Three acronyms, one job. LLMO, GEO and AEO are the three names floating around for "get my brand cited inside an AI answer." They were coined by different sub-communities, they map to slightly different surfaces, but the actual technical work overlaps by about 80%. This post is the cheat sheet I wish I'd had when buyers started asking which one I do.
Short answer: I do all three. They share the same foundation. Below is the long answer, including which term to actually use when you're pitching internally.
The 30-second answer
Anyone telling you these are different disciplines is selling you three contracts. Anyone telling you they're identical is missing nuance that occasionally matters. The honest read is: 80% identical foundation, 20% emphasis difference depending on which surface you care about most.
LLMO — large language model optimization
Coined inside the LLM developer community around 2023-2024. Broadest of the three. Covers any work that gets your brand cited inside an LLM response — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, plus the enterprise wrappers like Cursor (Claude inside a code editor), Continue, and any internal LLM a company has built on top of an API.
LLMO emphasis tends to be technical: schema completeness, llms.txt files, entity resolution, sameAs links. Lighter on classic SEO content marketing language. Resonates with engineering and AI product audiences.
When LLMO is the right term to use
- You're pitching to an AI product team or developer-tools company.
- The buyer has an engineering background and respects technical specificity.
- Your scope includes optimization for code-editor LLMs (Cursor, Continue, GitHub Copilot Chat).
GEO — generative engine optimization
Coined by SEO researchers around the Google AI Overview rollout in 2024-2025. Specifically targets generative-search surfaces. The canonical example is Google AI Overview, but some practitioners stretch GEO to cover all AI engines.
The narrower definition (Google-specific) is more useful in my opinion. If GEO means "everything," it's just a synonym for LLMO and the acronym carries no information. Reserve it for Google-AI-Overview work and the term earns its keep.
When GEO is the right term to use
- The buyer came up through classic SEO and lives in Google Search Console.
- The primary KPI is brand appearances inside Google AI Overviews specifically.
- You're integrating into an existing SEO retainer where the team already knows the GEO term.
AEO — answer engine optimization
The oldest of the three. Originated in voice-search and featured-snippet work in the late 2010s. Now retrofitted to cover AI assistants. The most common search term among buyers in 2026.
Two reasons AEO won the search-volume race: the older AEO community already had the vocabulary, and "answer engine" describes what ChatGPT and Claude actually are. Buyers searching for help framing it that way is intuitive.
When AEO is the right term to use
- Selling to non-technical buyers (founders, marketing leads, agency clients).
- Your traffic strategy depends on capturing the AEO search term itself.
- You want one term that covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity without sub-disciplines.
Where the technical work overlaps
All three converge on the same foundation. If you've done one, you've done about 80% of the other two:
- Schema completeness — Organization, FAQPage, Article, Service, BreadcrumbList. Same JSON-LD blocks, same sameAs links to Wikidata.
- Entity clarity — your brand resolves to a single canonical entity across the web, not a fragmented set.
- Answer-format content — claim-plus-example pattern beats long marketing paragraphs across every engine.
- Freshness signals — explicit dateModified when the content actually changes.
- llms.txt at root — same file format, same engines parse it.
Where the terms diverge in practice
LLMO emphasis
Developer-side optimization. API response structure. Code-editor wrappers. README and SDK docs. The work that gets your brand cited when a developer asks Cursor "which library handles X."
GEO emphasis
Google Search Console alignment. Helpful-content guidelines. AI Overview appearance rate. The work that gets your brand into the box at the top of Google Search results.
AEO emphasis
FAQ patterns. Voice-search legacy carryover. Conversational answer format. The work that gets your brand named when a buyer asks an assistant a question in plain English.
These are differences of emphasis, not fundamentals. Schema and llms.txt are doing the heavy lifting across all three. The emphasis difference matters at the margin — maybe the last 15-20% of citation rate lift.
Which term to use when pitching internally
Use whichever your stakeholders already recognise. Concretely:
- Marketing or founder-led teams → AEO. Highest recognition outside SEO circles.
- Engineering or AI product teams → LLMO. Resonates with the developer crowd.
- Classic SEO teams → GEO. Slots into the existing SEO vocabulary cleanly.
- Hybrid teams → AEO primary, mention LLMO and GEO once each as "also known as."
I lead with AEO on skynetjoe.com because the search volume favours it. Inside individual client pitches, I switch to whichever term the buyer already uses. The work doesn't change. The label does.
How agencies position around the terms
Most agencies in 2026 list all three on their service pages to capture search volume across the variants. That's the right call — there's no penalty for stacking the synonyms and the search-term capture is real.
What's wrong is selling three separate engagements for what's the same underlying work. If an agency quotes you "AEO retainer plus LLMO retainer plus GEO retainer," you're paying for the same audit three times. One engagement, one team, one workstream — three terms on the invoice line is fine, three workstreams is not.
The honest measurement frame across all three
Regardless of which acronym, the measurement is the same:
- Pick 20 buyer queries you want to win.
- Run them weekly against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity.
- Log citation rate (percent of prompts that name your brand).
- Correlate to brand search lift in Google Search Console.
- Correlate to direct traffic in your analytics.
If you're doing this manually with a Google Sheet, you're already ahead of 90% of teams that bought "AEO services" in 2025. The tooling matters less than the discipline of running the prompt set every week without changing it.
Frequently asked questions
Which term should I search for to hire an agency?
AEO has the highest search volume. LLMO surfaces more engineering-flavoured agencies. GEO surfaces classic-SEO-pivoting agencies. All three lead to roughly the same expertise pool, just sorted slightly differently.
Is one of these terms going to win and the others die?
Unclear in 2026. AEO has the head start in search volume. LLMO has the engineering audience. GEO has the SEO-community adoption. Most likely all three persist as overlapping terms for at least another two years.
Do the three terms describe identical work?
About 80% identical. Differences are in emphasis (engine focus, vocabulary, target buyer), not in the underlying technical fixes. Anyone selling them as fundamentally different disciplines is overcharging.
Should my agency be called an AEO agency or an LLMO agency?
Whichever your target buyer searches for. We use AEO primary at SkynetLabs because search volume favours it, with LLMO and GEO mentioned as supporting terms on service pages.
Are there tools specific to each term?
Profound and Athena HQ market under AEO primarily. Some newer entrants market under LLMO. Tooling does not divide cleanly by term — most tools handle all four major engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) regardless of which acronym they front.
Does Google reward content that uses these acronyms?
Not directly. Google rewards content that answers the buyer query well. Acronym usage matters for capturing the search query for the term itself, not for ranking unrelated pages. Don't keyword-stuff "AEO LLMO GEO" into pages that aren't about the disciplines.
Bottom line
Three acronyms, one job. Pick the term your audience uses. Ship the same foundation work underneath. Measure with a fixed prompt set every week. Don't pay three retainers for what's one engagement.
If you want me to audit your current AEO/LLMO/GEO setup, the discovery call is the same call regardless of which acronym you booked it under. The work is the work.