primary content shape | Depth on a topic | Direct answer, then depth | Specific, quotable facts |
| Off-site work | Links and authority | Profiles, reviews, listings | Mentions across the corpus |
| Technical lever | Crawl, index, speed | Schema and clean markup | AI crawler access |
| Headline metric | Position and clicks | Feature ownership rate | Citation and presence rate |
| Time to first signal | 3–6 months | 4–10 weeks | 6–12 weeks |
| Click guaranteed? | Yes, that is the point | Often not | Frequently not |
Where AEO vs GEO and SEO Overlap, and Where They Split
The most expensive mistake in this whole area is treating the three as separate programmes with separate budgets, separate content and separate teams. Most of the work is shared. Quantifying that overlap is the fastest way to stop paying twice for it, and it reframes the AEO vs GEO argument from a choice into a weighting.
The shared majority
Consider a quarter of retained work priced at 100 hours. Technical health, information architecture, entity and brand consistency, and the core research that decides what to write about all serve every surface at once. In a typical engagement that is around 60 of the 100 hours. Another 15 go to work that mainly serves ranking but incidentally helps everything else — internal linking, page speed, link earning. That leaves roughly 25 hours of genuinely surface-specific work: perhaps 12 on answer formatting and schema, and 13 on citation substance and off-site mentions.
Read that split carefully, because it is the argument against buying three retainers. Sixty per cent of the effort is common ground, and the entire AEO vs GEO debate is really an argument about the last quarter of the hours. If you are quoted for three separate programmes with three separate discovery phases, you are paying for that 60% three times.
Where they genuinely diverge
The remaining quarter of the work is where AEO vs GEO stops being an academic distinction. Three divergences matter enough to fund separately.
The first is the unit of optimisation. Traditional SEO improves a page. AEO improves a passage inside a page — a forty-word answer that has to stand alone when lifted out of context. GEO improves how your organisation is represented across an entire corpus, most of which you do not own.
The second is the role of off-site work. For ranking, links carry authority. For citation, unlinked mentions matter enormously: a model reading a comparison article that names you has learned something about you whether or not that mention was a hyperlink. That reframes digital PR, review management and directory presence from “nice for brand” to “core to the channel.”
The third is what counts as success. Ranking without clicks used to be failure. In an answer-led world, presence without a click is often the whole point, because the buyer forms an impression, remembers a name, and arrives later through a branded search. Our GEO reporting framework sets out how to make that measurable rather than a convenient excuse.
What an Answer Engine Optimisation Service Actually Delivers
Strip the label away and a credible AEO engagement produces a fairly concrete list of artefacts. If a proposal cannot name these, it is selling traditional SEO with a new cover sheet — which is the commonest way an AEO vs GEO quote turns out to be neither.
Question research, not just keyword research
The unit of work is a question, phrased the way a human phrases it, including the messy long ones. That means mining People Also Ask, on-site search logs, sales call recordings, support tickets and the questions your team answers by email fifteen times a month. A good engagement ends the first month with a prioritised inventory of a few hundred real questions, grouped by buying stage.
Answer-first content structure
Each priority question gets a heading that matches how it is asked, followed immediately by a self-contained answer of roughly forty to sixty words, followed by the depth. That shape is unnatural for writers trained to build to a conclusion, and it is the single highest-leverage change most sites can make. It also, usefully, improves the page for humans skimming on a phone — and it is one of the few places where AEO vs GEO work happens to be the same edit twice, since a cleanly extractable passage is also an easily quotable one.
Structured data and entity clarity
Schema markup tells a machine what it is looking at instead of leaving it to inference. Organization markup establishes who you are; product, service, article and breadcrumb types describe what you publish. Note that Google has retired some rich result types over the years, so the value here is increasingly about machine comprehension rather than a guaranteed visual treatment — build for the former and treat the latter as a bonus.
Local and profile answers
For any business with a physical presence or service area, a substantial share of answers are assembled from your business profile rather than your website. Google’s local ranking guidance is explicit about relevance, distance and prominence, and the Q&A, services and attributes fields are answer inventory in their own right. Our Chester local SEO guide covers that ground for regional businesses in detail.
What a Generative Engine Optimisation Service Actually Delivers
GEO is the newest of the three and therefore the one most likely to be sold vaguely. It is also the half of the AEO vs GEO pairing that carries the most unearned mystique. Here is what a real engagement contains.
Crawler access and technical permission
None of it works if the systems cannot read you. That means an audit of how your robots directives treat AI crawlers and fetchers — Google’s crawler documentation lists its own agents, OpenAI documents its bots, and Perplexity documents its own. The decision of which to allow is a genuine business choice with a trade-off, not a technical default, and it should be made deliberately. The robots.txt specification remains the mechanism; emerging conventions such as llms.txt are worth watching without betting on.
Citable substance
Models cite sources that contain something specific enough to be worth quoting. Original data, named methodology, dated figures, clear definitions, direct comparisons and explicit numbers all raise the odds. Generic thought leadership that could have been written about any company in the sector does not get cited, because there is nothing in it to attribute. This is where a lot of existing content libraries quietly fail.
Corpus and mention footprint
Because generative systems read far beyond your site, a real GEO programme works on how your business appears elsewhere: comparison articles, industry directories, review platforms, community discussions and trade publications. The objective is consistency and coverage — the same description of what you do, in enough of the places a model is likely to read.
Measurement infrastructure
Finally, you need to be able to see it. That means a fixed prompt set, a repeatable monthly test across engines, and metrics defined before you start collecting. Our guide to measuring brand visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity sets out that method step by step. Without it, GEO spend is unfalsifiable, which is a polite way of saying unaccountable.
What Traditional SEO Still Does That Nothing Else Replaces
There is a fashionable claim that traditional optimisation is finished, and that the only live question left is the AEO vs GEO one. It is wrong, and expensively so. Three things remain true.
It is still where transactional demand converts
People who are ready to buy still search in short, commercial phrases and still click. A generative answer is a superb research tool and a poor purchase path; at the bottom of the funnel, the ranked result that goes straight to the right page continues to do the commercial work. Our analysis of B2B SEO for long sales cycles shows how the two stages differ.
It is the substrate the others read
This is the part most often missed. Generative systems and answer extractors are reading the open web, and a page that cannot be crawled, rendered or understood is invisible to all of them equally. Every hour spent on indexation, site structure, internal linking and page performance pays into all three surfaces at once. A technical SEO audit is therefore not the old-fashioned part of the programme; it is the part the new work stands on.
It still produces the largest measurable volume
For almost every UK business today, conventional organic search still delivers more sessions, more enquiries and more revenue than AI-referred traffic — often by an order of magnitude. That balance is shifting, and it will keep shifting, but a budget built on where the market will be in three years rather than where it is now is a budget that misses this year’s pipeline. Any honest AEO vs GEO recommendation has to sit inside that constraint rather than pretend it away.
The AEO vs GEO Decision: Five Questions That Settle It
Rather than argue about the AEO vs GEO split in the abstract, answer these five questions about your own business. They resolve most cases in under an hour.
1. Does your buyer research before they buy, or just buy?
The longer and more considered the purchase, the more research happens in AI tools, and the more GEO matters. A £40,000 managed service is investigated for weeks; a replacement part is bought in ninety seconds. Considered purchases justify citation work. Impulse and commodity purchases mostly do not.
2. Are your customers asking questions or naming products?
If your demand arrives as questions — “how do I”, “what is the best way to”, “should we” — you have an answer-optimisation opportunity, and AEO is likely your cheapest early win. If demand arrives as product names and part numbers, conventional ranking and merchandising matter far more.
3. Do you already rank at all?
This is the reality check, and it dissolves the AEO vs GEO dilemma for a surprising number of businesses. If your site is not indexed properly, has thin content and no authority, then GEO is not the answer — you are trying to be cited by systems that have found nothing worth citing. Fix the foundation first. Our SEO results timeline sets realistic expectations for that phase.
4. Is your category one where AI answers confidently?
Regulated, high-stakes and locally-specific categories tend to get more cautious, more heavily-cited answers — which means more citation opportunities for credible sources. Broad, commoditised categories tend to get generic answers with fewer named sources, so the GEO upside is thinner.
5. Can you actually produce citable substance?
GEO runs on specifics: your data, your pricing logic, your methodology, your case outcomes. If your organisation cannot or will not publish anything concrete, a GEO retainer will underperform no matter who runs it, and the money is better spent elsewhere.
| If this is true of you | Lead with | Add second | Defer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site is technically weak or unranked | Traditional SEO | AEO | GEO |
| Strong rankings, falling click-through | AEO | GEO | More ranking work |
| Long, researched, high-value sale | GEO | AEO | Volume content |
| Local service business | AEO and local | Traditional SEO | GEO |
| E-commerce, branded product demand | Traditional SEO | AEO | GEO |
| Category leader defending share | GEO | Traditional SEO | Nothing |
| New brand, no mentions anywhere | Traditional SEO | Digital PR | GEO reporting |
Matching AEO vs GEO Spend to How Your Buyers Search
The five questions give you a lead service. Turning that into a budget split needs one more step: mapping spend to where your demand actually starts. That mapping is what converts an AEO vs GEO opinion into a number somebody can approve.
Three worked splits
Take a business spending £3,000 a month on search. Three realistic allocations, stated as percentages of that £3,000:
A local service business — a plumber, dental practice, regional IT provider — puts around 60% into traditional and local ranking work, 30% into answer optimisation, and 10% into generative visibility. Most of its demand is proximity-driven and converts on a map result or a phone call.
A considered B2B service — a consultancy, software vendor, managed provider — puts around 40% into traditional, 25% into answer work and 35% into generative visibility, because a large share of its buyers genuinely do begin with an open-ended question in an AI tool.
An established e-commerce brand puts around 65% into traditional, 25% into answer optimisation and 10% into generative work, because product-level demand is still overwhelmingly a conventional search behaviour.
Reading the splits honestly
Notice that no scenario puts a majority into generative work, and none puts zero there either. That is the practical shape of the AEO vs GEO question for most UK businesses in 2026: a meaningful minority allocation, sized to how much of your buying journey happens in a conversation rather than a results page, and reviewed every quarter as that proportion moves.
Sector Patterns in the AEO vs GEO Choice
Patterns repeat by sector often enough to be useful as a starting hypothesis for the AEO vs GEO weighting — though never as a substitute for looking at your own data.
Professional and technical services
High-consideration, question-heavy, and full of buyers who research privately before making contact. This is the strongest case for a serious generative allocation, and the sector where the AEO vs GEO balance tips furthest from tradition. Expertise that is specific and documented gets cited; generic capability statements do not.
Healthcare, legal and financial services
Regulated categories where accuracy matters and systems tend to cite recognised sources rather than improvise. Answer optimisation is very strong here because the questions are predictable and the answers are stable. Generative visibility is valuable but demands genuine authority signals, not just content volume.
Retail and e-commerce
Product demand is still mostly conventional and transactional. Answer work pays off for the informational layer — sizing, compatibility, care, comparison — while ranking and merchandising continue to do the commercial lifting.
Manufacturing and industrial
Long cycles, technical specifications and small buying committees. Specification data, compatibility tables and clear technical documentation are exactly the citable substance generative systems favour, so a modest GEO investment often outperforms expectations here — one of the few sectors where the AEO vs GEO balance tips on the strength of documentation you already own.
Local trades and consumer services
Proximity dominates. Profile completeness, reviews and answer coverage for local questions beat everything else, and a large generative budget is usually premature.
What AEO vs GEO and SEO Cost in the UK
Prices vary enormously by scope, market and agency, so treat these as the ranges to sanity-check an AEO vs GEO quote against rather than as a tariff. Our detailed SEO cost guide and SEO budget guide go further on how those numbers are built.
| Service | Typical UK monthly range | Usually bought as | Main cost driver |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional SEO (SME) | £800–£3,000 | Ongoing retainer | Content and technical hours |
| Traditional SEO (mid-market) | £3,000–£8,000 | Ongoing retainer | Scale of site and competition |
| AEO add-on | £500–£1,500 | Retainer add-on or project | Question volume and rewrites |
| GEO monitoring and content | £750–£2,500 | Retainer add-on | Prompt set size and engines |
| Combined programme | £2,000–£6,000 | Single retainer | Shared foundation, split focus |
| One-off technical audit | £1,500–£6,000 | Project | Site size and complexity |
Why a combined retainer beats three quotes
Look at the last two rows against the first four. Three separate services at mid-range would total roughly £2,000 plus £1,000 plus £1,600, or £4,600 a month. A combined programme covering the same ground sits in the £2,000–£6,000 band precisely because the shared 60% is only paid for once. If you are being quoted for three discrete engagements, the duplication is the thing to challenge. Our note on SEO pricing models covers how to structure that commercially.
Sequencing: The Order to Fund AEO vs GEO and SEO
Order matters more than allocation in the first year, because each stage makes the next one cheaper. Get the sequence right and the AEO vs GEO percentages almost settle themselves.
Months 1–3: foundation
Technical health, indexation, site structure, entity and brand consistency, analytics and Search Console properly configured, and a content inventory. Nothing exotic. Every later surface depends on this being right, and skipping it makes everything after it more expensive.
Months 2–5: answer layer
Question inventory, answer-first rewrites of the highest-value existing pages, schema, and profile completeness. This overlaps deliberately with the foundation phase because much of it is editing what you already have rather than commissioning new work. It is also the fastest of the three to show a signal.
Months 4–9: citable substance and generative visibility
Original data, methodology pages, comparison content, and the off-site mention work. Start measurement at the beginning of this phase, not the end, so you have a baseline. This is where the AEO vs GEO investment stops being theoretical.
Months 6–12: compounding and review
Authority building, continued publication, and a quarterly review of the split. By month twelve you should have enough of your own data to replace every assumption in this article with a measured figure from your own business.
Measuring AEO vs GEO and SEO Without Fooling Yourself
Each surface needs its own metrics, and mixing them is how reporting becomes theatre. An AEO vs GEO programme that reports both through a single traffic chart has already lost the argument it is trying to win.
Traditional SEO metrics
Impressions, average position, clicks, click-through rate, indexed pages, and the conversions attributable to organic sessions. All of it available in Search Console and analytics, all of it well understood, all of it still relevant.
AEO metrics
The share of your target questions where you own the extracted answer, the number of People Also Ask entries you appear in, profile interaction counts, and — importantly — impressions on queries where clicks fall. A rising impression count with a flat click count is often success, not failure, though it takes a mature stakeholder to hear that.
GEO metrics
Presence rate, citation rate and share of voice across a fixed prompt set, measured monthly with the same method each time. Our GEO reporting framework defines each formula. The cardinal rule is that the prompt set is frozen: changing the questions between months makes the trend meaningless.
| Surface | Leading indicator | Lagging indicator | Reporting cadence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional SEO | Impressions, position | Organic revenue | Monthly |
| AEO | Feature ownership rate | Branded search volume | Monthly |
| GEO | Presence and citation rate | Assisted pipeline | Monthly, fixed prompts |
| Shared foundation | Crawl and index health | All of the above | Continuous |
The Shared Foundation Underneath All Three
If you take one operational point from this guide, take this one: the foundation is not a phase you complete and leave behind. It is the permanent substrate every surface reads from, letting it decay degrades all three at once, and it is the part of the AEO vs GEO budget nobody argues about because nobody notices it.
Crawlability and rendering
A page that cannot be fetched and understood cannot rank, cannot be extracted and cannot be cited. This is the cheapest failure to prevent and the most common one to find.
Content quality that survives scrutiny
Google’s guidance on creating helpful content describes what all three surfaces reward: content written for people, demonstrating real experience, and covering a topic completely. Its spam policies describe what all three punish. Mass-produced, low-substance pages are a bad investment in every direction now.
Consistent entity description
Your business should be described the same way on your site, your profiles, your directory listings and your press coverage. Inconsistency confuses ranking systems, weakens answer extraction and dilutes citation, which is a remarkable amount of damage for something that is essentially a copy-and-paste discipline. A WordPress SEO maintenance routine keeps the on-site half of that honest.
AEO vs GEO Mistakes That Waste a Quarter
Five failure patterns account for most wasted budget in this area, and each one is a specific way of getting the AEO vs GEO decision wrong rather than a general lack of effort.
Buying GEO before you can be found at all
The most expensive one. Citation work on a site with no substance, no authority and no technical health produces nothing, because there is nothing to cite. Foundation first, always.
Treating them as three separate programmes
Three retainers, three discovery phases, three content plans, one company. You pay for the shared 60% three times and get worse coordination than a single team would deliver. An AEO vs GEO split is a weighting inside one programme, not a procurement exercise.
Changing the prompt set every month
The commonest GEO measurement error. If the questions change, the trend is noise. Freeze the set, log every change deliberately, and compare like with like.
Abandoning traditional SEO too early
Cutting the channel that currently produces most of your pipeline in order to fund the channel that might produce it in three years is a decision that looks bold in a strategy deck and painful in a revenue review.
Publishing volume instead of substance
More pages does not mean more citations. Specific, verifiable, quotable material does. Ten genuinely original pages outperform a hundred generic ones on every surface discussed here.
A 90-Day Plan to Get Your AEO vs GEO Mix Right
A practical starting sequence for a business that has not yet made these decisions, ending with an AEO vs GEO split you can actually defend.
Days 1–15: baseline everything
Run a technical audit, pull twelve months of Search Console data, and take a first manual reading of how you currently appear across two or three generative tools. Record it — this is your only chance to capture a genuine before.
Days 16–30: decide the split
Answer the five questions above with your own data, choose a lead service, and write the percentage split down where the whole team can see it. A documented AEO vs GEO allocation ends the recurring argument.
Days 31–60: fix the foundation and rewrite the top twenty
Technical remediation in parallel with answer-first rewrites of your twenty highest-value existing pages. Add schema. Complete every business profile. This is unglamorous and it is where the return is.
Days 61–90: stand up measurement and publish substance
Freeze a prompt set, run the first proper monthly measurement, and publish two or three genuinely original, citable pieces. Review the AEO vs GEO split at day ninety against what you have actually learned, and adjust. Ninety days is long enough to replace an opinion with a measurement, and short enough that a wrong split costs you a quarter rather than a year.
Frequently Asked Questions About AEO vs GEO
Is AEO vs GEO a real distinction or just agency vocabulary?
AEO vs GEO is a real distinction, though the labels are newer than the work. AEO targets an extracted answer on a results page; GEO targets a citation inside a synthesised response. They share a foundation but have different content requirements, different off-site work and different metrics, which is exactly the test for whether two disciplines are genuinely distinct.
Can one agency do all three well?
Yes, and in most cases one agency should, because roughly 60% of the effort is common to all three. What matters is that the proposal names surface-specific deliverables and metrics for each side of the AEO vs GEO split, rather than describing traditional optimisation in new language.
Will generative search kill traditional SEO?
No, but it will keep shrinking the share of journeys that end in a click from an informational query. Transactional and branded search remains click-driven, and every generative system still reads the open web — so the work that makes you rankable is the same work that makes you citable.
How long before GEO shows results?
Expect a first measurable movement in presence or citation rate within six to twelve weeks if you already have credible content, and considerably longer if the substance has to be created first. Anyone promising faster is measuring something loosely.
Do we need AEO if we already do good SEO?
Usually yes, and it is often the cheapest of the three to add, because most of the work is restructuring existing pages rather than creating new ones. The answer-first format is a formatting discipline more than a content investment.
What should a small business with a limited budget do first?
Foundation and answer work, in that order, with generative visibility deferred until there is something worth citing. For most small businesses the honest AEO vs GEO answer in year one is “AEO now, GEO next year” — and that is a perfectly respectable plan.
How do we choose between agencies quoting different mixes?
Ask each to justify their split with reference to your data rather than to industry trends. Our list of questions to ask before hiring an SEO agency covers the rest of the selection process.
If you want help sizing this for your own business, our SEO services, AEO services and GEO services pages set out how we structure a combined programme, and our marketing services overview covers where the wider channels fit.
References
Google Search Central: AI Features and Your Website
Google Search Central: SEO Starter Guide
Google Search Central: Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content
Google Search Central: Spam Policies for Google Web Search
Google Search Central: Introduction to Structured Data Markup
Google: Common Crawlers and Fetchers
Google Search Central: Get Started with Search Console
OpenAI: Bots and Crawler Documentation
Perplexity: Developer Platform Overview
GEO: Generative Engine Optimization
