We see it all the time. Many brands are running three optimisation strategies without noticing they’ve split into three. There’s the old SEO work everyone knows. There’s a newer rush to appear inside AI Overviews and chatbot answers. And there’s the generative engine stuff that sounds like a rebrand of the second thing, but isn’t quite.
So let’s untangle what these acronyms mean, where they overlap, and how to use them as a single thing rather than three separate strategies.
What Each Acronym Is Doing
SEO is the one with grey hair. Search engine optimisation means earning visibility in search engine rankings: Keywords, backlinks, page speed, crawlability, etc.
AIO, AI Optimisation, is about being the source a machine extracts from when it writes an answer. Think Google’s AI Overviews, that little paragraph that appears above the links. When someone asks a question and gets a paragraph instead of a list, AIO is the discipline of being the site that paragraph quotes.
GEO, generative engine optimisation, aims at the chat tools directly. You’re not trying to rank. You’re trying to be the thing the model considers trustworthy enough to reference or paraphrase when a user asks it something in your category.
The truth is, these three constantly overlap. A machine deciding whether to cite you leans on a lot of the same signals a search crawler already reads. Which is good news, because it means you’re not starting from zero on any of them.
Where the Overlap Happens
Clean site structure, content that answers a real question rather than teases it, and real authority signals, like credible places that mention you and link to your site. All three optimisation types want these things.
Machines love a clean, direct answer near the top of the page. They love FAQ sections and summaries. They love it when your claims are specific rather than mushy and half-elaborated. So a page that states the answer and then supports it will be pulled into an AI Overview, rather than one that goes on and on for four paragraphs before making its point.
Building the Single Strategy
Start with a content audit that judges every page against one question: could a machine lift a correct answer out of this in two seconds? If the answer’s buried, shoved into oblivion, or lost in three intro paragraphs, it fails for AIO and GEO, even if it ranks well for SEO today.
After the foundations, rewrite your highest-value pages so the core answer arrives early. Add citations and data because generative models favour specificity, and a page that says “[X%] of buyers abandon at checkout, according to [X Institute]” is more quotable than one that says “many buyers leave.” Keep your facts current, since a model referencing old figures will make you look horribly wrong.
An established SEO agency in London will tell you when an AI problem is really just an old SEO gap, and how an AI problem could, in fact, be an opportunity should the right strategy be applied to it.
Measuring Something That Won’t Sit Still
Tracking this can be awkward, and anyone who tells you they’ve nailed AI visibility measurement is optimistic. You can monitor whether you appear in AI Overviews for target queries, though it takes manual checking or one of the newer tools built for it. You can track referral traffic from Claude and similar sites in GA4, which shows up in analytics under its own source. You can search your own category inside ChatGPT and see whether you get name-checked.
If someone asks Gemini for the best supplier of whatever you sell, and if your content taught the model well, you’re likely to be the answer. That’s a warm lead who’s already been told you’re credible, by a machine they trust more than they trust your ads.
Now, Putting it All Into Practice
Start by auditing once, fix those shared foundations, then add the extraction work on top. Don’t sell yourself three overlapping projects because they’ve got three acronyms to invoice against.
The web your customers search is the same web the machines read. Serve it well, and you’re covering all three at once, which is the only version of this that makes sense for a business that also has a product to sell.
