Everyone's Selling You a New Acronym for AI Search

If you have been anywhere near marketing content this year, you have been told that SEO is dead and you now need AEO. Or GEO. Or LLMO. Or AIO.

Short version: most of these words mean the same thing, none of them is official, and the change underneath the vocabulary is real even though most of the vocabulary is marketing.

I look after about thirty small business websites. Here is what each term means and which ones deserve your attention.

SEO — Search Engine Optimization

The original. Getting your site to rank in the list of links. It still exists, still works, and is still the foundation everything else sits on. Nobody replaced it. The results page just has more things above it now.

AEO — Answer Engine Optimization

Getting your business named in the answer rather than in the links below it. An "answer engine" is anything that replies with writing instead of results: ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot.

The practical difference from SEO is small but real. SEO wants you to be clickable. AEO wants you to be quotable.

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization

The same thing as AEO. The term came out of an academic paper, which arguably makes it the more official of the two. In everyday use people use AEO and GEO interchangeably, including the companies selling tools for both.

If someone tells you they are different disciplines needing separate retainers, be careful.

LLMO — Large Language Model Optimization

Also the same thing, named after the technology instead of the behaviour. Less common, and mostly seen in more technical writing.

AIO — AI Optimization

The vaguest of the four. Sometimes it means everything above. Sometimes it means using AI tools to do your marketing, which is a completely different activity. Ask which one is meant before you agree to anything.

AI Overviews and AI Mode

Not disciplines. These are Google features: the summary at the top of a normal results page, and the fuller conversational version. People sometimes talk about them as things you optimize for separately. You do not. They are two of the places your result shows up.

So Which One Is Correct?

There is not an answer, and that is not me dodging. No standards body owns these terms. Wikipedia's own entry on generative engine optimization notes there is no agreed definition separating them and that they are used interchangeably in practice. Google's public position is that this is all just SEO.

My read: GEO is the more precise term, AEO is the one people actually say, and they describe the same work.

What Actually Changed, Which Is the Real Part

The vocabulary is noise. The shift underneath it is not.

Search results increasingly answer the question on the page instead of sending someone to a website. When that happens, the site that used to be first gets a fraction of the clicks it used to. Estimates of how big the drop is vary a lot and depend heavily on the kind of question being asked, but the direction is not in dispute.

The consequence for a small business is this. Your website used to be where your customers went. Now it is also where the AI goes to learn about you before it answers them. That is a different job. A storefront needs to look good. A source needs to be accurate, current, and readable by a machine.

What I Would Actually Do, No Acronym Required

Check what they currently say about you. Ask ChatGPT to recommend someone in your line of work near you. Do the same in Google and read the AI answer at the top. Look for three things: whether you appear, whether what it says is correct, and who appears instead.

Make your basic facts identical everywhere. Name, address, phone, hours, services. Your website, your Google Business Profile, every directory you are listed in. Inconsistency is the most common reason a model gets a business wrong.

Answer real questions in plain language. The ones customers actually ask, each answered in a paragraph that stands on its own. That is the format these systems lift from.

Keep it current. A page untouched since 2022 tends to lose to one that is not.

Do not block the crawlers. Check that your site is not refusing the AI crawlers by default. Some hosts and plugins do it without mentioning it.

None of that is new marketing. Most of it is the same advice as ten years ago, applied to a reader that is now a machine as often as a person.

The Short Answer

If someone quotes you for AEO, GEO, LLMO and AIO as four separate services, you are being sold vocabulary. Ask what they would actually change on your site. If the answer looks like the five things above, they are being straight with you.