We spend a lot of time talking with clients about AI search these days. And somewhere in almost every conversation, we eventually have to stop talking about AI search so we can talk about what we’re supposed to call AI search.
GEO. AEO. AIO. LLMO. AI SEO. AI Search Optimization. We’ve probably forgotten a few. And give the marketing industry another six months, we’ll have a few more.
Somehow, an industry built around helping machines understand things has made its own terminology almost impossible for humans to understand.
Part of the problem is that this is all happening incredibly fast. ChatGPT changed how people find information, Google responded with AI Overviews and AI Mode, and platforms like Perplexity, Gemini and Claude quickly became part of the conversation. Almost immediately, an entire industry started trying to name the practice of helping brands show up across all of them.
Naturally, everyone came up with a different acronym.
So, what are we actually talking about?
At Splendor, we’ve generally used GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization. It’s become one of the more common terms for improving how brands and their content are discovered, understood, cited and recommended by generative AI systems.
But you’ll also hear AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, which has actually been around longer and generally refers to optimizing content to become part of a direct answer. That made sense when we were talking about featured snippets and voice search. It still makes sense now that the answers are being generated by AI.
Then there’s AIO, AI Optimization, AI Search Optimization, LLMO, Large Language Model Optimization, AI SEO, and a growing collection of other names that attempt to describe roughly the same changing behavior from slightly different angles.
Some people will tell you these are distinct disciplines, and they can certainly be defined that way. AEO can focus more specifically on answers. GEO can focus on generative engines. LLMO can focus on large language models. There are legitimate technical distinctions if you want to get deep enough into them.
But most businesses don’t need to. Because the conversation we’re having with clients is rarely, “Should we pursue an AEO strategy or a GEO strategy?”
It’s usually some version of: When someone asks ChatGPT, Google, Gemini or Perplexity about what we do, why aren’t we showing up? At the end of the day, that’s the conversation that matters.
Even Google Has Entered the Acronym Conversation
Interestingly, Google recently weighed in on this. Its guidance specifically acknowledges both AEO and GEO as terms being used for work focused on improving visibility in AI search. Google’s position is considerably less dramatic: optimizing for its generative AI experiences is still, fundamentally, search optimization.
Which is both helpful and slightly funny considering how much time the rest of us have spent naming it.
And Google has a point. A lot of what makes a company visible to AI isn’t completely new. It still starts with strong, authoritative content that search engines can understand, supported by clear technical structure and credible signals from outside the company’s own website.
The environment around those things has changed.
For years, we optimized websites largely around the way search engines found, indexed and ranked information. Now we’re also thinking about how AI systems retrieve it, interpret it and use it when constructing an answer.
That’s a meaningful change. It just may not require seven different acronyms.
