GEO vs SEO vs AEO vs LLMO: the terminology, explained

The four terms, side by side

SEO: optimize a page to rank in the classic list of search results. Success is a high position and a click.

AEO: optimize to win the featured snippet or direct answer a search engine shows above the links. Success is being the one boxed answer.

GEO: optimize to be surfaced and cited inside an answer that a generative model composes. Success is being named in the generated text.

LLMO: another name for GEO, emphasizing the large language model as the target. In practice GEO and LLMO describe the same work.

Why the words matter less than the overlap

The terms are argued over because the field is young. Chasing the label is a distraction. What matters is that all four reward the same fundamentals: content a machine can read, structure it can parse, facts it can trust, and sentences it can quote.

Do the fundamentals well and you tend to improve across all of them at once. A page that ranks in classic search is often the same page a model reads to compose an answer.

Frequently asked

Related

• Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a person or brand more likely to be surfaced, c
• How to appear in Google AI OverviewsGoogle AI Overviews are assembled from pages that rank and read cleanly for the query. Strong SEO, clear struc
• llms.txtllms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of a website that gives AI models a curated, readable map of the sit