SEO gets your page ranked. AEO gets your brand quoted. GEO and LLMO are narrower names for parts of the same job. The short version: there is one discipline here with four labels, and the labels matter less than knowing which part of the work you are actually missing.
The acronyms arrived faster than the practice did, which is why the definitions conflict depending on who is selling. Here is a straight account of what each one means, where they genuinely differ, and where the distinction is marketing.
The short answer
| Term | Stands for | The job it describes | Success looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO | Search engine optimization | Being findable and ranked in a list of links | Position 1 to 3, clicks to your site |
| AEO | Answer engine optimization | Being retrieved, trusted and quoted inside a generated answer | Your brand named and cited in the answer |
| GEO | Generative engine optimization | Same job as AEO, named after the generative model rather than the answer | Appearing in generated output |
| LLMO | Large language model optimization | The model-facing slice: being learnable and retrievable by the model itself | The model can describe you accurately, unprompted |
What SEO is
Search engine optimization is the practice of making a website findable, crawlable, indexable and rankable by a search engine, so that it appears high in a list of results for a query.
It covers technical work (crawl paths, indexation, canonicals, speed), on-page work (titles, headings, internal links, content depth) and off-page work (links and mentions that establish authority). None of that has gone away. Every AI engine that cites a page found that page through the same crawling and indexing machinery search has always used.
What AEO is
Answer engine optimization is the practice of making a brand retrievable, understandable, trustworthy and quotable by systems that answer questions directly instead of returning a list of links.
In practice it adds five things on top of SEO:
- Entity clarity. AI systems answer from entities, not pages. Your name, what you do, who you serve and why you are credible have to agree across your site, your schema and the wider web.
- Answer-ready structure. Content written so a model can lift a clean, self-contained answer from it. Direct response first, supporting detail after.
- Structured data. Organization, Service, FAQPage and Article markup, correct rather than merely present.
- Crawler access. Whether GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended can actually reach you, and whether your robots.txt and llms.txt help or hinder.
- Citation measurement. Tracking where you are cited, mentioned, misrepresented or invisible, engine by engine.
What GEO is
Generative engine optimization is optimising to appear in output generated by an AI model rather than in a ranked list of links. Functionally it describes the same work as AEO. The difference is where the name points: GEO names the generative system, AEO names the answer it produces.
If a provider describes GEO and AEO as two separate services with two separate budgets, ask what one does that the other does not. In most cases the honest answer is nothing.
What LLMO is
Large language model optimization is the narrowest of the four. It concerns how a model itself represents your brand: whether it can describe you accurately without being handed a source, and whether it retrieves you when it goes looking.
It is a real slice of the work, and it is where entity consistency and off-site corroboration matter most, because a model’s idea of you is assembled from everywhere it has seen you, not just your website.
Where the distinction is real, and where it is marketing
Real: the difference between optimising for a ranked link and optimising for a citation. Those genuinely require different content structure, different measurement and different success criteria. A page can rank first and never be quoted. That happens constantly.
Marketing: the difference between AEO and GEO. They describe the same work. Choosing between them is a branding decision, not a strategic one.
Also real, and usually ignored: none of it works on a broken foundation. If your key pages sit six clicks from the homepage, your canonicals conflict, or half your content is off-topic, no amount of answer formatting will get you cited. AEO does not replace SEO. It sits on top of it, and it fails without it.
Which should you actually invest in
In order, and skipping ahead does not work:
- Technical foundations. Can engines crawl, index and understand your site at all? Get this wrong and everything downstream is wasted.
- Entity clarity. Does the web agree on who you are? This is the cheapest high-impact work most brands have never done.
- Answer-ready content on the pages that matter. Not all 200 blog posts. The ten pages tied to what you sell.
- Measurement. A citation baseline, so you can tell whether any of it worked.
The label you put on that sequence matters far less than doing it in that order.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between SEO and AEO?
SEO optimises for position in a list of ranked links. AEO optimises for being quoted inside a generated answer. They share technical foundations, but AEO adds entity clarity, answer-ready content structure, structured data, AI crawler access and citation measurement. A page can rank first and still never be cited.
Is GEO the same as AEO?
Functionally yes. Generative engine optimization and answer engine optimization describe the same work. GEO names the generative system producing the output, AEO names the answer itself. Providers selling them as two separate services with two budgets are selling a branding difference, not a strategic one.
What is GEO in SEO?
GEO in an SEO context means generative engine optimization: optimising so your content appears in answers generated by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini, rather than only in ranked search results. It is not geographic or local SEO, which is a separate discipline.
What is LLMO?
LLMO is large language model optimization: making sure a language model can represent your brand accurately and retrieve you when relevant. It is the narrowest of the four terms and focuses on the model’s own understanding of your entity, built from everywhere it has encountered you rather than from your website alone.
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. AEO sits on top of SEO and depends on it. AI engines discover content through the same crawling and indexing machinery search has always used. If crawl paths, indexation or canonicals are broken, answer formatting will not produce citations.
Which should a business invest in first?
Technical foundations first, then entity clarity, then answer-ready content on the pages tied to what you sell, then citation measurement. Skipping ahead does not work, and the label applied to that sequence matters far less than the order.
Kadima Digital is an AEO agency. If you want to know where your brand currently stands across the engines before deciding what to spend on, start with an AEO audit.