SEO, GEO, AEO: Which One Actually Gets You Found

Three acronyms are being flung around every marketing newsletter right now, and most of the people using them could not tell you where one ends and the next begins. SEO you have heard for twenty years. GEO and AEO turned up in the last eighteen months and started getting used as if they were interchangeable, which they are not, quite. The blur matters, because if you do not know which one you are trying to win, you cannot know where to put your effort, and right now a lot of wine businesses are pouring effort into a game that stopped being the only game in town.

So here is the clean version. Three acronyms, three different questions about how people find you, and one move underneath all of them that does most of the work.

SEO: the game you already know, on ground that is moving

SEO, search engine optimisation, is the practice of getting your page to rank in a list of results. You pick the words your buyers type, you earn links from other sites, you structure your pages so Google understands them, and the prize is a high spot on a page of ten blue links. The searcher scans the list and clicks one. For two decades that click was the whole point.

The trouble is the click is quietly disappearing. In the first four months of 2026, more than two thirds of Google searches ended without anyone clicking through to a website, up from around 60% two years earlier. Google now answers the question itself, at the top of the page, before you ever reach a link. SparkToro, who have tracked this for years, put it bluntly: less than one third of searches still send a click to the open web. SEO is not dead, and I will come back to why. But ranking on a page nobody scrolls to is a smaller prize than it used to be, and pretending otherwise is how good wineries end up wondering why a well-optimised site brings them nothing.

AEO: being the answer, not one of the links

AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the practice of getting your content picked as the direct answer, rather than one option in a list. This is the featured snippet at the very top of Google, the box that reads your answer back before the results begin. It is the People Also Ask questions that unfold underneath. And it is the single spoken reply you get when someone asks Alexa or Siri out loud.

AEO is older than the AI panic, which surprises people. Answer engines have been pulling one best answer to the top for years. If a sommelier asks their phone "what temperature should Champagne be served at" and gets a spoken answer, that answer came from whichever page an answer engine judged clearest and most trustworthy. No list, no click, just your words in someone's kitchen. The work that wins it is unglamorous: answer a real question directly, put the answer near the top, structure it so a machine can lift it cleanly, and give the machine reasons to trust the source.

GEO: being quoted inside the AI's answer

GEO, generative engine optimisation, is the newest of the three and the one doing the most to change the picture. It is the practice of getting your expertise cited and quoted inside an answer that an AI builds on the spot, in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google's AI Overviews. The engine does not hand back a list or even a single lifted snippet. It reads across many sources, writes a fresh reply, and names a handful it drew from. GEO is the fight to be one of those named sources.

The term is not marketing froth. It comes from a 2023 Princeton and IIT Delhi research paper that coined "generative engine optimisation" and ran the first controlled test of what actually moves the needle, later presented at the KDD conference in 2024. Testing content strategies across ten engines and ten thousand queries, the researchers found that the right changes could lift a source's visibility in AI answers by up to 40%. What worked was not keyword stuffing. It was clarity, citing real figures, quoting named sources, and writing with the kind of specific, credible detail a model is willing to repeat with its own name attached. For a wine business, that is the difference between a buyer asking Perplexity, "who are the interesting natural wine importers in Austria" and your name being in the reply, versus your competitor's being there instead.

Where GEO and AEO blur, and why nobody can draw a clean line

Here is the honest part the confident LinkedIn posts skip: GEO and AEO overlap heavily, and plenty of smart people use them interchangeably. The cleanest way to hold them apart is this. An answer engine retrieves one best existing answer and surfaces it, so AEO is about being that answer. A generative engine synthesises a new answer from many sources and cites some, so GEO is about being one of the trusted sources it builds from. One picks a winner. The other assembles a reply and credits its ingredients.

But the line is genuinely fuzzy, and getting fuzzier, because the surfaces are merging. Google's AI Overviews is an answer engine and a generative engine in the same box. The reason you do not need to lose sleep over the taxonomy is that the underlying work is almost identical. Whether you are trying to be the snippet or the citation, you win the same way: answer the real question, write with clarity and specific detail, and be a named, credible source the machine already trusts. Learn one and you have mostly learned the other.

What this changes for a wine business

The mistake is treating SEO, GEO and AEO as a menu you order one dish from. They are not alternatives. They stack, and they are increasingly fed by the same content. A clear, specific, genuinely useful page written under a named expert helps you rank (SEO), gets pulled as a direct answer (AEO), and gets quoted inside AI replies (GEO), all at once. That is why the smart move is not to chase whichever acronym is trending this quarter. It is to write the kind of thing all three reward and publish it where all three are reading.

And "where all three are reading" now includes your social feed, not just your website. Your Instagram captions and image alt texts get crawled and read the same way a web page is, so a caption with a real answer in it, and an alt text that actually describes the wine instead of reading "IMG_4821", quietly feeds your findability every time you post. The words under your photos are not decoration. They are searchable content doing double duty.

Which is exactly why SEO is not dead, only demoted. The content that ranks well, being clear, well-structured, and actually answering the question, is largely the same content that gets picked as the answer and quoted by AI. You are not doing three jobs. You are doing one job that pays out in three places.

If you want the fuller argument for why this shift is happening now, and why LinkedIn in particular has become one of the sources AI leans on most, I laid it all out in Reach Was Never the Point, the companion piece to this one. This article is the map of the terms. That one is the case for why you should care before your competitors do.

The one move that covers all three

Stop optimising for the acronym and start being unmistakably the person who knows the answer. Pick the questions your buyers genuinely ask, answer them clearly under your own name, name real examples and real numbers, and publish consistently in the places machines read. Do that and SEO ranks you, AEO quotes you, and GEO cites you, without you ever having to keep three separate scorecards.

The acronyms will keep multiplying, because the industry loves a fresh three-letter word to sell a service around. The thing underneath them has not changed and will not: be genuinely useful, be genuinely findable, and be genuinely you. That is the whole game, whatever we end up calling it next year.

People also ask

Written by

Margot van Lieshout DipWSET FWS RV

Wine marketeer, sales expert with over 20 years in the trade, public speaker and international wine judge. Thousands of wines scored from Steiermark to Ningxia, and a trade she knows from the inside out. Wine with Margot is where she helps wine brands tell the stories that sell them.

LinkedInInstagramSubstack