SEO, AEO, GEO: A Technical Breakdown for Developers Building for Search and AI Answers

Short summary

A brand strategist breaks down three layers of search optimization for developers: traditional SEO (crawlable HTML, schema.org, sitemaps), AEO (formatting content for direct extraction into snippets and chat answers), and GEO (targeting LLM-based answer engines like AI Overviews and Perplexity via llms.txt and entity consistency). The author argues teams should fix foundational schema markup before chasing GEO-specific hacks, since clean semantic HTML and structured data serve all three systems simultaneously.

• •SEO, AEO, and GEO share more overlap than most teams assume—clean HTML and structured data serve all three
• •AEO requires self-contained answers and genuine FAQPage JSON-LD schema
• •GEO targets LLM answer engines via llms.txt files and consistent entity facts across the web

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.