Traditional SEO vs AEO vs GEO vs AI search — the comparison
Traditional SEO ranks pages in a list of links, judged mainly by relevance, authority and technical health. AEO structures individual passages to directly answer a question, aimed at snippets, voice and AI summaries. GEO focuses on being sourced or paraphrased inside a generative answer, which depends more on clear entity data and citation-worthy content than on classic keyword ranking. AI Search Optimization sits above all three, covering visibility across every AI-mediated surface — Overviews, chat assistants and voice — as one measurement objective.