AEO vs GEO vs SEO: What's the Difference, and Which Does Your Business Need?

The shift nobody announced to you

For about twenty years, being found online meant one thing: rank high on Google, get clicks. Everyone understood the deal. You earned a position in a list of blue links, and the position determined the traffic.

That deal has quietly changed, and most business owners found out by accident — by watching their traffic fall while their rankings stayed exactly where they were.

Here is the number that explains it. Ahrefs analysed 300,000 keywords using Google Search Console data, comparing click-through rates before and after AI Overviews existed. When an AI Overview appears, the top-ranking page loses around 58% of its clicks. Out of every 100 clicks that once went to the first result, roughly 58 now stay with Google. That figure was 34.5% eight months earlier. It is moving in one direction.

Pew Research approached it differently, by watching what people actually do in their browsers. They found that when an AI Overview is present, about 8% of users click a traditional search result — versus 15% when it isn't. Roughly half the clicks, gone. A field study published in 2026 found that removing AI Overviews increased outbound clicks from 0.38 to 0.61 per search, with zero-click searches rising from 54% to 72% on affected queries.

The studies disagree on the exact size. They range from about 34% to over 60% depending on method, industry and query type. They do not disagree on the direction. Every credible study found the same thing: fewer clicks are reaching websites, including websites that still rank first.

This is not a reason to panic, and it is not a reason to abandon what already works. It is a reason to understand that "being found" now happens in three different places, and that most businesses are only set up for one of them.

SEO: getting ranked

Search Engine Optimisation is the work of getting your website to appear high in a list of results, so a person can click through to you.

It is the oldest of the three and still the foundation of everything. It covers the technical health of your site — how fast it loads, whether search engines can crawl and index it, whether the structure makes sense. It covers the words on your pages and whether they match how real people actually search. It covers your credibility: who links to you, whether your business details are consistent, whether Google can tell you are a real operation in a real place.

SEO answers a specific question: when someone types this, where do we appear in the list?

That question still matters enormously. Google still holds over 90% of search. Most people still click links. A business with no SEO foundation is invisible in the channel that still drives the majority of discovery — and, as we'll get to, invisible to the AI systems too.

But SEO alone now answers a question that is slowly becoming narrower than the one your customers are asking.

AEO: getting quoted

Answer Engine Optimisation is the work of getting your business presented as the answer itself — not as a link to an answer.

When someone asks Google a question and gets an AI Overview at the top of the page, that summary is the answer. When someone asks their phone "who does emergency plumbing near me and are they open now," the assistant reads back a response. When a featured snippet answers a question in a box, that box often ends the search.

In all of these, there may be no list to rank in. There is one answer, assembled from sources the system trusts. AEO is the work of being one of those sources.

That means your content has to be structured so a machine can lift a clean, correct answer out of it. It means your business facts — what you do, where, for whom, at what price, when you're open — have to be stated unambiguously and marked up so they're understood rather than guessed at. It means answering the actual questions people ask, in the actual words they ask them.

GEO: getting recommended

Generative Engine Optimisation is the work of getting your business named when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation.

This is a genuinely new behaviour and it deserves a moment's thought. People no longer only search for "dentist Antwerp." They open ChatGPT and type something like: "I've just moved to Antwerp, I'm nervous about dentists, I need someone gentle who speaks English and can take me in the evening. Who should I call?"

They get back a short list. Three names, maybe five. Not ten blue links — a shortlist, with reasoning attached.

That shortlist is the new shop window, and it is far smaller than page one ever was. Position 8 on Google was worth something. Position 8 on a list of three does not exist.

ChatGPT reached around 900 million weekly active users by early 2026 and processes billions of prompts a day. But the market is no longer one engine: recent tracking puts ChatGPT at roughly 63% of measurable AI referrals, with Claude, Gemini and Perplexity holding most of the rest — four engines now splitting nearly 99% of it. Each pulls from different sources and cites differently. One analysis of 680 million citations found only about 11% of domains were cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity. They are looking at largely different webs.

GEO is the work of being a business these systems can find, understand, trust and name. It overlaps heavily with AEO — which is exactly why we don't sell them separately.

The three, side by side

Read the last row twice, because it is the single most misunderstood thing about all of this.

What this is actually worth in euros

Percentages are easy to nod along to and hard to feel. So let's put real numbers on it — and let's be honest about what they are: a worked example, not a prediction for your business. Change the inputs to match your own and the shape of the answer holds.

Take a service business. Nothing exotic — a clinic, a trades company, a consultancy:

• 1,000 visits a month from search
• 3% of visitors make an enquiry — that's 30 enquiries
• 1 in 3 enquiries becomes a client — 10 new clients
• €800 average value per client

That's €8,000 a month from search. €96,000 a year. For a lot of small businesses, that's not a marketing channel — that's the business.

Now apply the AI Overview effect. Not the worst-case 58% headline — let's be conservative and say AI Overviews appear on only half your queries, and on those you lose half your clicks. That's a 25% traffic loss overall.

Your rankings didn't move. Your website didn't get worse. Your competitors didn't outspend you. You simply stopped being the thing the searcher saw, and €24,000 a year walked quietly out the door without a single explanatory email.

Now the other side of the ledger — the part that makes this an opportunity rather than just a threat.

AI referral traffic is currently small: roughly 1% of all website traffic, growing about a percentage point month over month. It would be easy to dismiss. Here's why that would be a mistake.

The visitors it sends are not normal visitors. They arrive pre-qualified — the AI has already understood their problem, synthesised the options, and specifically recommended you. They're not browsing. They're following up on a recommendation.

The measured results are striking, and they come from independent sources with no shared interest:

• Semrush found AI search traffic converting at 4.4x the rate of traditional organic traffic.
• Ahrefs found that 0.5% of their visitors — the ones from AI search — drove 12.1% of total signups. A 23x multiplier.
• Adobe, across more than a trillion visits to US retail sites, found AI-referred visitors converting 42% better than non-AI traffic in March 2026, generating 37% more revenue per visit. Twelve months earlier the same channel converted 38% worse. That's an ~80-point swing in a year.
• Microsoft Clarity, studying over 1,200 publisher sites, found AI-referred visitors converting to signups at 1.66% versus 0.15% from organic — roughly 11x on that event.
• SE Ranking found AI-referred visitors spending 68% more time on site than organic visitors.

The honest range across studies is wide — from about 1.3x in low-consideration ecommerce up to 23x in B2B services. But every serious dataset lands on the same side of the line: fewer visitors, dramatically better ones.

Apply that to our example business. Suppose the AI layer brings back just 50 visits a month — a rounding error next to 1,000. But they convert at even 4x the normal rate, so 12% rather than 3%:

Fifty visits doing the work of 500. That is the entire argument for this in one line: you are not buying traffic, you are buying intent.

And the two effects stack. Recovering some of what AI Overviews take, plus capturing a channel that converts several times harder, against a service cost of €199/month. You don't need the optimistic end of any of these studies for that to be the easiest arithmetic on your P&L.

The invisible competitor problem

Here's what makes this genuinely different from every previous shift in search, and why waiting is expensive in a way that isn't obvious.

When you lost rankings to a competitor, you could see it. You searched your own keyword, you saw them above you, you knew. Painful, but visible. You could respond.

You cannot see this. When ChatGPT recommends three plumbers in Antwerp and you're not one of them, nothing happens in your analytics. No line goes down. There's no impression, no click, no bounce. The customer never existed as far as your dashboard is concerned. They asked, they got three names, they called one, and you never knew there was a conversation.

Only about 14% of marketers currently track AI search as a separate channel. Most AI visits get misfiled as "direct" or "referral" in Google Analytics — and native AI apps strip the referrer entirely, so much of it is genuinely untrackable by default. The channel is largely invisible even to the people already winning in it.

So which do you actually need?

An honest answer, including the cases where the answer is "not this, not yet."

If you don't have a proper website yet

Then this article is not your first problem, and we'd rather tell you that than sell you something. No amount of AI optimisation rescues a site that can't be crawled, doesn't load on a phone, or doesn't say clearly what you do. Build the foundation first. Our website packages start at €799 and include the technical SEO groundwork on every build. Come back to this once you have something worth optimising.

If you have a website but no ongoing search work

Start with SEO — €119/month. This is the foundation, and it's not optional groundwork you can skip to get to the exciting part. Everything else is built on it. If your site isn't findable, structured and credible, the AI systems have nothing to quote you from. Get this right first.

If your customers ask questions before they buy

This is most service businesses — clinics, consultants, trades, agencies, professional services, organisations. Your customers research. They compare. They ask for recommendations. This is exactly where the AI layer pays. These are precisely the "who should I use for X" queries that AI assistants are now answering, and precisely the considered purchases where a recommendation carries weight.

SEO + AI Search — €199/month. Both layers, one strategy, one report, saving €69 against buying them separately. This is what we recommend for most businesses that take enquiries seriously, because this is where the two compound: the same structured content that ranks is the content that gets quoted, so running them together does double duty.

If you're already doing SEO and want the AI layer

AI Search Optimisation — €149/month. Covering AEO and GEO as one product, because pretending they're two things and billing you twice would be dishonest. It builds on your SEO foundation rather than replacing it.

What nobody can promise you — including us

This section costs us sales. We're including it anyway, because you should know how to spot the people it protects you from.

Nobody can guarantee you rankings. Not us, not anyone. No agency controls Google's ranking systems. Anyone who promises you position one is either misunderstanding their own work or lying to you, and either should worry you.

Nobody can guarantee you AI citation. This is even more true. The systems change constantly — citation patterns shift month to month, engines change what they draw from, and one platform's sources look almost nothing like another's. Ahrefs found that 67% of the pages ChatGPT most often cites are places you cannot pitch your way into at all: Wikipedia, government sites, universities, major news. There is no back door, and anyone selling you one is selling you nothing.

What can actually be done is make your business genuinely easy to find, understand, verify and quote. Make the facts about you unambiguous. Make your content answer the real questions. Make your site technically sound. Then measure honestly and adjust. That's the work. It's not magic and it's not a lever — it's the accumulation of a lot of correct decisions that make citation likely rather than accidental.

Treat any guarantee in this field as a red flag. The people making them are competing on promises because they can't compete on work.

What it costs, plainly

No packages hidden behind a "request a consultation" form. Here's the pricing:

Put the combined package next to the worked example above. €199/month is €2,388 a year. Against a channel that, in our illustrative business, was quietly losing €24,000 a year to AI Overviews while gaining nothing from the AI channel it was invisible in.

We're not going to insult you by pretending those numbers are your numbers. Run yours. Take your monthly search visits, your enquiry rate, your close rate, your average client value. Cut the traffic by a quarter. Look at what falls out. That's the number that matters, and it's the only one you should make this decision on.

The bottom line

SEO gets you ranked. AEO gets you quoted. GEO gets you recommended.

SEO is the foundation and it isn't going anywhere — but on its own, it now competes for a shrinking share of the clicks it used to win outright. The AI layer builds on it, recovering visibility where the clicks went and opening a channel that sends fewer visitors who are worth far more.

You don't have to decide this today. But understand what the delay costs: not a dramatic collapse, but a slow quiet leak, in a channel where you cannot see the customers you're not getting. The businesses that show up in the shortlist in two years are the ones doing this work now, and they will be very hard to dislodge.

If you want to talk it through without a pitch, tell us what you're working with. If we think you need something else first, we'll say so.

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