What is the difference between SEO, GEO and AEO?
They are three different surfaces, measured three different ways. SEO is the ranked list: your position and clicks for a query, readable in your own Search Console. AEO is the answer box above that list — Google's AI overview — where the question is answered without anyone scrolling; you measure whether the overview appeared at all and whether it quoted you. GEO is an assistant answering with no list in sight — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini — where the only thing that matters is whether your page is one of the sources it cites. A single number cannot cover all three, and any report that averages them into one score has thrown away the part you needed.
Which one actually brings buyers?
It depends where your buyers ask. A part number typed into Google is still SEO. A question like "who makes this connector in Taiwan" is increasingly answered by an assistant, and if you are not cited there you are not in the conversation at all — there is no page two to be on. The honest answer is that you measure all three and let the split tell you where your market actually is, rather than deciding in advance.
How do I check whether an agency is really measuring this?
Five checks, all of which can be answered in one meeting. One: ask for the unit — how many questions, which engines, how many samples each, in which language. "We track AI visibility" is not a unit. Two: ask what happens when an engine does not answer — the honest answer is that the cell is recorded as unmeasured, never as zero. Three: ask to see a row that says zero; a ledger with no zeros in it is a brochure. Four: ask whether the numbers appear in your own accounts, not only in their slides. Five: ask for the date on every figure, and check that two figures from different dates were measured the same way.
What do your own numbers look like?
On 2026-09-09 and again on 2026-09-14 and 2026-09-16 we put our own frozen question bank through the engines we sell: six buying questions per language, three samples each. Our domain was cited zero times. The pages that took those slots are round-ups answering the question directly — which is exactly the mechanism this page is describing, and the reason this page exists. We publish the zero because a company that will not show you its own worst number will not show you yours either.