SEO, AEO, GEO: what the alphabet soup means for estate agents

A letting agent asked us recently whether she needed GEO as well as SEO, because someone had quoted her for both. It is a fair question, and the honest answer needs the definitions first, because the sellers of these services are rarely in a hurry to provide them.

SEO: getting ranked in the list

Search engine optimisation is the oldest of the three and the one everyone half knows. SEO is the work of getting your website ranked in the list of results when someone searches, classically on Google. Structure, speed, content, links from other sites, and a Google Business Profile that says what you are. Twenty years of practice, and still the foundation: nothing that follows replaces it, because every newer discipline stands on the same evidence.

AEO: getting quoted as the answer

Answer engine optimisation came next, born when search engines started answering questions directly instead of just listing links: featured snippets, the boxes at the top of the page, voice assistants reading one result aloud. AEO is the work of getting your content chosen as the answer itself, quoted directly rather than merely listed. In practice it means content shaped around real questions, marked up so machines can read it as questions and answers, and written plainly enough to be lifted whole. If you have ever seen your own words in the box at the top of Google, that was AEO working.

GEO: getting named by the AI engines

Generative engine optimisation is the newest and the one the trade press has settled on for the AI era. GEO is the work of getting your business named and recommended in the answers that generative AI tools write: ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Perplexity, Copilot and the rest. These engines do not hand back a list; they write a paragraph with three or four names in it, and either yours is one of them or it is not. We have written up what the engines actually read before choosing those names, from answers we captured and measured.

Here is the part the acronyms hide

Underneath, these are not three different purchases. They stand on the same evidence: a website machines can actually read, content that answers the questions real people ask, a Google Business Profile that says precisely what you are, and a reputation corroborated beyond your own site. Do those jobs properly and you improve all three at once, because a rank, a quote and a recommendation are three different rewards for the same homework. Which is why the warning matters: some providers now sell the same work three times under three acronyms, an SEO package, an AEO addon, a GEO retainer, each invoiced as if it were a separate discipline. If the deliverables underneath look identical, you are being sold the alphabet, not the work.

The question that cuts through all of it

Whatever the acronym on the proposal, ask one thing: how will you prove it worked? Rankings can be screenshotted, and always are. But for the AI engines, proof means captured answers: what ChatGPT, Google's AI, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude actually say when someone asks about your patch, word for word, dated, from clean sessions, remeasured monthly so movement is visible. Optimisation, whichever letters it wears, is the work. Visibility is the proof. We named our service AI Visibility rather than GEO for exactly that reason: agents do not need another acronym, they need to know whether the machines name them, and the only honest way to know is to ask the machines and write down what they say.