AI SEO terminology: what AEO, GEO, LLMO, AIO and local SEO actually mean

I sat down one afternoon to see how other people describe the work I do. I opened four websites offering the same service, and they called it four different things.

Not to copy anyone. I wanted to know what language a practice owner would run into if they went looking, so that I would recognise it when somebody quoted it back at me.

The first called it AI SEO. The second called it AEO. The third called it LLM SEO in one place and AEO in another. The fourth used three different terms on a single page, without acknowledging anywhere that they were three names rather than three services.

I closed the fourth tab thinking I had missed something. Some settled definition that everybody else had and I did not.

There is no settled definition. That is the finding, and it took me a while to accept it.

Why the naming is a mess

The change these words describe is about three years old. Search engines began answering questions directly instead of only listing pages, and a set of new systems began answering them without a results page at all.

When something moves that quickly, the naming happens before the agreement. Several people describe the same shift at the same time, each invents a term, and all of them survive because each one has somebody using it. There is no committee. There is no standard. There is no memo you failed to receive.

If you have found this confusing, the confusion is accurate. You are not behind. Here is what I found each one actually means.

SEO — search engine optimisation

The parent term, in use since the late 1990s. Arranging a website so that search engines can read it, understand what it covers, and show it to people looking for that subject.

Everything below is built on this. None of the newer words replaces it, whatever anybody tells you. A site that search engines cannot read properly will not be found by the newer systems either, because most of them still depend on a search index underneath.

Local SEO

The oldest of the specialisations and the one with the clearest meaning. It is about appearing when somebody searches for a service near a place — a physiotherapist in a suburb, a dentist in a postcode, support coordination in a region.

It works differently from ordinary SEO because the result on the page is different. Google shows a map with three listings above the ordinary results, and what puts a business into that map is not the same as what puts a page at the top of the list below it.

Three things carry most of the weight.

• Distance. The physical gap between the searcher and your front door affects whether you appear. Nobody can optimise that away, and it means your results differ depending on where the person searching is standing.
• The listing rather than the website. Your Google Business Profile is a separate thing from your website, with its own categories, description, photographs and reviews. A practice can have an excellent website and a neglected listing, and in local search the listing frequently matters more.
• Consistency. Whether your business name, address and telephone number are written the same way everywhere they appear. Small inconsistencies accumulate into uncertainty about whether these are all the same business.

For most practices this describes the largest part of the work that actually needs doing, and it has nothing whatever to do with artificial intelligence. I say that plainly because local search was reshaped years before AI arrived and the fundamentals have not changed since. Anybody selling you an AI-era service who has not looked at your Google Business Profile has skipped the part most likely to make a difference.

AEO — answer engine optimisation

This one is older than the AI wave, which surprised me.

It originally described getting your content into the answer box at the top of a Google results page — the featured snippet — and into the replies given by voice assistants. That was a real discipline with real techniques well before generative AI arrived: clear question-and-answer structure, direct answers stated early, content formatted so a machine could lift a definition out of it cleanly.

Since roughly 2023 the term has been reused to mean getting into AI answers as well. So a page using AEO might mean the older thing, the newer thing, or both without distinguishing them. I have found the publication date of the page is usually a better guide than its text.

GEO — generative engine optimisation

This is the only one of them with a formal definition behind it. It comes from an academic paper published in November 2023, freely readable at arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735.

Worth one aside before the definition. Two separate summaries told me where that paper came from, and they contradicted each other. Neither matched the paper. It took reading the first page to find that out, and it is the reason I now go to the source whenever a claim is going to end up in something I publish.

What GEO means: visibility inside an AI-generated answer, rather than a position in a list of links. The argument in the paper is that traditional SEO does not transfer directly, because a generative system is not matching keywords — it is reading, summarising, and deciding what to cite.

What the GEO paper actually found

The figure everybody quotes is that these methods improved visibility by up to forty per cent. That number is real. It was measured across a benchmark of ten thousand queries.

It is also a controlled-experiment result on a test set. It is not a figure anybody can promise you for your website, and if somebody quotes it at you as though they can, that tells you something about them.

What is more interesting is which methods worked and which did not.

There is a plain reading of all this. What improves visibility in AI answers is roughly what makes writing genuinely good: specific, sourced, clear, and honest about where its facts came from. That is not a coincidence and it is not marketing. It is what the measurement showed.

The finding in that paper that matters most for a small practice

The authors also tested what happens when every source in a set is optimised, and looked at the results by where each site already ranked in ordinary search.

Lower-ranked sites gained substantially more of the answer than higher-ranked ones did, and the top-ranked site's share fell. The share is finite — an answer is one paragraph, so when every source improves they are dividing the same paragraph differently.

The explanation given is straightforward. Traditional search rankings depend heavily on things that favour large established organisations — the number of other sites linking to you, the age and authority of your domain. Those are difficult for a small business to build. But a generative system reads the content of the page. It is not counting your backlinks in the same way.

At the answer stage, a small practice competes on the quality of its text rather than on the authority of its domain.

I would not overstate this. It is one finding, in one paper, in one experimental setup, and the authors themselves note that these systems will keep changing. But it is the most encouraging piece of evidence I have found for a small practice, and it comes from peer-reviewed research rather than from somebody selling a service.

LLMO — large language model optimisation

Coined by practitioners rather than researchers, at roughly the same time as GEO, and overlapping with it heavily.

Where the emphasis differs: LLMO tends to be used for whether a system recognises your business exists at all — knows the practice, knows what it does, knows where it is, and can distinguish it from a similarly named business somewhere else. That is a question about entity recognition rather than about any particular page being cited.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A practice can have well-written pages that a system will happily cite when asked about a topic, while that same system does not reliably know the practice itself exists as a business. Those are two different problems requiring two different fixes.

LLM SEO

Used interchangeably with LLMO by most people who use it, and I have not found a consistent distinction between them.

What I find interesting is the phrasing rather than the definition. LLM SEO keeps the letters SEO inside it. LLMO drops them.

That is a small choice with a position embedded in it. Keeping SEO in the name says this is a continuation of an existing discipline. Dropping it says this is a new thing. The people who use each form generally do believe the corresponding thing, and if you notice which form somebody uses, you have learned something about how they think about the work before they have said a word about it.

For what it is worth, my own view is that it is a continuation. But that is a view, not a fact, and the naming is not evidence either way.

AIO — and this is the one that caught me out

I assumed AIO meant AI optimisation. It does, for some people.

For others it means AI Overview optimisation — appearing specifically in the AI-generated summary that Google places above its ordinary results.

Those are not the same objective. The first is a broad aim across many systems. The second is a specific target on one surface of one search engine. I could not always tell from context which was meant, and in at least one case I do not think the writer had decided.

If somebody uses AIO with you, it is entirely reasonable to ask which they mean.

AI SEO — ambiguous in a way that costs money

This is the term I use, and looking into it properly made me more careful about how I use it.

It gets used to mean using AI tools to do the optimisation work — drafting content faster, clustering keywords, running technical audits at scale. It also gets used to mean optimising so that AI systems find and recommend you.

Those are close to opposite propositions. The first describes how the supplier works internally. The second describes what you receive. A supplier could deliver the first perfectly while doing nothing at all about the second.

A practice owner being sold AI SEO is entitled to ask which is on offer, because the answer changes what the money buys. For the avoidance of doubt on this site: I mean the second.

SGE — a name that is retired, and why it is still useful

SGE stood for Search Generative Experience. It was Google's own name for its AI-generated answers during the period when the feature was being tested rather than fully released.

Google later renamed it. The AI-generated summary that now appears above ordinary results is called an AI Overview, and the separate conversational version is called AI Mode. SGE, as a name, no longer refers to anything Google currently offers.

The term still appears in a great deal of published material, and this is where it becomes useful to you. If you find a guide, an agency page or an article still using SGE as a current term, it was written before the rename and has not been revisited since. That tells you the material is at least a year or two old without your having to judge whether its content is right.

In a field where a great deal of published advice is simply old, having a quick way to date something is worth more than it sounds. I now use it exactly that way. It is the fastest single check I know for whether a page has been maintained.

One caution: some writers still use SGE deliberately as a shorthand for the whole category of AI answers, knowing perfectly well that Google retired the name. Context usually makes it obvious which is happening.

What actually differs, once the words are set aside

Underneath the vocabulary, most of the work is shared. Content that answers a real question clearly. A site a machine can read without difficulty. Accurate and consistent information about the business. Being mentioned somewhere other than your own website. All of that serves every objective on the list.

The genuine differences are narrower than the naming suggests.

The reason to hold both readings of AI SEO and AIO in mind is that the ambiguity is where money goes missing. A supplier can honestly say they do AI SEO while meaning only the first reading, and you can honestly hear the second.

What I would ask, if somebody used one of these words at me

Not which term is correct. Nobody has settled that, and anybody who tells you it is settled is describing a preference rather than the state of the field.

I would ask three things.

• What will you actually do? An answer naming specific work on specific surfaces is useful whatever it is called. An answer that mostly defends the acronym is not.
• Where will I be able to see it? Some of this work is visible to you directly — a listing you can look at, pages you can read, an answer you can go and ask a system for yourself. Some of it is not. Know which you are buying.
• What can you not do? Anybody working honestly in this field can name several things. Distance from the searcher. The age of your business. Whether a system happens to answer the same question differently tomorrow. A supplier who cannot name a single limitation has either not thought about it or is not telling you.

The question underneath all of it

Whatever word is used, the same thing sits underneath. When somebody searches for what you do rather than for your name, do you appear?

You can answer that yourself in about thirty seconds. Search your practice name. Then search what you actually do, the way a stranger would phrase it. Signed out, on a phone. Notice whether you appear at all, rather than where you rank.

If the first search works and the second does not, the acronym does not matter. The gap does.

Checked against live sources on 18 August 2026. Terminology in this field is unsettled and platform behaviour changes. Verify before relying on any detail here.