The acronyms are multiplying — GEO, SEO, AEO. Here's what each one actually means for consumer brands selling online, where they overlap, and how to prioritise without tripling your budget.
If you run marketing for a consumer brand, you've probably noticed the acronym count rising. SEO has been a budget line for years. Then AEO started appearing in agency decks as voice assistants and featured snippets changed how Google delivered answers. Now GEO has arrived — driven by the rise of ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Amazon's Rufus — and your CEO is asking whether you need three separate strategies.
The honest answer: you don't need three separate strategies. But you do need to understand what's changed, because the way your customers discover products is shifting faster than most brands' marketing plans.
This guide explains GEO, SEO, and AEO from the perspective of someone managing a consumer brand — not an SEO practitioner. We'll focus on what each discipline means for your product visibility, where your existing investments already cover you, and where the genuine gaps are that need attention.
**A Quick Primer: What Each Acronym Actually Means**
Before we get into strategy, let's define terms — because the way these are discussed online is often more confusing than it needs to be.
**SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)** is the practice of making your website and content rank higher in traditional search results — primarily Google. It covers technical foundations (site speed, mobile responsiveness, structured data), content quality, and domain authority through backlinks. If your brand has a website, you're already doing some form of SEO, whether you call it that or not.
**AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)** focuses specifically on getting your content selected as the direct answer in search results — featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, and voice assistant responses. It's essentially a specialisation within SEO that structures content so search engines can extract and display it as a definitive answer. If you've ever seen a box at the top of Google answering a question with text pulled from a website, that's the real estate AEO targets.
**GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)** is the newest discipline. It focuses on ensuring your brand appears in AI-generated responses — the kind produced by ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Amazon's Rufus. This is fundamentally different from SEO and AEO because these AI systems don't just rank pages — they synthesise information from multiple sources and generate original responses. When a shopper asks ChatGPT "What's the best natural skincare brand for sensitive skin?", the response is a reasoned recommendation, not a list of links. GEO is about making sure your brand is part of that recommendation.
We've covered [how these AI systems decide which content to cite](/blog/how-snippet-signals-ai-powered-what-content-2025) in more detail if you want the technical background.
**Why This Matters for Consumer Brands Specifically**
The shift from links to answers hits consumer brands harder than most sectors, because your customers are increasingly making purchase decisions inside AI-powered conversations rather than by clicking through search results.
Consider the difference in shopper behaviour:
**The traditional search path:** A shopper searches "best moisturiser for sensitive skin" → scans 10 blue links → clicks 2-3 → reads reviews → buys from the brand they trust most.
**The AI-powered path:** A shopper asks ChatGPT or Rufus "What's the best moisturiser for sensitive skin that doesn't feel greasy?" → gets a curated answer mentioning 3-4 specific products with reasoning → clicks directly to buy the one that sounds right.
In the first path, you need SEO to get on page one. In the second, you need GEO to be one of the 3-4 brands the AI mentions. The click-through landscape is completely different — and if your brand isn't in that AI-generated shortlist, you've lost the sale before the shopper ever visits your website.
This isn't hypothetical. If you sell on Amazon, [Rufus is already influencing which products shoppers see](/search-lab/decode-amazons-ai-how-what-shoppers). If you sell via your own site, Google's AI Overviews are reshaping the click-through rates on the queries that drive your organic traffic.
**Where GEO, SEO, and AEO Overlap (And Where Your Budget Already Covers You)**
Here's the good news for anyone worried about tripling their marketing spend: roughly 60-70% of the work is shared across all three disciplines.
**High-quality, specific content is the foundation for all three.** Content that demonstrates genuine expertise, provides specific and useful information, and addresses real customer needs performs well in traditional search, answer engines, and AI-generated responses. If you're already creating expert-level content that answers real questions, you're doing the base work for all three.
**Structured data benefits everyone.** [JSON-LD markup](/blog/why-json-ld-acts-websites-ai-search-2025) and well-organised content architecture help Google rank your pages (SEO), identify extractable answers (AEO), and provide machine-readable information for AI systems (GEO). This is one of the highest-ROI technical investments a consumer brand can make.
**Brand authority compounds across all channels.** A strong backlink profile helps your SEO. Being cited by authoritative publications helps your GEO. Having a well-known brand helps your AEO. Every investment in [building your brand's offsite signals](/blog/how-offsite-brand-signals-ai-visibility-2025) pays dividends across all three disciplines.
**E-E-A-T principles apply universally.** Google's Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness framework isn't just a ranking factor. It's what makes AI systems trust your content enough to cite it, and what makes answer engines confident enough to extract your content as the definitive answer.
**Where the Genuine Gaps Are**
The 30-40% that's different is where consumer brands need to pay attention, because this is where most are underinvesting.
**Gap 1: Entity recognition for GEO**
AI systems need to know your brand exists and understand what it does before they can recommend it. This requires consistent, structured information about your brand across multiple authoritative sources — your website, industry directories, press coverage, social profiles, and structured data.
Many consumer brands have good SEO but poor entity presence. Your website ranks for product keywords, but if someone asks ChatGPT about brands in your category, you don't appear. That's an entity recognition problem, and it requires a different kind of optimisation than traditional SEO.
**Gap 2: Content designed for citation**
GEO rewards content that's factually specific, data-rich, and provides unique perspectives that AI systems find valuable enough to reference. Generic marketing copy gets ignored. Specific, evidence-based content gets cited.
For consumer brands, this means moving beyond product descriptions and blog posts about "5 tips for better skin" toward content that includes proprietary data, specific formulation details, clinical study references, and expert commentary that AI systems can attribute to your brand.
**Gap 3: Answer-formatted content for AEO**
If your product pages and blog posts aren't structured with clear question-and-answer formatting, you're missing featured snippet opportunities. This is particularly relevant for consumer brands because shoppers ask comparison questions ("Is X or Y better for sensitive skin?") that Google loves to answer with featured snippets.
**Gap 4: AI-platform monitoring**
You probably track your Google rankings weekly. But do you know how your brand appears when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Rufus about your product category? Most consumer brands have no visibility into this. Setting up systematic monitoring of your brand's presence across AI platforms is a new discipline that sits outside traditional SEO reporting.
**How to Prioritise: A Practical Framework for Consumer Brands**
Rather than treating GEO, SEO, and AEO as three separate projects, here's how to layer them efficiently.
**Layer 1: Fix your SEO foundation (if needed)**
This is table stakes. Ensure your website is technically sound, your product and category pages target the right keywords, and you have a reasonable backlink profile. If your organic traffic is flat or declining, fix this first — everything else builds on it.
Most consumer brands with an established website already have a reasonable SEO foundation. If that's you, don't over-invest here. Maintenance-level SEO (technical health, content freshness, ongoing link building) is enough.
**Layer 2: Add answer optimisation**
Take your existing high-performing pages and optimise them for answer extraction. Add FAQ sections with Schema markup. Structure key sections as clear question-answer pairs. Create comparison content that addresses the questions shoppers actually ask.
This is a relatively quick win because you're enhancing existing content rather than creating new assets. Budget: 15-20% of your total search investment.
**Layer 3: Engineer for AI visibility**
This is the strategic frontier. Start by auditing your brand's presence across AI platforms — ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Rufus about your brand, your competitors, and your product category. Identify where you're present and where you're missing.
Then work on the gaps: strengthen your entity graph through consistent structured data and authoritative mentions. Create content specifically designed to be cited by AI systems — data-rich, specific, current, and authoritative. Build [the offsite signals](/blog/how-offsite-brand-signals-ai-visibility-2025) that AI models use to assess your brand's credibility.
Budget: 20-30% of your total search investment, increasing over time as AI-powered discovery grows.
**Layer 4: Measure across all three**
Track traditional SEO metrics (rankings, traffic, conversions) alongside AEO metrics (featured snippet ownership) and GEO metrics (brand mentions in AI responses, citation frequency). This requires a combination of established tools and newer monitoring approaches — we've covered the measurement side in more detail in our piece on [what LLM visibility means for brands](/search-lab/what-llm-visibility-why-matter-brand).
**Common Mistakes Consumer Brands Make**
**Treating GEO as a completely separate workstream.** The brands that waste money are the ones who hire an "AI SEO agency" on top of their existing SEO agency, creating duplicate efforts. The most efficient approach is integrated: one strategy that addresses all three through coordinated content, structured data, and authority building.
**Ignoring GEO because "it's too early."** The competitive dynamics of AI visibility are similar to early SEO. Brands that invest now build an advantage that compounds over time as AI systems develop "brand awareness" through repeated encounters with consistent, authoritative information about your brand. Waiting means playing catch-up later.
**Over-investing in SEO when the returns are diminishing.** If your core product pages already rank well and your SEO traffic is stable, pouring more budget into traditional SEO delivers diminishing returns. That incremental budget is better allocated to GEO, where the competitive landscape is still forming.
**Publishing "GEO content" that's just SEO content with a different label.** Some agencies are repackaging basic SEO work as GEO services. Real GEO requires understanding how specific AI systems discover, evaluate, and cite sources — it's not just "write good content and hope ChatGPT notices."
**The Business Case: Why Your Board Should Care**
This isn't just a marketing discussion. The shift toward AI-powered product discovery has direct commercial implications.
Consumer behaviour is changing. A growing percentage of product research now involves AI tools — whether that's asking ChatGPT for recommendations, using Google's AI Overviews for quick comparisons, or consulting Amazon's Rufus before purchasing. The shoppers who aren't using these tools today will be using them within 12 months.
First-mover advantage is real. GEO is new enough that the competitive landscape isn't yet established. Brands that invest now build persistent advantages that are difficult for competitors to replicate quickly.
The cost of inaction compounds. If your competitors are investing in GEO and you're not, the gap widens over time. AI systems increasingly favour brands they've frequently encountered and cited, making the barrier to entry higher the longer you wait.
**What Lmo7 Does Differently**
At Lmo7, we built our entire agency model around this convergence. As an agentic commerce agency, we help consumer brands engineer visibility across the full spectrum of AI-powered discovery — from Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT to Amazon's Rufus.
We don't treat GEO, SEO, and AEO as separate workstreams. We build integrated strategies that ensure your brand is visible, credible, and compelling wherever your customers are searching — whether that's a traditional Google query, a voice search, or a conversation with an AI shopping assistant.
Our founder, Stephen Honight, built his career leading eCommerce for global brands at Mars, Unilever, and LEGO, and he founded Lmo7 specifically to help brands navigate this shift from keyword-based discovery to AI-powered commerce.
If you're wondering where your brand stands across GEO, SEO, and AEO — and where the biggest opportunities are — [get in touch for a visibility audit](/contact). We'll show you exactly how your brand appears across traditional search, answer engines, and AI platforms, and build a roadmap for improving your visibility across all three.
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*Lmo7 is an agentic commerce agency helping consumer brands build visibility across AI-powered shopping experiences. [Learn more about our AI search services](/ai-search-for-consumer-brands) or [explore our latest thinking on the blog](/blog).*