GEO vs SEO vs AEO: what ecommerce brands need to know

Short answer: SEO earns your pages a place in search results. AEO (answer engine optimisation) makes your pages the easiest source for an AI-generated or featured answer. GEO (generative engine optimisation) works on whether AI models mention and recommend your brand at all. For an ecommerce brand, all three matter, and they build on each other in that order.

The acronyms have multiplied quickly, and some agencies sell them as if they were entirely new disciplines. They aren't. They're three angles on the same goal: being the store a shopper finds, trusts and buys from, wherever they start looking.

The three, side by side

	SEO	AEO	GEO
Goal	Rank in search results	Be quoted as the answer	Be mentioned and recommended by AI models
Where it shows	Google and Bing results pages	AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice, chat answers with citations	ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot recommendations
Main levers	Technical health, relevance, content, links	Answer-first structure, FAQs, schema, clarity	Brand consistency, mentions on trusted sites, reviews, distinctive expertise
How to measure	Rankings, impressions, clicks, organic revenue	Featured answers, AI citations, question-query impressions	Brand mentions in AI answers to a fixed question set

SEO: still the foundation

Search engine optimisation is the work of making your site crawlable, relevant and authoritative. For Shopify stores, that means fixing duplicate URLs, building collection pages that match real searches, writing original product copy, adding structured data, speeding up pages and earning links. Our Shopify SEO checklist covers it in detail.

SEO matters even if you care most about AI, because AI tools that browse the web lean on search indexes to find sources. A page that isn't indexed or isn't trusted by search engines is unlikely to be picked up by an answer engine either.

AEO: from ranking to being quoted

Answer engine optimisation adapts your content for systems that answer questions directly. The most important changes are structural: a direct answer near the top of the page, headings that mirror real questions, short self-contained paragraphs, lists and tables for facts, FAQ blocks, and schema that describes products, offers, reviews and questions.

We explain the full approach in What is AEO?. In short, if a machine had to pull one or two sentences from your page to answer a shopper's question, would it find them easily, and would they be correct?

GEO: being the brand the model recommends

Generative engine optimisation looks at a different question. When someone asks an AI tool "what are the best Australian swimwear brands for curvy bodies?", the answer often names brands without citing a specific page. That answer is shaped by what the model has learned and what it retrieves from the web about each brand.

You influence it through:

• Consistent brand facts. The same description, categories, price range, location and claims across your site, marketplaces, directories and social profiles.
• Third-party mentions. Press coverage, expert quotes, gift guides, reviews, podcasts and partner pages. These are the sources models draw on to decide who's credible in a category.
• Distinctive positioning. If you're clearly "the Australian-made, plastic-free option" or "the sensitive-skin specialist", a model has a reason to name you for that use case.
• Reviews and reputation. Genuine reviews on your site and on trusted platforms reinforce what you claim about yourself.

This is why GEO overlaps so heavily with digital PR and link building. The same mention that earns a backlink also gives AI models another trusted source that describes your brand. Our backlinks and digital PR service is built with both in mind.

How they work together on a Shopify store

Imagine a skincare brand that sells a barrier-repair moisturiser.

• SEO gets its "moisturiser for sensitive skin" collection ranking, fixes slow product pages and makes sure Google indexes the right URLs.
• AEO rewrites the collection intro to answer "what moisturiser is best for sensitive skin?" in two sentences, adds an ingredients table and an FAQ, and marks it up with schema.
• GEO makes sure the brand is described consistently as a sensitive-skin specialist across its site, stockists and press, and pitches expert commentary to beauty publications so it's mentioned in the places AI models read.

Each layer makes the next more effective. Strong SEO gets the page seen. AEO makes it quotable. GEO makes the brand recommendable even when no single page is cited.

What to prioritise, in order

1. Remove blockers. Make sure search and AI crawlers can access your store, and that your key pages are indexed.
2. Fix revenue pages. Collections and best-selling products first: technical health, original copy, answer-first intros, FAQs and schema.
3. Make your brand facts consistent everywhere they appear.
4. Publish genuinely useful content that answers the questions buyers ask before they purchase, and link it to the right collections.
5. Earn mentions and links from trusted, relevant sites.
6. Measure all three monthly.

Measuring each one

• SEO: Search Console impressions, clicks and average position; organic sessions and revenue in your analytics.
• AEO: impressions for question-style queries; whether you appear in AI Overviews or featured snippets for target questions; citations in tools that show sources.
• GEO: a fixed set of 20 or so recommendation questions run through ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI features and Perplexity on a set date each month, recording whether your brand is mentioned. Date every check, because answers vary.

On our own publication, LUSTRE Mag, we track exactly this. In its first weeks live it earned 3,033 Google impressions, and ChatGPT cited it in 4 of 20 test questions on 2 November 2026, up from 2 of 20 on 24 October.

Free tool: see whether AI search mentions your store right now with our AI visibility check. It's a quick snapshot, not a ranking.

A simple 90-day plan

Days 1–30: foundations. Check robots.txt and any bot-protection apps so search and AI crawlers can reach you. Confirm your key collections and products are indexed in Search Console. Add or fix Organization and Product schema, publish an llms.txt file, and write your 20-question citation set so you have a baseline before you change anything.

Days 31–60: revenue pages. Rewrite your top five to ten collection pages and best sellers answer-first, with a short FAQ on each. Replace any manufacturer copy with original descriptions. Make your shipping, returns and pricing details identical everywhere they appear.

Days 61–90: reach. Publish two or three genuinely useful guides that answer pre-purchase questions and link to the right collections. Start earning mentions: respond to journalist requests in your niche, ask stockists and partners for a link, and fix unlinked brand mentions. Re-run your citation set and compare it with your baseline.

Signs your brand is invisible to AI

Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to recommend products in your category for a specific use case and location. If competitors with weaker products are named and you aren't, look at three things: whether your site blocks or confuses crawlers, whether your category pages actually explain what you sell and who it's for, and whether anyone outside your own site talks about you. In our experience it's usually the third. A brand with almost no press, reviews or partner mentions gives a model little reason to trust it, however good the store is.

Watch out for

• Agencies selling GEO as a replacement for SEO. Without crawlable, trusted pages, there's little for GEO to build on.
• Guarantees. Nobody controls what AI models say. Anyone promising a guaranteed recommendation is guessing.
• Shortcuts. Buying mentions, spamming forums or publishing hundreds of thin AI-written pages can damage your brand's credibility with both search engines and models.

Does GEO matter for smaller brands?

Yes, arguably more. Large brands are mentioned constantly, so models already know them. A smaller, specialist brand has to give the model a reason to name it, and that reason is usually specificity: a clearly defined niche, consistent facts and a handful of credible third-party mentions that describe the brand the same way. You don't need national press to start. A stockist page, an expert quote in a trade publication and a well-structured category page that answers the exact question shoppers ask can be enough to appear in niche recommendations.

The bottom line

Don't treat SEO, AEO and GEO as three budgets. Treat them as one strategy with three checkpoints: can people and machines find you, can they quote you, and do they recommend you?

At Elodae, AEO is part of every plan, and GEO with AI citation tracking is part of Scale alongside our white-hat link and mention programme. See AEO and GEO services, compare pricing, or request a free audit.