MPA man named Dale called me in July. He had three proposals on his desk. One agency was selling him AEO, one was selling GEO, and one was selling LLMO, all at roughly the same price, all describing roughly the same work. He wanted to know which of the three he needed. The honest answer annoyed everybody involved.
The Five Words, Defined
Start with what the letters stand for, because half the confusion is that nobody bothers to say.
SEO is search engine optimization. Getting your pages to rank in the blue links on Google and Bing. Thirty years old, still the foundation, still paying rent.
AEO is answer engine optimization. Getting your business named inside the answer itself, rather than ranked on a page of options. That is the whole distinction, and it is a real one. We wrote the long version of what AEO is if you want it.
GEO is generative engine optimization. Optimizing for systems that generate an answer rather than retrieve a list. Which is, if you read that sentence twice, the same thing AEO just said.
LLMO is large language model optimization. The same work, named after the technology instead of the outcome.
AIO is AI optimization, or AI overview optimization, or artificial intelligence optimization, depending on who is holding the invoice. It is the least settled of the five and the one most likely to mean whatever the seller needs it to mean.
Which Ones Are Actually The Same Thing
| Term | What it optimizes for | Different work? |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | Ranking in a list of links on Google and Bing | Yes, genuinely |
| AEO | Being named inside an AI answer | Yes, genuinely |
| GEO | Being named inside an AI answer | No, same as AEO |
| LLMO | Being named inside a chatbot answer | No, same as AEO |
| AIO | Depends entirely who is selling it | No, and often nothing |
Two columns of that table are honest and three are marketing. AEO, GEO and LLMO describe one discipline that the industry named three times in eighteen months because everybody wanted to plant a flag on it. The tactics are identical: make your business unambiguous to a machine, get credible third parties to corroborate it, and publish direct answers to the questions your buyers actually ask.
If an agency charges you separately for AEO and GEO, they are charging you twice for one thing. That is not a subtle scam. It is just a scam with good branding.
The One Split That Is Real
There is exactly one meaningful division in that list, and it is SEO on one side and everything else on the other.
SEO is a competition for position. You want to be higher on a list than somebody else, and the list has ten slots, and the game is legible. AEO is a competition for inclusion. There is no position four in an AI answer. You are named or you are not.
That changes what you optimize. Ranking rewards depth, backlinks and authority at the domain level. Inclusion rewards clarity, corroboration and the ability to be quoted in forty words. A page that ranks third on Google and a page that gets lifted into an AI answer often are not the same page, and frequently are not even on the same site. We covered how far apart they really are in Is SEO Dead, which, spoiler, it is not.
What You Actually Need To Buy
Two things, not five.
One: traditional SEO. Still the substrate. AI does not invent its recommendations out of nothing, it reads what is already indexed, structured and credible. A site that Google cannot crawl is a site ChatGPT has never heard of. Search demand for the word SEO is falling and it is still many times larger than every AI acronym put together, which tells you where your competitors' customers are still looking.
Two: one AI visibility program, under whatever name. Call it AEO, call it GEO, call it whatever the contract says. Judge it on the deliverables, not the letters. A real one covers entity and identity cleanup, review and citation building, direct answer content, structured data, and actual tracking of whether you are being named. Our one plan for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot is that scope written out.
What you do not need is a separate invoice for each acronym, a "GEO audit" that is a rebadged SEO audit, or anybody who cannot tell you in one sentence what their letters mean. Ask them. The ones who fumble it are selling vocabulary.
How To Read A Proposal Now
Four questions, and you can ask all of them in a single email.
- What does your acronym mean, in one sentence, without using another acronym? If they need a paragraph, they are improvising.
- Which platforms will you track me on, and how will you show me? ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot behave differently. "AI" is not a platform.
- What are you doing off my website? This is the one that separates the real from the repackaged. Most of what decides an AI recommendation is not on your site at all, which is a longer story and how AI picks local businesses tells part of it.
- What does it cost and when do I see movement? We published our own answer on cost and timeline so you have something to hold theirs against.
Dale picked the agency that answered all four without flinching. It was not the cheapest proposal and it was not the one with the newest acronym. It was the one that could explain itself.
If you want to know where you stand before anybody sells you anything, the 20-minute AI visibility audit is free and takes exactly as long as it says.
Questions People Ask
What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
In practice, nothing. Answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization describe the same work: making your business the one named inside an AI-generated answer. The tactics, deliverables and measurement are identical. The two names exist because the industry coined them independently within about a year of each other.
Is GEO or AEO the more widely used term?
GEO currently attracts noticeably more search demand than AEO, roughly twice as much by recent measurement, though AEO is more common among agencies selling to local and service businesses. Neither has won. Pick the one your buyers say and stop worrying about it.
Do I need SEO if I am doing AEO?
Yes. AI systems read what is already indexed, structured and credible. Traditional SEO is the substrate the AI layer draws from, so a site with broken SEO fundamentals is invisible to both. They are complements, not replacements.
What does LLMO mean?
Large language model optimization: optimizing so large language models like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can find, understand and cite your business. It is the same work as AEO, named after the technology rather than the outcome.
Should I pay separately for SEO, AEO and GEO?
No. Pay for SEO and pay for one AI visibility program. An agency billing you separately for AEO and GEO is billing you twice for one scope of work.
Which acronym will win?
Nobody knows, and it matters less than it sounds. The work is stable even while the vocabulary churns. Optimize for being named in the answer and you are covered whatever the invoice ends up calling it.