These three terms get used interchangeably, and that's a problem, because they optimize for different things. A site can be strong on one and invisible on another. If you don't know which one you actually have a gap in, you end up paying for the wrong fix.
Local SEO: ranking for "near me"
Local SEO is about geo-qualified searches — "blinds installer Gold Coast," "plumber near me." The ranking surface is Google's Map Pack and localized organic results, and the signals are almost entirely different from classic SEO: your Google Business Profile, review volume and recency, NAP (name/address/phone) consistency across directories, and service-area or suburb-specific pages. Backlinks barely move this needle. A business with zero backlink profile can still dominate the Map Pack in its area with a well-run listing and a steady flow of reviews.
This only applies if you have a physical service area. A SaaS product with customers everywhere has no local SEO problem to solve, because there's no "near me" query it could ever rank for.
Classic SEO: ranking in organic search generally
This is the discipline everyone means by default when they say "SEO" — ranking in standard organic results for queries with no geo-intent. It runs on domain authority and backlinks, content depth and topical coverage, site architecture, and page speed. It's a content-and-authority problem, not a listings problem, and it's where most of the fixable, structural issues live: broken or missing schema, thin meta tags, sitemap gaps — the kind of thing an audit turns up constantly.
GEO: getting cited by the AI answer, not ranked in the blue links
GEO (generative engine optimization) is a different axis again — not where you rank, but whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or a Google AI Overview can find your content, trust it, and quote it accurately when someone asks a question your business could answer. We've written about what GEO adds on top of SEO in more depth, but the short version: it rides on the same structured, crawlable content that both local and classic SEO need anyway, plus a few things neither of the older disciplines ever had to think about — an llms.txt file, AI-crawler-aware robots.txt rules, and FAQ content phrased for direct-answer extraction rather than keyword density.
The reason GEO isn't a fourth line item on top of the other two: it's not a separate audience, it's a separate surface. A local tradie needs GEO so an AI assistant recommends them for "who installs shutters on the Gold Coast." A SaaS product needs GEO so an AI assistant cites them correctly instead of confusing them with a similarly-named competitor. Same underlying fix, different business.
Why the distinction matters practically
A site can win classic SEO and still be invisible in AI Overviews, because ranking well and being quotable cleanly are different properties — plenty of well-ranked pages are keyword-optimized prose an LLM can't extract a clean answer from. Equally, a local business can have a five-star Google Business Profile and still get recommended for a competitor's product because its site never disambiguated what it actually is. Diagnosing which of the three you're actually missing is most of the value of an audit — the fixes genuinely don't transfer between them.
If you're a local service business, see how local SEO & GEO works. If you're running a product or SaaS site, see the SEO & GEO engagement. Either way, the audit is free and tells you which of the three is actually the gap before you pay for anything.