Guide
The short answer
SEO competes for a position in a list of links. AEO (answer engine optimisation) competes for the extracted answer box at the top of that list. GEO (generative engine optimisation) competes to be named inside an AI-generated answer where there is often only one recommendation. They share a foundation, so a firm does not choose between them, but they are won by different work and measured in different ways, which is why the order you invest in matters.
Three acronyms, sold interchangeably by agencies offering all three. They are not the same thing, and the distinction is practical rather than academic: a firm can hold the top position in Google and never be mentioned when a client asks ChatGPT the same question.
Start with what is on the screen, because that is what separates them.
SEO competes for a place in a ranked list. Ten organic results, and the reader chooses one. Being fourth still earns clicks. The work is relevance, authority and technical health, and success is a position you can track daily.
AEO competes for the extracted answer that sits above that list: the featured snippet, the People Also Ask box, the panel that answers the question without the reader clicking anything. This is the oldest of the three. Google has served answer boxes since 2014, and optimising for them is largely a formatting discipline: answer the question directly, near the top, in the format the question implies.
GEO competes to be named inside a generated answer. Someone asks an assistant which solicitor to instruct and receives a recommendation naming two or three firms, sometimes one. There is no second page, no scrolling, and no advertising slot to buy your way in. You are named or you are not.
That last difference is the one that changes the economics. In a ranked list, fourth is a worse version of first. In a generated answer, fourth usually means absent. For a sector where a client instructs a single firm, the gap between named and unnamed is far wider than the gap between position one and position four.
The table below is the short version. The rest of this page is why the third column is not simply an extension of the first.
This matters, because the agencies selling GEO as an entirely separate product are overstating the novelty, and firms that believe them end up paying twice for the same foundation.
Crawl access and readability. All three depend on a machine being able to fetch and read your pages. The crawlers differ and that is covered elsewhere in this guide series, but the principle is common to all three.
Authority and corroboration. A site nobody credible links to or mentions struggles in all three. Google weights it, and so does a model deciding which of several firms to name.
Accurate, specific content. Vague reassurance ranks badly, gets extracted rarely, and gives a model nothing quotable. Specificity serves all three.
Consistent, correct information about the firm. Name, address, regulator number, practice areas. Wrong or contradictory details damage local ranking, snippet eligibility and AI citation alike.
So roughly seventy per cent of the work is one job with three benefits. A firm that has never done proper SEO does not need a separate GEO programme. It needs SEO, done in a way that is aware of the other two.
Three things do not carry over, and the first one is the reason this page exists.
Ranking does not produce citation. Research by Search Engine Land and Fractl across 8,090 keywords in 25 verticals found that Google's AI answers and standalone chatbots cited the same source only 7.2% of the time. They disagree in more than nine cases out of ten, because they are drawing on different parts of the web and weighing different signals. We regularly test UK firms holding the top Google position for their town who are never named when the same question is put to an assistant.
Entity consistency matters across the whole web, not just your own site. SEO tolerates a certain amount of untidiness elsewhere. A model building an internal picture of your firm from many sources does not: an old address on one directory, a former trading name on another, a phone number changed two years ago, and the firm reads as unverifiable. Unverifiable organisations do not get recommended. For a law firm the surface includes the SRA register, Companies House, the Law Society's Find a Solicitor, the legal directories and the review platforms, and they all have to agree.
Formatting is for extraction, not for dwell time. Classic SEO advice sometimes rewards withholding the answer to keep a reader on the page. A model quoting a passage needs that passage to stand alone: it must answer the question completely without depending on the three paragraphs above it. A page that opens with positioning and reaches the point in paragraph four gets skipped in favour of a competitor who led with the answer.
SEO has a position. You can track it daily, and two people running the same search from the same place see broadly the same result.
AEO has ownership. Either your page is in the answer box for a query or it is not, and that is checkable.
GEO has neither. The answer differs between users, sessions and phrasings, so there is nothing to rank. What can be measured is how often your firm is named across a fixed set of prompts tested repeatedly over months. A single screenshot of ChatGPT naming a firm is a coincidence, not a measurement, and any agency showing you one as evidence is showing you noise.
The practical consequence for a managing partner: do not accept GEO reporting in the shape of SEO reporting. If a report gives you a position number for an AI answer, the number is invented.
Most GEO writing is aimed at e-commerce and SaaS. Three things change for a regulated firm.
Regulation constrains the copy, and helps more than it hinders. SRA rules require that anything published is accurate and not misleading, which rules out the aggressive tactics some agencies use. It is also protective, because the attribution and precision compliance forces, named solicitors with real credentials, qualified claims, published fees where the Transparency Rules require them, is close to what the models reward anyway. Verify the current scope of those rules with your compliance lead.
Local intent dominates. Most legal queries carry an implicit or explicit location, and Google's AI answers lean heavily on its own local signals. So Google Business Profile quality and review recency feed AI visibility directly rather than only feeding the map pack. This surprises firms who assumed AI work was purely a content exercise.
The single-recommendation problem is sharper. Someone comparing suppliers will read five options. Someone asking an assistant which solicitor to instruct often gets one name. Being second in an AI answer is worth considerably less than being second in Google, and in a market where the client instructs one firm that difference is the entire argument for taking GEO seriously now rather than in two years.
This depends on where you are starting, not on which is newest.
If your site has never had proper SEO work, start with SEO. Technical health, indexation, a real page per service and per town you serve, and consistent details across the directories. That work carries into the other two, and skipping to GEO on a broken site means building on nothing. A firm in this position that buys a GEO retainer is being sold the wrong thing.
If you rank reasonably well but have never checked whether AI names you, the answer is to check before you buy anything. It cannot be inferred from your rankings, and the 7.2% overlap figure is why. If you are already cited, protect it. If you are absent while a competitor is named, that is a specific, fixable problem and it is worth knowing which.
If you rank well and are cited, the work is AEO formatting and entity consistency, because those are the cheapest remaining gains and they compound into both channels.
If you are a national or specialist practice competing on expertise rather than proximity, weight GEO higher and sooner. Complex, high-value work is exactly the kind of question people put to an assistant in full sentences, and the answers currently cite general advice sites more often than they cite firms.
What we would not advise for any firm is buying GEO as a separate retainer from SEO. The foundation is shared, the reporting overlaps, and separating them produces two half-strategies at one and a half times the cost.
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it competes for | A position in a ranked list of links | The extracted answer box above the list | Being named inside a generated answer |
| How many winners | Ten results, all get some clicks | Usually one | Two or three firms, sometimes one |
| What wins it | Relevance, authority, technical health | A direct, self-contained answer in the format asked for | Entity clarity, corroboration, crawler access, quotable structure |
| How it is measured | Rank position, clicks, impressions | Snippet and People Also Ask ownership | Citation rate across a fixed prompt set, over months |
| Is fourth place useful | Yes | No, there is one box | Rarely, the client instructs one firm |
| Can you pay to appear | Yes, ads alongside | No | No |
| How new is it | Twenty-five years | Answer boxes since 2014 | Since generative answers arrived |
J Scott Legal, conveyancing, Maidenhead
A firm that was ranking on Google and absent from AI answers, until it was not.
More monthly enquiries
AI mentions per month
Terms in top positions
Written by George Levett, Founder, legalbuzz. Last reviewed 2026-08-14.
Questions, answered
No, though they share a foundation and anyone selling them as entirely separate is overstating it. A well-structured, authoritative site is a prerequisite for both. GEO adds work SEO does not require: entity consistency across the regulator and directory record, verifying AI crawler access separately from Googlebot, formatting for extraction rather than for dwell time, and measuring citation instead of position.
AEO wins the answer box on a Google results page: one winner, checkable, largely a formatting discipline. GEO wins a mention inside a generated answer that varies by user and session, and depends far more on what independent sources say about your firm. AEO is the older idea and sits inside SEO. GEO is different in kind, because the output is assembled rather than retrieved.
Not necessarily, and the two are decided by different mechanisms. Search Engine Land and Fractl found, across 8,090 keywords, that Google's AI answers and chatbots cite the same source only 7.2% of the time. We frequently find firms holding the top position for their town that are never named when the same question is asked of an assistant. It has to be tested rather than assumed.
If your site has never had proper SEO work, SEO, because the foundation carries into the other two. If you rank well already, test your AI visibility before buying anything, since you may be fine or you may be absent while a competitor is named, and those need different responses.
We would not recommend it. Around seventy per cent of the work is shared with SEO, and separating them produces two overlapping retainers, two sets of reporting and two half-strategies. It is one programme with three outputs.
No, and that is worth knowing when comparing proposals. Some use AEO and GEO interchangeably, some use AI SEO for all of it. The useful question to ask any agency is not which acronym they use but how they measure it. If they cannot describe their measurement method, there is not one.
Increasingly yes, because referred clients still check. Someone given your name by a friend will search it, and what an assistant says about your firm at that moment either confirms the referral or undermines it. Entity accuracy matters even for a practice that never wants to rank for anything.