GEO, AEO & LLMO: the new alphabet, explained
The three terms you'll hear most for AI-era optimization: what each means, how they differ, and what to actually do about them. Affects: AIO
Three names for one shift
As AI assistants answer more questions directly, the industry has coined competing names for optimizing your website for them. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the strongest broad term, born in a 2023 research paper (arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735): visibility inside answers produced by generative engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the marketer's term: becoming the answer, citation or recommendation rather than a blue link, covering older surfaces too (featured snippets, voice assistants, People Also Ask). LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) is the technical framing: how models understand your brand, retrieve your content, and summarize it accurately.
They overlap heavily. This site's umbrella term is plain-English AI Search Optimization; it's what the AIO score measures.
What actually changes in practice
- Crawl access decides everything: robots.txt now governs AI assistants too.
- Answers win: open pages with a 1–3 sentence direct answer an assistant can quote.
- Structure wins: descriptive H2 sections, FAQ schema on real FAQs, clean markup.
- Identity wins: consistent Organization schema and facts about who you are.
- Citations need dates: assistants prefer content they can date and attribute.
- And classic SEO still carries it: Google itself calls GEO and AEO emerging terminology, not replacements for SEO fundamentals.
Where to go deeper
Each term has a full page in our terminology hub (/terminology/geo, /terminology/aeo and /terminology/llmo), alongside nine more names you'll meet in the wild, from RAG Optimization to AI Citation Optimization. Your own site's AIO score breaks down the exact categories these practices feed.
See where your site stands on this: grade it and every check shows its evidence.
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