They overlap, but they are not the same discipline, and treating them as one is why most ecommerce content underperforms.
SEO — earn the position
Crawlability, site speed, internal linking, keyword-matched pages, and backlinks. Still the foundation: AI engines largely read what search engines already index.
AEO — win the direct answer
Concise factual answers, FAQ and HowTo schema, question-shaped headings. The unit of optimisation is a sentence, not a page.
GEO — get cited and recommended
Entity consistency, third-party corroboration, comparison content, transparent pricing and trade-offs. The goal is not a click — it is being named in the answer.
How to split the effort
For most ecommerce brands: roughly half the effort on technical and commercial SEO, a third on answer-shaped content, and the remainder on entity work and third-party proof. Review the split quarterly against referral data.