Field Guide › AEO, GEO, LLMO, SEO
AEO, GEO, LLMO, SEO — what do all these letters mean?
They mostly mean the same work. SEO is about showing up in Google's list of links. AEO, GEO and LLMO are all about getting named when the answer comes from an AI instead. Different sellers picked different letters. The work underneath is nearly the same, so nobody should charge you four times for it.
What does each one actually stand for?
Here they are, one sentence each. That's genuinely all they are.
- SEO — search engine optimization
- Getting your business into Google's list of blue links, so somebody scrolling that list finds you.
- AEO — answer engine optimization
- Getting your business named when a customer asks an AI assistant like ChatGPT who they should call.
- GEO — generative engine optimization
- Getting your business into the answer an AI writes, wherever it writes it: Google’s summary at the top of the page, Perplexity, Copilot, any of them.
- LLMO — large language model optimization
- The same goal as AEO with a different label. "Large language model" is the industry's name for the thing running ChatGPT.
None of these are official. Nobody at Google or OpenAI sat down and named them. They're labels the marketing world invented over the last few years, and they arrived faster than anyone agreed on what they meant.
Are these four different jobs or one job?
Close to one job. SEO is the base, and the other three are extensions of it rather than replacements for it.
The differences are real but small. Getting picked as a short answer rewards a page that says things plainly and gets to the point. Getting pulled into an AI summary rewards a page with enough depth behind it to be worth quoting. Getting named in a chat answer rewards being described the same way everywhere, including on sites other than your own.
Look at that list again. It's one instruction wearing three hats: be clear, be substantial, be consistent. A shop doing this properly does it once, and all three benefit.
Which one should I care about?
If you run a local service business, the answer-getting-named part is where your money is. Your customers ask short, specific questions with a town in them. "Who does emergency furnace repair near me." That kind of question is exactly what AI assistants are good at answering in one shot, and the answer names a handful of businesses, not fifty.
But you don't buy that as a separate product. You buy someone making your business easy to describe and hard to get wrong. That's the whole thing. The letters are just where the result shows up.
How do I tell if someone is explaining or selling?
Ask one question: what would you actually do for me in the first month?
A good answer is boring and specific. Fix what your website says about the towns you cover. Write out the questions people ask you on the phone. Get your hours and phone number matching everywhere they appear. Check whether the assistants currently name you.
A bad answer is more letters. If someone tells you they run AEO, GEO and LLMO as three separate services and can't explain the difference in words you already know, the letters are doing the selling. That is not knowledge. That is a way to make one job sound like three.
Common follow-ups
Is AEO just a new name for SEO?
Not quite, but it's closer than most sellers admit. AEO is not a replacement for SEO. It's the same work extended to a new place, because the answer a customer sees is now written by an AI instead of picked from a list of links.
Do I have to stop doing SEO?
No. Google still sends real customers, and the AI answers are built partly out of the same pages Google reads. Dropping your search work to chase AI answers would knock out the foundation the AI answers stand on.
Someone quoted me separately for AEO and GEO. Is that fair?
Ask what's different between the two lines. There's a real answer available, since the two lean on slightly different things. If they can't give it to you in one sentence you understand, you're being charged twice for one job.