AEO, GEO, LLMO: What the AI Search Acronyms Actually Mean

Somebody emails you about AEO. A different agency's proposal says GEO. A LinkedIn post insists both are dead and it is LLMO now. A fourth calls the whole thing AI SEO.

Four names. Here is what each one actually means and where it came from. Here is how much of the work behind them genuinely differs.

The short version: not much.

Why there are four names

Nobody owns this vocabulary. There is no standards body for search marketing terminology, and there was a genuinely new thing to describe in 2023, so several people described it at once and each name has been pushed by whoever benefits from it.

Some of it is honest. The old vocabulary really did stop covering what was happening, because "ranking" makes no sense when the answer never shows a list. Some of it is a new line on a menu at a new price.

The terms, one at a time

SEO. Search engine optimization. The original. Making your site easy for a search engine to find, understand and rank, so it appears in the list of results. Coined in the mid-1990s and still the umbrella most of this sits under.

AEO. Answer engine optimization. Making your content usable as the answer itself. The term predates the current AI wave: it was used for winning featured snippets, knowledge panels and the "position zero" box at the top of Google, back when those were extracted from ordinary pages. It got picked up and widened to cover being the cited source inside an AI answer.

GEO. Generative engine optimization. This one has an actual origin, which is rare in this field. It was introduced in a research paper uploaded on 16 November 2023 by researchers affiliated with Princeton, the Allen Institute for AI, Georgia Tech and IIT Delhi, later published at the ACM SIGKDD conference in 2024. The paper defined the term and built a benchmark of roughly 10,000 queries. It then tested which content changes improved visibility inside generated answers. It reported improvements in the range of 22 to 41 percent from targeted changes.

That paper is the reason GEO is the closest thing to a standard name. It is also worth reading with the usual caution: it tested a benchmark rather than live commercial engines, and the engines have changed repeatedly since.

AIO. AI Overview optimization, sometimes AI optimization. Narrower, and specifically about getting cited in Google's AI Overview block, the summary that appears above the ordinary results.

LLMO. Large language model optimization, sometimes written LLM SEO. Framed around the model rather than the product: structuring information so a language model understands and represents your business correctly.

SGE. Retired. It stood for Search Generative Experience, Google's name for its AI results while they were an experiment. Google renamed the feature to AI Overviews. If a proposal still says SGE, it was written a while ago.

The one distinction worth keeping

If you want a real difference between the two main terms, it is scope.

AEO is about earning the citation. Being the source an answer quotes and links.

GEO is about the whole generated answer. Not only whether you are cited, but how the assistant describes you when it does, and whether you appear at all in the pool of businesses it considers.

That distinction is genuine and it matters at the strategy level. Where it stops mattering is the task list. Sit down and write out what you would actually do this month under each heading, and you get the same page: complete your listings, make your details agree everywhere, publish real answers to real questions, earn recent reviews, get mentioned by people who are not you.

Anybody who tells you these are separate services should be asked to write out both task lists side by side. That request usually ends the conversation.

What Google says about it

This is the part that gets left out of proposals.

Google's own documentation on its AI features, updated in December 2025, states there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and "no other special optimizations necessary." It goes further and specifically says site owners do not need to create new machine-readable files or AI text files or special structured data for these features.

Take that for what it is. Google has an interest in publishers not chasing a separate playbook, and Google is not the only answer engine in the room. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude are not covered by Google's guidance and they behave differently from each other.

What it does settle is the sales question. If an agency is charging you a separate monthly amount for GEO on top of an SEO retainer, and the deliverables are ordinary SEO deliverables, they are billing twice for one list of tasks. That is worth asking about directly.

It is also the reason we do not sell llms.txt as a lever. We generate one for our own site because it is free and accurate, and Google has stated plainly that it does not use it. There is more on that in what llms.txt is and whether you need one.

The list, whatever you call it

Here is the work, in the order that pays for a local service business. It is identical under all four acronyms.

1. Be findable at all. A complete Google Business Profile with the right primary category, and a site that is actually indexed.
2. Agree with yourself. Name, address and phone identical on your site, your profile and every directory. A machine assembling an answer treats disagreement as a reason to lower confidence and reach for a competitor instead. That is ordinary citation hygiene and it now pays twice.
3. Publish real answers. What a job costs, or the range and what moves it. How soon you can come. What happens on a first visit. What you take on and what you refer out. A page that says you are trusted and experienced cannot be quoted, because it answers nothing.
4. Get corroborated. Local news, a supplier's installer page, the chamber, a genuine roundup. If every source about you was written by you, you look thin.
5. Keep the reviews current. Recency counts more than the pile.
6. Measure it honestly. Ask the same questions every month and record what came back.

That is the whole thing. We went through where the real differences from classic SEO sit, and roughly how much overlaps, in AEO vs SEO for a local business.

Which word should you use?

For your own purposes it barely matters. There is no prize for the right acronym.

If you want the safest one, use AEO when you mean being quoted and cited, and GEO when you mean your overall presence inside AI answers. That matches how most careful people in the field use them, and it is what we mean on this site. If somebody uses them the other way around, they are not wrong, because nobody has the authority to be.

What matters is what appears on the invoice. Ask what will be done and in what order and how you will know whether it worked. Those three questions cut through every acronym anybody invents next.

Common questions