AEO, GEO, SEO: Who, What & Why

The rules of discovery are being rewritten in real time. Here is what affiliate managers need to understand before the market moves on without them.

If you have been half-listening to conversations about AI search and hoping it will settle down before you have to do anything about it, this episode is your wake-up call. Reza Moaiandin, co-founder of SALT.agency, has spent 25 years watching the internet evolve from static HTML to generative AI. He joins Lee-Ann to cut through the noise on SEO, AEO and GEO, explain what the data from his clients is actually showing about shifting user behaviour, and give affiliate managers a clear-headed diagnostic for where to focus right now.

Talking Points Include:

• Why SEO, AEO and GEO are not three separate disciplines – and the crucial distinction between winning the click, being in the answer, and being part of the answer that every affiliate manager needs to understand right now
  
• The 20% tipping point that changes everything – Reza's research tracks the mass adoption rate of generative AI globally, and his data suggests the hockey stick moment is closer than most people think
  
• The collapsing customer funnel – how discovery, comparison, evaluation and shortlisting are now happening inside a single AI interaction, and what that means for the partner segmentation models affiliate programs still rely on

SEO, AEO, GEO: What Is the Actual Difference?

These three terms are being used interchangeably and that is causing real confusion in affiliate programs right now. Reza's explanation is one of the clearest you will hear. SEO is about winning the click. AEO is about being the answer, structured so that search engines and voice assistants can extract it directly. GEO is about being woven into the AI-generated responses from platforms like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews, where content is not ranked in the traditional sense but selected as part of a synthesised reply.

For affiliate managers, this changes the question from “which keywords am I ranking for?” to “which partners are my customers actually finding in each of these environments?” The partner segmentation mix that made sense two years ago was built around one set of discovery behaviours. That set is fragmenting fast.

For further reading on what OpenAI's own research reveals about the future of search and what it means for performance marketers, this Search Engine Journal piece is worth your time.

Get Your Foundations Right Before You Chase the Trend

Reza's advice is deliberately grounding. Before any affiliate manager starts reassigning budget toward AEO publishers or GEO-focused content partners, the question to ask is whether the technical foundations of your SEO are actually solid. Not as a theoretical exercise but in practice: can your content be crawled properly, is your information retrieval set up correctly, does your site have the structural integrity that lets anything else you build on top of it actually hold?

His analogy is blunt. A crack in the wall that keeps coming back is not a plastering problem. It is a foundation problem. You can keep treating the symptom or you can go deeper once and fix it. The same applies to affiliate programs that keep finding their performance unstable regardless of which partner or channel they are testing. Clean up the house first.

Listen to Find Out More About:

• Why Reza refuses to use keyword difficulty as a meaningful metric, and the specific example of a tiny B2B company that outranked international businesses for a keyword rated 99 out of 100
  
• The hidden technical trick using Cloudflare and server logs that lets you see which of your pages AI platforms are actually pulling, and what that tells you about how your affiliates' content is being used
  
• Why ChatGPT and Claude give different answers when Reza is asked to pick a favourite, and which one he recommends for affiliate managers specifically
  
• How the user journey is being compressed so that discovery, comparison and purchase intent are collapsing into a single AI interaction before a user even reaches your website
  
• The generational behaviour shift Reza is tracking using his father and his teenage nephew as a real-world test of when mass adoption has genuinely arrived

Key Segments of This Podcast and Where You Can Tune In to Go Direct:

[05:06] Reza breaks down the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO in plain language, and explains why confusing them leads affiliate managers to make the wrong budget decisions

[11:00] How the traditional customer funnel is collapsing inside a single AI interaction, illustrated with the running shoe example that makes the shift impossible to ignore

[20:40] The diagnostic Reza would run on any affiliate program today: where to start, what to fix first, and why fixing AEO and GEO before your SEO foundations are solid is a waste of time and budget

[24:44] The server log technique that tells you exactly which pages AI platforms are pulling from your site and your affiliates' content, and why most affiliate managers are not looking at this data

A big thank you to Reza for sharing his research and his thinking so generously. If this episode has made you question whether your current partner segmentation still reflects how your customers actually find you, that instinct is worth following up on.

KonverJ works with brands and affiliate managers to audit and rebuild partner strategies that are built for where the market is heading, not where it has been. If that conversation is timely for your program, get in touch with the team here.

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