AEO vs SEO vs GEO vs SXO: A Plain-English Guide to the Acronyms
SEO earns the ranking. AEO earns the citation inside an AI-generated answer. GEO shapes what AI systems say about your brand overall. SXO makes sure the page satisfies the person once they click. They share a foundation and optimise for four different moments.
The acronym inflation is genuinely annoying, and some of it is agencies rebranding old work. But the underlying distinctions are real, and confusing them leads to buying the wrong thing.
SEO — Search Engine Optimization
The original discipline: getting a page to rank in a list of results. Keywords, technical health, content depth, authority signals, internal linking. For a local business the local variant — Google Business Profile, citations, reviews, proximity — still produces the majority of leads.
If you have to pick one, this is still it.
AEO — Answer Engine Optimization
Optimising so that an answer engine quotes you when answering a specific question. Answer-first structure, question-shaped headings, self-contained passages, concrete specifics, structured data.
It's the most page-level of the four, and the one you can make real progress on in a single content pass.
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization
The broader discipline of influencing what generative AI says about you, cited or not. Where AEO is about winning a particular citation, GEO is about the model's overall picture of your business — the mentions, reviews, directory entries and coverage it absorbed.
Most GEO work happens off your own website, which is why it's slower and why it can't be bought as a content package.
SXO — Search Experience Optimization
Optimising for what happens after the click: does the page actually satisfy the intent, fast, on a phone. Page-type fit, above-the-fold clarity, Core Web Vitals, conversion path.
It's the one that turns the other three into revenue rather than traffic.
Which do you actually need?
In order, for a typical local business: get local SEO right first, because it still drives most of the phone calls. Add SXO next, because improving conversion on traffic you already have is the fastest money in the list.
Then AEO, if your customers ask AI assistants for recommendations in your category — increasingly true of home services, dental, legal and restaurants. GEO last, as an ongoing reputation discipline rather than a project.
The honest summary
Three of these four are things good marketers were already doing, now with names. That doesn't make them fake — naming a thing is how it gets budgeted and measured — but it should make you sceptical of anyone selling AEO as a replacement for fundamentals rather than a layer on top.
If an agency quotes you for AEO without first looking at your Google Business Profile, they're selling the acronym.
