Short answer: all three chase visibility, but in different places: SEO wins the click in search results, AEO wins the direct answer inside a search engine, and GEO wins the mention inside a conversation with generative AI.
Quick comparison
SEO → goal: the click. Where: traditional search results.
AEO → goal: being the direct answer. Where: AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Copilot.
GEO → goal: being cited/mentioned. Where: conversations with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini.
Why they don't compete with each other
The same well-structured content (direct answer, sourced data, verifiable authority) usually works for all three at once — they're not strategies to choose between separately, but layers built on top of each other, with SEO as the foundation.
The GEO paper (KDD 2024) explicitly builds on information retrieval principles used in SEO, applying them to the specific context of generative engines.Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024