The Difference Between GEO, AEO And LLM SEO

Keeping It Honest Two disciplines keep this from decaying. First, the answers have to be checked by somebody who knows the business, because a writer working from notes will approximate a figure and an approximation published as fact is a liability you carry rather than they do.

What the First Ninety Days Usually Look Like Most engagements open with a visibility audit rather than a content plan. There is no point writing anything until you know which prompts matter, which assistants answer them badly, and who is being named instead of you.

Where to Put Them Individual pages for questions with real volume and commercial weight, grouped sections for the smaller ones. Both work, and the decision should follow how much there is to say rather than a rule.

That emphasis is worth watching, since retrieval is where most current influence actually lies. A proposal built primarily on getting into training data is describing a slower and far less controllable mechanism than one built on being retrievable now.

Generative Engine Optimization The broadest of the three in common use. It refers to being visible in systems that generate an answer rather than returning a list, which covers assistants, AI summaries on results pages and any interface that synthesises rather than links.

A page asking how much something costs that says pricing depends on your requirements has answered nothing, and it will not be cited because there is nothing to cite. A range with the variables named is a real answer and gets quoted.

The same caution applies to referral growth figures, which circulate widely without their context. One widely shared statistic showing several hundred percent growth in assistant referrals came from a sample of nineteen analytics properties. That is a real observation and a genuinely small sample, and the difference matters when you are deciding where to move budget.

Answer Engine Optimization Older and broader in origin. It predates the current generation of assistants and originally covered any surface that answers directly, including featured snippets, knowledge panels and voice assistants.

Inside your own organisation, the useful move is to write a single sentence defining whichever term you adopt and put it wherever your team will see it. Most of the confusion these acronyms cause is internal rather than external, with two people using the same word for different scopes and discovering the mismatch three months into a project.

How to Judge It at Day Ninety Re-run the original fifty prompts, the same number of times, under the same conditions. Compare against the baseline on three measures: how often you are named, whether the description of you is accurate, and which sources are being cited.

Size is less of a factor than category maturity. Smaller brands often gain faster because their categories have thin third party coverage, and thin coverage is easier to influence than a category where every comparison page has been fought over for a decade.

The same applies to limitations. Stating plainly what you do not do, what size of job you decline and which situations suit a competitor produces the constraint statements that models lift as impartial facts.

Real questions are messy, specific and frequently uncomfortable. They ask about price, about limitations, about whether you can handle a particular awkward situation. That specificity is exactly what makes an answer quotable, because it matches the shape of a real query rather than a generic one.

Expect the vocabulary to keep shifting, and expect new terms to arrive with each wave of positioning. The underlying work has been stable since these systems started retrieving live sources, and it is the work rather than the name that you are buying. llm seo

If your category still gets meaningful traffic from those, a proposal scoped only to assistants will leave that work undone. Conversely, if somebody proposes an answer engine optimization programme and delivers only snippet optimisation, they are working on the older half of the definition.

One thing worth deciding before you start is who inside the business will answer factual questions. This work generates a steady trickle of small queries about lead times, price ranges and what you will and will not take on, and an agency that cannot get answers will either stall or guess. Naming one person and giving them twenty minutes a week removes the most common cause of these projects drifting.

That is a quarter of work, it costs mostly attention, and in a thinly covered category it is frequently enough to change what an assistant says. The window for it being that cheap is open now and will narrow as the rest of your category catches up. llm seo

Who Actually Needs One If your buyers research before they purchase, you are exposed. Software, professional services, healthcare, home services, equipment and anything with a considered purchase all show heavy assistant use at the research stage. If people buy from you on impulse or purely on price at the shelf, this matters far less.