What is SEO for AI called? GEO, AEO, LLMO and the other names, explained.

1. Every name for SEO for AI, in one table.

The field named itself several times in three years, from different corners of the industry. Researchers said GEO. People who had spent years chasing featured snippets said AEO. Practitioners watching ChatGPT pick some brands and ignore others said LLMO. Vendors selling to buyers said AI search optimization. Wikipedia's article on the topic files them as overlapping terms for related practices and notes there is no consensus definition. Here is the full set, with where each one came from.

If you only keep one line from this page: GEO is the most common name, AEO is the oldest, LLMO is the narrowest, and AI search optimization is the one a non-specialist understands without a footnote. The rest are variants or retired labels. Tool vendors use all of them interchangeably, which is why the same product can turn up in a roundup of the best GEO tools and in a list of AEO tools at the same time.

2. GEO: the name with a research paper behind it.

Generative engine optimization is the only name on the list with a clear birth certificate. Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande posted a paper titled GEO: Generative Engine Optimization to arXiv on November 16, 2023, and it was accepted to KDD 2024, a major data mining conference. The paper calls LLM-powered search systems generative engines and introduces GEO as a way for content creators to raise their visibility in the answers those engines write. Our generative engine optimization guide covers the method end to end.

The paper also measured something, which most of the vocabulary in this field does not. Across a benchmark of about 10,000 queries, adding statistics, quotations and cited sources raised a page's visibility in generated answers by up to 40%, and the authors note the effect varied by domain. That is the strongest evidence anyone has that specific content edits move AI citations.

One trap comes with the name. In SEO, geo has meant location for years: geo-targeting, geo pages, local packs. Generative engine optimization has nothing to do with local search, and our GEO vs SEO breakdown untangles the two meanings and the overlap with classic SEO. Use GEO when you talk to marketers and tool vendors, because it carries the most shared meaning. If you want the work done rather than explained, that is the job of a GEO agent.

3. AEO: the older name, from the featured snippet era.

Answer engine optimization predates the AI chat boom. It grew up around featured snippets, answer boxes and voice assistants, when Google started answering questions directly on the results page. Jason Barnard is usually credited with the term, and his company Kalicube dates it to 2017, though that credit is self-reported. The aim then was the same as now: be the answer a search surface shows, not a link below it. Our answer engine optimization guide covers the method.

The meaning has stretched since. Microsoft Advertising's January 2026 guide, From Discovery to Influence: A Guide to AEO and GEO, expands AEO as answer or agentic engine optimization and defines it around content that AI assistants and agents can retrieve, interpret and present as direct answers. In practice AEO now covers ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews as much as snippets. The AEO agent page shows what that looks like when it runs every day.

Use AEO when your audience came up through featured snippets and voice search, or when you are hiring for it, because agencies often sell the work under this name. If you are comparing agencies, our page on AEO services sets out what a retainer usually covers.

4. LLMO and LLM SEO: optimizing for the model itself.

Large language model optimization is the practitioner name. Nobody has a solid claim to coining it, and glossaries date it anywhere from 2023 to 2025. It is used less than GEO in English, but it puts the stress somewhere useful: on what the model itself knows and says about you, not only on which pages a search step pulls in.

That split maps onto real crawlers, because the companies behind the big assistants run separate bots for training and for search. GPTBot collects content that may be used to train the models behind ChatGPT, while OAI-SearchBot indexes pages for ChatGPT search. ClaudeBot collects content for Claude's training, Claude-SearchBot indexes pages for its search answers, and Claude-User fetches a page when someone asks Claude about it. Perplexity runs PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User. LLMO covers both lanes: the training lane shapes what a model says from memory, and the search lane decides whether it can cite your page today. The ClaudeBot guide walks through the robots.txt rules for each of Claude's bots.

LLM SEO is the same idea with the older acronym attached. If that is the phrase you searched, our LLM SEO page explains it in full, and the roundup of LLM SEO tools covers the software. One thing LLMO is not: a file. Google says its Search ignores llms.txt, and the llms.txt guide covers what the file does and does not do.

5. The plain-English name: AI search optimization, AI SEO and AIO.

If you need one name a CEO or a client understands without a glossary, it is AI search optimization. It says what the work is for, it needs no acronym, and it covers every surface at once: ChatGPT search, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, AI Overviews and AI Mode. It is the name on our AI search optimization page for exactly that reason.

AI SEO is shorter, but it carries two meanings. Sometimes it means SEO for AI answers. Just as often it means doing ordinary SEO with AI tools: keyword research, briefs and drafts produced by a model. Check which one a vendor means before you buy. The second meaning is what our page on AI SEO tools is about.

AIO is the most confusing of the lot. It can mean AI optimization, the umbrella, or AI Overviews optimization, which is one Google surface. If someone says AIO, ask which. For the Google surface, our guide on how to rank in AI Overviews is the deep dive. SGE optimization is a retired name for the same thing: Google launched its Search Generative Experience as a Search Labs test in May 2023 and renamed it AI Overviews in May 2024. And search everywhere optimization is broader still: it treats AI answers as one surface among many beyond Google.

6. What Google calls it: still SEO.

On May 15, 2026, Google published Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search, its first full guide to AI Overviews and AI Mode. It takes the naming question head on. It spells out AEO as answer engine optimization and GEO as generative engine optimization, calls them terms you may see used to describe work on visibility in AI search experiences, and then gives its own answer: “From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”

The same guide is blunt about the tactics sold under the new names. It says you do not need new machine readable files, AI text files, markup or Markdown to appear in Google Search, that Google Search ignores llms.txt files, that there is no requirement to break content into tiny pieces, that you do not need to write in a special way for generative AI search, and that chasing inauthentic mentions across the web is not as helpful as it might seem. Google speaks only for Google, and ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity run their own retrieval. But the core transfers, and Google applies the same view to the conversational tab covered in our Google AI Mode SEO guide.

So which name should you use? The one your audience already uses, and then judge the work by its scope, not its acronym. GEO with marketers and tool vendors. AEO with people who came up through snippets. AI search optimization with executives and clients. And SEO, as Google does, when you decide where the budget comes from: the same pages, the same crawl access and the same authority do most of the lifting.

7. The work is the same under every name.

Strip the labels off and every version of SEO for AI comes down to six jobs. A GEO agency, an AEO consultant and an LLMO tool will each describe them differently, but this is what they are doing.

1. Crawl access. Googlebot for AI Overviews and AI Mode, OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User for Claude, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User for Perplexity. Blocking a search crawler can keep you out of that product's answers.
2. Answer-first pages. One question per section, with the answer in the first two sentences under a heading phrased like the question.
3. Sourced facts. Numbers with a date and a named source. The GEO paper's biggest gains came from exactly this.
4. Coverage of the sub-questions. The definition, the how to, the cost, the comparison and the common problems each get their own section or page, linked together.
5. Real brand mentions. Your name on the reviews, roundups and forums that describe your category, earned rather than seeded.
6. Measurement. A fixed list of prompts checked every month, or a tracker. Our list of AI visibility tools compares the trackers.

The engine-by-engine guides go deeper on each surface: how to rank in ChatGPT, how to get cited with Perplexity SEO, and the AI search engines worth checking. Job one is an afternoon. Jobs two to four are the expensive ones, because they are not a project. They are a publishing habit, and most teams cannot keep it up.

A worked example: one proposal, four acronyms.

Harbor Ledger is a fictional bookkeeping SaaS on the reserved harborledger.example domain. The company, the proposal and the scope below are invented to show the method. Its founder asked an agency for help getting cited in ChatGPT and AI Overviews, and the proposal came back with four line items, each with its own monthly fee.

PROPOSAL · AI VISIBILITY PROGRAM · HARBOR LEDGER
01  GEO audit and strategy
02  AEO content optimization
03  LLMO brand authority program
04  AI SEO monitoring and reporting

Read past the names and map each line to the six jobs above. The GEO audit is crawl access plus a content gap list. AEO content optimization is answer-first rewrites of existing pages. The LLMO program is brand mentions. AI SEO monitoring is measurement. Nothing is wrong with any single line, but the names overlap, and not one of them says how many new pages get written. Rewritten by job, the same program reads like this:

SCOPE · REWRITTEN BY JOB · HARBOR LEDGER
01  Crawl access     Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot,
                     PerplexityBot allowed in robots.txt and the CDN.
                     One-off.
02  Existing pages   Top 15 pages rewritten answer-first, every
                     figure dated and sourced. Month 1.
03  New pages        20 pages a month, one per buyer question,
                     linked to the hub page. Ongoing.
04  Mentions         Listed on the category reviews, roundups and
                     directories. Ongoing.
05  Measurement      25 fixed prompts checked in ChatGPT, Claude,
                     Gemini and Perplexity. Monthly.

The rewrite does two things. It makes proposals comparable, because a second agency can now price the same five jobs. And it shows where the effort goes: line 03 is most of the work and most of the result, and it is the line the four-acronym version left vague. The founder kept line 01 in-house (an afternoon in robots.txt and the CDN settings), bought lines 02, 04 and 05, and went looking for a cheaper way to cover line 03. Whatever an agency calls the program, ask for the page count.

Common mistakes with the names for SEO for AI.

1. Paying for each acronym separately. Agencies price what buyers ask for, and buyers ask for the name they read last. GEO, AEO and LLMO line items overlap. Price the jobs instead.
2. Reading GEO as local SEO. Geo has meant location in SEO for years, so the mix-up is natural. If a local SEO vendor pitches GEO, check which of the two they mean before you sign.
3. Treating LLMO as a file. An llms.txt file is quick to ship and easy to invoice, which is why it gets sold. Google says its Search ignores the file. Spend the time on the pages.
4. Blocking the wrong crawler. Blocking GPTBot or ClaudeBot to keep content out of model training is a fair call. Blocking OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot by accident, with a wildcard rule or a CDN bot setting, can take you out of those products' answers.
5. Calling a tracker optimization. AI visibility tools count citations. They do not write the pages that earn them. A dashboard full of prompts you do not appear in is a to-do list, not progress.
6. Dropping SEO for the new name. The acronyms make it sound like a separate channel. Google's own guide calls it still SEO, and the answers you want to appear in still pull from pages that are crawlable, indexed and worth citing.