SEO vs AEO vs GEO vs SXO: What Each Does and Which You Actually Need
SEO competes for a position in the results. AEO gets your answer extracted into a snippet or AI Overview. GEO gets you cited inside an answer a model generates. SXO makes the page deliver once someone clicks. They are four emphases of one job, not four products — and the underlying work overlaps almost entirely.
The proliferation of acronyms is partly genuine — search really has changed — and partly commercial. An agency with four named services can sell four retainers. It is worth being able to tell which parts are real distinctions and which are the same work with a new label.
- The foundations are shared: crawlable, clear, credible, well-structured.
- AEO is mostly a formatting discipline. GEO additionally needs entity consistency and corroboration.
- SXO is the only one measured after the click.
- Anyone selling these as four separate retainers is selling the same work four times.
The four, side by side
| Discipline | Competes for | Main lever | Measured by |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO | A position in the results list | Relevance, authority, technical health | Rankings, impressions, clicks |
| AEO | Being the extracted answer | Answer-first structure, FAQ markup | Position zero, PAA appearances |
| GEO | Being cited in a generated answer | Entity consistency, corroboration, original data | Citation across a fixed prompt set |
| SXO | What happens after the click | Intent match, clarity, speed | Enquiries per thousand impressions |
Which do you actually need?
- Not ranking at all? SEO first. Everything else assumes you can be found; AEO in particular mostly requires a page-one position before a snippet is available.
- Ranking but not getting clicks? AEO and SXO. Either the snippet is going to someone else, or your page is not matching why people searched.
- Getting traffic but no enquiries? SXO. This is an intent-match problem, and more traffic will not fix it.
- Competitors named in AI answers and you are not? GEO — and start with entity consistency rather than content.
What one programme looks like
Done sensibly, this is a sequence rather than four workstreams. Fix technical foundations so the site can be crawled and rendered. Reconcile your facts so engines can corroborate who you are. Write answer-first so both snippets and models can extract. Make the page deliver after the click. Then measure rankings, citations and enquiries rather than only the first.
Frequently asked questions
Is GEO replacing SEO?
No. Most commercial clicks still come from the results page, and AI answers sit above those results rather than instead of them. GEO is additive — ignoring it means being absent from an increasingly important surface, but abandoning SEO for it would be a mistake.
Do we need separate agencies for these?
No, and separating them tends to cause the gaps. The classic failure is an SEO agency reporting rankings while a conversion specialist tests buttons, and the actual problem — a page answering a different question from the one searched — belonging to neither.
Which gives the fastest results?
AEO, where you already rank — restructuring an answer can win position zero in weeks. SXO is next, because intent and clarity problems are fixable without new authority. SEO and GEO both take longer.
Is SXO just CRO?
No. CRO optimises a page for the traffic it already has. SXO starts from the query — what was searched, what the result promised, whether the page delivers it — which frequently changes the page’s structure rather than its buttons.
