If you’ve looked into search marketing recently, you’ve probably met a growing list of acronyms. SEO is familiar. GEO and AEO are newer, and LLMO turns up too. They are often presented as separate disciplines, but in practice they describe one goal seen from different angles: making your website the clearest, most trustworthy source on its topic.
SEO: search engine optimization
SEO is the work of helping search engines find, understand and rank your pages. It covers technical health (can the page be crawled and indexed?), on-page relevance (does it clearly answer the search?), and authority (do other sites reference it?). Everything else in this article builds on it.
AEO: answer engine optimization
Answer engines are systems that respond to a question with a direct answer rather than a list of links — featured snippets, voice assistants and AI-generated summaries. AEO is about structuring content so it can be lifted as an answer: a clear question, a concise response near the top, and supporting detail below.
GEO: generative engine optimization
Generative engines, such as Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, write an answer by drawing on many sources. GEO focuses on being one of those sources: consistent facts about your business across the web, content that covers a topic thoroughly, structured data that removes ambiguity, and mentions on sites the systems already trust.
Where LLMO fits
LLMO (large language model optimization) is often used interchangeably with GEO. Some people use it more narrowly for how a brand is represented in a model’s general knowledge. Either way, nobody outside the companies that build these models can directly change what a model was trained on, so treat any promise to do so with suspicion.
What this means in practice
- Fix the SEO foundations first: if a page isn’t indexed or is unclear, no answer engine will use it.
- Write for questions: put a direct answer near the top of the page, then the detail.
- Be consistent: your business name, services and locations should match everywhere they appear.
- Measure honestly: AI answers vary between sessions, so record the date and exact prompt when you check them.
None of this can guarantee that a particular AI tool will cite you. But it makes your site a far better candidate — and it improves your ordinary search visibility at the same time.
