SEO earns a link in a list. AEO earns a citation inside a written answer. GEO shapes the wording of that answer. They share about seventy percent of their tactics, and no vendor should charge you three times for it. If you are starting from zero, fix SEO fundamentals, then AEO, then GEO.
One line each
SEO — Search Engine Optimization. Get your page to appear high in a list of results.
AEO — Answer Engine Optimization. Get named and cited inside a written answer.
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization. Control what that answer says about you.
Everything else is detail. Anyone who tells you these are three separate disciplines requiring three separate retainers is describing their pricing model, not the work.
Side by side
Where they overlap — most of it
The unglamorous fundamentals serve all three at once, which is why they get done first.
If a bot cannot fetch your page, it cannot rank, retrieve or learn from it. One fix, three benefits.
One topic per page helps a ranking algorithm and an extraction model identically.
Ranks well, extracts well, gets remembered well.
Removes ambiguity for every consumer of your page, human or otherwise.
Links for SEO, corroboration for AEO, consensus for GEO — usually the same outreach.
Where they genuinely differ
Three real divergences are worth planning around.
The click may never come. A good AEO outcome can be a customer who arrives already convinced, or never arrives at all because the answer satisfied them. Traffic-only reporting will call that a failure.
Question sets replace keyword lists. Keywords are short and cheap to track. Questions are long, conversational and specific, and you have to choose which fifty matter.
Off-site work carries more weight. For GEO especially, what other people write about you outranks anything on your own domain.
SEO is about being findable. AEO is about being quotable. GEO is about being described correctly.
How to split the budget
A reasonable starting split for a business with a functioning site, and the order to build it in:
If the site is broken, none of the rest matters. If the site is healthy and you are still invisible in answers, the money belongs in stages two and three.
Common questions
Do I need to hire three agencies?
No. The overlap is large enough that one team with the right measurement should cover all three. What you need is reporting that separates the outcomes.
Is SEO dead?
No. Retrieval runs on search infrastructure, so search health is a prerequisite for answer visibility. What has changed is that ranking first no longer guarantees anyone sees you.
Which acronym should I ask a vendor about?
Ask instead: which questions do you track, how often, and can I see last month against this month. If they cannot answer that, the acronym is decoration.
Where should I start?
Read What is AEO for the fix list, then run the free check to see which stage you are actually in.
The free check asks six engines about your business and shows you the answers.