Three acronyms are being used interchangeably by people selling all three, and they are not the same job. I asked Elias Curtis to define them cleanly on the Next Build Podcast, because he runs an agency that does all three and he has no incentive to blur the lines.
What follows is his breakdown, plus the strategy he is actually running behind it.
SEO: Getting Indexed
Search engine optimization is the traditional one, and it has not gone anywhere. You build a site, you have your pages and your sitemap, and you feed that to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Someone searches, and your business, product or service appears in the results.
This is a machine reading a page and filing it. Everything else in this article assumes you have done this part competently, because the newer disciplines still lean on it.
GEO: Getting Ingested
Generative engine optimization is a different mechanism. Here you are feeding AI models information about your business through citations and sources rather than through a sitemap.
Elias described it as consistency across the board. Your content, your phone number, your address, your details, appearing the same way on many platforms. That consistency is what validates trustworthiness and credibility, and it is what determines whether you appear when somebody asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for a plumber, a roofer or a lawyer in their area.
The practical implication is unglamorous. Inconsistent business details across directories are not a tidiness problem any more. They are a visibility problem.
AEO: Getting Quoted
Answer engine optimization is about answering very specific questions. You build pages and visibility across platforms that answer the exact things people ask, and you answer them directly rather than burying the answer in a sales page.
If GEO is about the machine knowing who you are, AEO is about the machine having something concrete to quote when a question comes up.
The Strategy: Programmatic Plus Semantic
Here is where his approach gets interesting, and where most agencies stop short.
Programmatic SEO means building large numbers of what he calls combination pages, blending a service with a location. Website design in one city, then the next city, then the metropolitan areas and the suburbs, wherever there is genuine visibility for what you do. AI makes the volume possible.
But volume alone gets you penalised or ignored. The pages have to be structured properly so search engines can read them without technical errors, because pages throwing errors do not show at all. And it has to stay inside the platforms' policies. Doing this legally and ethically is not a footnote, it is the difference between an asset and a liability.
Semantic SEO is the other half, and it is the part people skip. It is about how human the content reads. Whether a person landing on the page thinks this is a good read and this is worth something. As Elias put it, the goal is not spitballing content at the wall and hoping it sticks. Every page has to give value to the reader and to the searcher.
Combine the two and you get scale without slop. Run programmatic without semantic and you have built thousands of pages nobody wants to read, which is a lot of work to produce something worthless.
Why Elias Expects This to Get Crowded Fast
His prediction was blunt. Once agencies and web developers work out how to do this properly, it becomes very popular, and it starts to look like Monopoly. Whoever builds the most visibility, and connects it, wins the board.
He gave one example of how that compounds. Every site his agency builds carries their name at the bottom of the page, linking back. Those are organic backlinks, earned by delivery rather than by outreach, and they accumulate quietly for years.
That is worth copying in principle even if you do not build websites. Ask what your delivery work leaves behind that points back at you.
The Part Nobody Wants to Hear: Patience
Elias launched the current version of his own site four months ago. His domain is sixteen years old with authority in the forties, and he expects to reach the sixties in the next year or two. That is a realistic timeline from someone who does this professionally, on a domain that already has history.
If your domain is new, adjust accordingly. Most of the disappointment I hear about SEO comes from expecting a two year process to show results in two months.
What This Costs You in Hours
One thing that does not get discussed enough is the labour. Programmatic SEO at scale is a lot of work even with AI doing the heavy lifting, and it is the kind of work that quietly expands to fill whatever time you give it.
This is the reason I built Zaptime. When a project spreads across weeks of page generation, review and cleanup, the only way to know whether the strategy is actually profitable is to know what it costs you in hours. Plenty of agencies discover after the fact that a content programme consumed more time than the client work it was meant to win.
Track it while you run it, not afterwards.
Where to Start
Fix your SEO fundamentals first, because GEO and AEO both depend on a site that can be read. Then audit your business details everywhere they appear and make them identical. Then pick the ten questions your customers actually ask and answer each one properly on its own page. Only then consider programmatic scale.