GEO, AEO, LLM SEO: What These Terms Actually Mean (And What You Need to Do)

If you have been in a marketing meeting recently and heard someone throw out "GEO" or "LLM SEO" and then watched the room nod along in uncertain silence, you are not alone. The past eighteen months have produced an acronym explosion around AI search that has left even experienced marketers confused about whether they need a fundamentally new strategy or whether someone is just repackaging familiar advice with a fresh label.

The honest answer is: a bit of both.

The Terminology Problem

Let me name the terms you are likely encountering:

AEO — Answer Engine Optimization. Optimising your content so that AI systems surface it as the answer to a question. The focus is on being the source an AI cites or quotes when a user asks something in a conversational interface.

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization. Optimising for visibility inside generative AI engines specifically — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini. The goal is to appear in the AI-generated response, not just the blue links beneath it.

LLM SEO. The same goal, named from the technology angle: large language models are now part of the search stack, so how do you get your brand, content, and expertise into what they produce?

These three terms describe overlapping phenomena. The distinctions between them are real but narrow, and the tactics that serve one generally serve all three. The reason we have three names instead of one is partly that different vendors coined their own terminology, and partly that "GEO" and "AEO" are now real search queries with real commercial intent. Buyers are typing them. So the industry is using them.

What Is Genuinely New

A few things have meaningfully changed with the rise of AI-generated answers, and they are worth taking seriously.

Entity clarity matters more than it did. Language models learn about your business from what they read across the web. If your name, category, location, and specialisation are described inconsistently across your website, your Google Business Profile, directories, and press mentions, you create ambiguity — and ambiguous entities get cited less. Consistency is not new advice, but the stakes for inconsistency are higher now.

Structured data is no longer optional. Schema markup helps AI systems understand what type of entity you are, what questions you answer, and whether you are the right source for a given query. A site with no schema is leaving information on the table.

Answer-first writing is rewarded more explicitly. AI systems are looking for passages they can quote or summarise. A page that buries its main point in paragraph seven is harder to surface than one that states the answer in the first sentence and then supports it.

Credentialing signals are under more scrutiny. E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) was already a Google concept, but AI systems lean on similar signals when deciding whose content to cite. Author bios, credentials, original research, third-party mentions — these are the signals that establish you as a trustworthy source worth quoting.

What Has Not Changed

High-quality content that genuinely answers real questions. A consistent NAP (name, address, phone) across local directories. Backlinks from authoritative sources. A technically healthy website. These are still the foundation. No GEO strategy will help a thin, untrustworthy site rank anywhere — in AI answers or traditional results.

The Practical Implication: You Do Not Have to Choose

The right approach serves traditional search and AI search simultaneously, because both are trying to do the same thing — identify trustworthy, authoritative sources that clearly answer user questions. The tactics are the same; the emphasis shifts slightly.

What I Actually Do With Clients

When I work with a business on AI search visibility, the work looks like this: I audit existing content for answer-first structure and rewrite where needed. I verify that schema is in place and accurate. I audit entity consistency — checking that the business is described the same way everywhere it appears. I look for gaps in credentialing: missing author information, no third-party mentions, expertise signals that live in the owner's head but not on the page. Then I build a plan that addresses traditional SEO and AI visibility at the same time, because the two strategies are not in competition.

Why the Terminology Matters Even If the Tactics Overlap

Here is the thing: even if "GEO" and "AEO" are largely the same idea with different names, the fact that buyers are searching for them means you need to know these terms to find the right help. If you search "how do I appear in ChatGPT results" and your agency has never heard of GEO, that is a signal. The vocabulary matters because it tells you whether someone is working in the current landscape or the previous one.

If you are trying to understand where your business stands right now — in both traditional search and AI-generated answers — start with my AI Visibility Checklist. If you want to talk through what this means specifically for your site, get in touch.