Glossary
SEO — search engine optimization
SEO — search engine optimization — is the three-decade-old practice of earning visibility in ranked search results. It is the parent discipline of AEO and GEO, and its center of gravity is moving into them as search engines embed AI answer layers above the rankings SEO was built for.
What carries over from SEO is the base layer: crawlability, site structure, structured data, and demonstrable authority still decide whether an engine — ranked or generative — can find and trust a site at all.
What changes is the objective. Classic SEO optimized a document's position in a list; the AI surfaces reward being retrieved into an answer and cited by it. Rank was a stable, inspectable outcome; citation is probabilistic and varies with the model underneath — which is why model swaps inside the engines are news for this discipline in a way algorithm updates once were.
The record: GoogleMicrosoft Bing
See also: AEOGEOZero-click search