LLM SEO, GEO and AEO: What You Are Actually Being Sold

Picture three proposals landing on your desk in the same month. One sells GEO. One sells AEO. The third sells LLM SEO and costs the most because it sounds the most technical. Which one do you need?

The honest answer is that you are being sold the same thing three ways. The names are real, and the shift behind them is real: buyers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini and the rest who to call, and the business those tools name gets the call. But the acronyms were coined by researchers, marketers and agencies at different times for overlapping ideas, and sales decks use whichever one sounds newest. This post is the glossary I wish every owner had before reading one: what each term means, what should land on your site, and how to test the company selling it.

What do LLM SEO, GEO and AEO actually mean?

LLM SEO. LLM stands for large language model, the technology inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the other assistants. The name describes the machine, not the work.

GEO, generative engine optimization. This one has the clearest origin. It comes from a 2023 research paper by academic researchers that studied how content gets picked up and quoted inside AI written answers. In a proposal, GEO usually means content and site changes aimed at being cited in an AI answer.

AEO, answer engine optimization. Older than GEO. It grew up around featured snippets and voice assistants, when the goal was to be the single answer read out loud. Today it means writing pages so a short, complete answer sits right under the question, where any engine can lift it.

AIO and AI SEO. AI optimization and AI SEO are the plain English versions. AIO is the name we use, and our what is AIO page explains the idea from the ground up. In 2026 a federal naming order added one more, super intelligence SEO, which I covered in what to ask before you pay for super intelligence SEO. Same work, new label.

Are GEO and AEO different from SEO, or the same work with a new name?

If you strip a good GEO proposal down to its line items, most of what is left is ordinary SEO done properly. That is the point. AI tools build their answers from pages they can find and trust, and those signals did not change because a chatbot is reading instead of a person.

The extras are real, and a company doing this work should be able to name them:

• Answer first writing. Every page and post opens each question with a short, complete answer before it explains. That is the passage an AI tool lifts.
• Open access for AI crawlers. Your robots file has to let the crawlers in. Plenty of sites block them by accident and never find out.
• Bing, not only Google. Several AI tools lean on Bing’s index, so your pages need to be submitted and indexed there too.
• Matching business details everywhere. An AI tool gets less confident about a business whose name, address and phone disagree across the web.
• Tracking the answers, not just the rankings. Someone has to ask the AI tools your buyers’ questions every week and record whether your name comes back.

If a company cannot show you the questions they ask and the answers they got, the acronym on the proposal is decoration. For a longer list of tells, my post on what AI SEO services are and who really does them covers the invoice side.

What are you actually buying when someone sells you GEO or AEO services?

When we built our own plans, we made a decision early: AI search work would not be an add on and would not get its own acronym line. It sits inside every plan, because it is the same pages, the same fixes and the same links doing double duty. What changes from plan to plan is how much content goes out, how many links and pages get built, and how many AI questions we track. You can see those counts on the plans page, and the AI SEO services page lays out how each piece is aimed at AI answers.

That is the shape I would look for in anyone’s offer. The shape to be wary of is a separate GEO retainer stacked on top of an SEO retainer from the same company. Ask what the GEO line delivers that the SEO line does not. If the answer is “it optimizes for AI,” ask for the list. A real answer sounds like “we rewrite your service pages answer first and check a written list of your buyer questions in each of the main AI tools every week.”

Why does every agency use a different acronym?

I have watched this happen in real time. In two years the same service has been pitched to owners as AI SEO, AIO, GEO, AEO, LLM SEO and now SI SEO. Each new term arrived with a fresh wave of proposals, and most of those proposals described work the owner was already paying for under a different heading.

The problem is never the name. It is using a name to justify a second invoice. If you want the full difference between GEO and classic SEO explained from the marketing side, Killerspots wrote a clear version in GEO vs SEO: the difference and why you need both, and their answer engine optimization explainer does the same for AEO.

What does Google say you need to do for AI search?

This is the part most sales decks leave out. In 2026 Google published guidance on its AI search features, and it reads like a list of myths. No special markup, no special file, no chopping content into small chunks for the AI. Its stated test is whether content is original and goes beyond common knowledge, which is the same standard it applies everywhere else.

It also says Google Search ignores llms.txt. We still set that file up on every plan, because other AI tools do read it and it costs nothing. But I would never tell a client it moves Google, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. When a company leans hard on a file, a markup trick or a special writing formula as the reason to buy GEO, they are selling the part of the work that matters least.

How do you test an acronym proposal before you sign?

A company that does the work can translate “GEO optimization” into “we will publish eight answer first posts a month and track one hundred buyer questions” without thinking. A company that cannot translate it has nothing underneath.

Three follow up questions finish the job:

Which AI tools do you check, and how often? A real answer names the tools and gives a schedule. We check ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity among others, every week, against a fixed list of questions.

Which questions do you ask them? They should be the questions your buyers actually type, written down, and you should get to see the list and change it.

What does the report show? The work by name, then what moved. If an AI mention is in the report, ask to see the answer itself, not a score.

And one thing nobody honest can promise: that a particular AI tool will name you. Mentions are earned like rankings. What a company can guarantee is the work, delivered and reported every month. If the proposal guarantees the result, read my post on SEO contracts before you sign it.

When is it too early to pay for AI search work?

The order matters. Get indexed, get your profile and listings right, and put a clear page on your site for each service you want to be called about. If your website is not showing up on Google at all, start with the seven causes, in the order to check them.

Once that groundwork exists, AI search work is not a separate project. It is the same monthly engine, aimed at being both ranked and named. That is how we run it as an SEO company for small business, and it is why you should never need to buy it twice.

Find out what the AI tools say about you today

Before you compare acronyms, find out where you stand. The free audit scores your site’s readiness for AI search along with its technical health, so you can see whether the crawlers can read you and what is missing. Then, if you want the work done, every plan includes AI search from day one, and every plan starts with a seven day free trial, month to month.