GEO? AIO? AEO? What the Heck Are We Calling It?

Sep 14

TL;DR: SEO, GEO, AEO, AIO…pick your fighter. While the digital marketing industry still hasn’t landed on one universal term for optimizing visibility across AI-powered search experiences, the strategies behind these acronyms overlap significantly. At Avenue, we’ve landed on GEO (generative engine optimization) when we need a specific term, and AI visibility when plain English will do. Strong SEO creates a powerful foundation for AI visibility, but there are additional opportunities, priorities, and ways to measure success that can warrant dedicated GEO work. Our biggest takeaway? Don’t let an acronym debate distract you from what actually helps your brand get found, understood, trusted, and chosen.

If you work anywhere near SEO, you’ve probably spent the last two years answering some version of the same questions: Is SEO dead? Do keywords still matter? Should we be optimizing for ChatGPT now? How do we get into Google AI Overviews? Do we need an llms.txt file? Does Reddit suddenly need to be part of our SEO strategy? And wait, are we calling this GEO? AEO? AIO? LLMO?

It has been…a lot.

At Avenue, we’ve had this exact terminology conversation more than once. We recently updated our own website to use GEO, or generative engine optimization, in part because it has emerged as the term people are actively searching for. But even then, there are plenty of times I find myself in conversations just skipping the alphabet soup altogether and simply say AI visibility.

Because sometimes you have 30 minutes with a client, and spending 10 of them debating whether something technically falls under AEO or GEO is not the best use of anyone’s calendar.

So, what is the difference between SEO vs. GEO vs. AEO? Are these genuinely different disciplines? And most importantly, how much should marketers actually care?

First, What Do SEO, GEO, AEO, and AIO Mean?

There’s no universally accepted framework for these terms, which is part of the problem. Different marketers, agencies, software companies, and SEO experts draw the lines in different places.

Generally, though, you’ll see them defined something like this:

SEO, or search engine optimization, focuses on helping content get crawled, indexed, understood, and ranked in traditional search engine results. That includes everything from technical SEO and site architecture to content strategy, keyword research, internal linking, backlinks, and more.

AEO, or answer engine optimization, typically focuses on making content easy to surface as a direct answer. Think featured snippets, People Also Ask results, voice search, zero-click results, and other experiences where a searcher may receive an answer without clicking through to a website.

GEO, or generative engine optimization, generally refers to improving visibility within generative AI experiences like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode. Instead of focusing only on ranking a webpage, GEO looks at whether your content or brand is referenced, cited, or incorporated into an AI-generated response.

Then there’s AIO, or AI optimization, which gets even fuzzier. Some marketers use it as an umbrella term for optimizing a brand’s broader digital presence so AI systems understand, trust, mention, and recommend it.

One framework describes the four as complementary layers: SEO makes content accessible, AEO makes it easily answerable, GEO makes it citable, and AIO makes the brand trustworthy. That’s a helpful way to understand the distinctions, even if the industry hasn’t exactly gathered around a conference table and signed off on The Official Acronym Treaty.

SEO vs. GEO vs. AEO: Are They Really That Different?

Yes and no. Helpful, right? (I’m a true Libra, I love gray areas and nuance!!!)

There are meaningful differences in how people search and how information gets surfaced. Traditional search largely asks a search engine to retrieve and rank relevant results. Generative AI can synthesize information from multiple sources into a new response. AI systems can also take a conversational prompt and generate multiple related searches behind the scenes, known as query fan-out, to gather the information needed to formulate an answer.

That changes the search experience significantly.

Someone might once have searched Google for “best business checking account,” opened five tabs, compared options, refined their search, and eventually chosen a financial institution.

Now they can ask an AI assistant, “I own a small business in Portland with three employees and want a local credit union with low fees. What should I consider?” The system can conduct several searches, synthesize the information it finds, and return a personalized response.

That is meaningfully different from a traditional SERP. But here’s where we think some of the conversation has gotten unnecessarily dramatic: different search experiences do not automatically require completely different marketing fundamentals.

Google itself says its generative AI features are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems, and that existing SEO best practices continue to apply. Google even addresses GEO and AEO directly, saying that while both terms are used for work focused on AI search visibility, optimizing for generative AI within Google Search is still, from its perspective, SEO.

In other words, your SEO strategy did not spontaneously combust when ChatGPT showed up.

A Lot of “GEO” Looks Suspiciously Familiar

This is where we encourage a healthy amount of skepticism. Over the past couple of years, plenty of advice has been packaged as a brand-new secret to GEO success:

Create genuinely useful content. Clearly answer your audience’s questions. Structure pages logically. Make your website crawlable. Build authority around important topics. Earn credible mentions from other websites. Demonstrate first-hand expertise. Maintain accurate business information. Build a recognizable brand.

If you’ve been doing good SEO for a while, you may be thinking: Wait a minute…

Exactly!!!

One of my favorite follows on LinkedIn, SEO expert Lily Ray, has been particularly vocal about this, arguing that many tactics marketed as revolutionary GEO strategies are familiar SEO, branding, social media, and digital PR practices with different prioritization for AI search.

Google’s own guidance reinforces that overlap. For AI-powered Search experiences, it continues to recommend people-first content, technical accessibility, useful site structure, strong page experiences, and accurate business or ecommerce information. Google also specifically says you do not need special AI markup, tiny “chunks” of content, pages rewritten exclusively for AI, or an llms.txt file to improve visibility in Google Search.

This is also how we’ve approached the shift at Avenue. For our existing SEO clients, we haven’t thrown out years of SEO strategy and started from scratch. We’ve adapted it. As we learn more about how AI-powered search experiences find, synthesize, cite, and recommend information, we’re incorporating those insights into the SEO work we’re already doing.

Because, in our experience, good SEO is very often good GEO, AEO, AIO, AI visibility, or whatever acronym wins the naming rights. But “very often” is important here. There are additional considerations for AI visibility that may sit outside the scope or priorities of a traditional SEO strategy.

Where Dedicated GEO Strategy Goes Beyond Traditional SEO

This is where the SEO vs. GEO conversation gets more interesting. Are you having fun yet?

Strong content, technical SEO, topical authority, and a healthy website can benefit visibility across both traditional and AI-powered search. But dedicated GEO strategy goes further by examining how a brand appears across AI platforms, which competitors are being recommended, what sources are shaping those answers, and where visibility gaps exist.

It also expands the role of off-site authority. AI systems draw from publishers, review sites, forums, social media, videos, and other sources across the web, making digital PR, social media, influencer marketing, and reputation increasingly relevant to search visibility.

And then there’s measurement. Alongside traditional SEO metrics, GEO gives us a reason to pay closer attention to AI mentions and citations, competitive share of voice, source visibility, and whether that visibility ultimately contributes to business results.

For our SEO clients, we’ve already adapted our strategies to account for AI search. But dedicated GEO gives us room to go deeper. For several clients, we’ve expanded our partnerships to add GEO services alongside SEO specifically to give this research, strategy, implementation, and measurement more attention.

The overlap between SEO and GEO is a strength. Strong SEO gives you a solid foundation, while dedicated GEO builds on it to help your brand become more visible, credible, and recommendable wherever AI is shaping discovery.

What Has Actually Changed?

Beyond the new acronyms, there are some meaningful changes marketers should be paying attention to:

Search is more conversational: People can ask complex, specific questions instead of reducing their needs to a few keywords, making audience intent and topical depth increasingly important.
Visibility doesn’t always equal a click: A brand can influence a decision within an AI-generated answer without generating a website session, expanding how we need to think about visibility and measurement.
Your website is only part of the picture: AI systems can draw from third-party sources across the web, increasing the value of a strong, consistent brand presence beyond your owned channels.
Keyword research has new inputs: Query fan-out can reveal the topics and subtopics AI systems associate with a question. We wouldn’t recommend creating a page for every hyper-specific query an AI tool generates. Please, for the sake of your content team’s sanity, don’t. But those patterns can help uncover meaningful content gaps and audience needs.

Sooo…What Should We Call It?

For now, we’re going with GEO when specificity is useful. Part of our job as marketers is meeting people where they are, including using the terminology they’re actually searching for. GEO gives us a relatively clear way to talk about improving visibility across generative AI search experiences.

But we’re not making this decision for the entire industry, because EO is useful when talking about becoming a direct answer. GEO works when discussing visibility within generative experiences. SEO remains the foundation underneath much of this work. And AI visibility is often the clearest way to describe the broader outcome without making everyone memorize another acronym. The terminology may settle over time. Or, knowing digital marketing, we’ll invent three more acronyms before it does.

What Matters More Than GEO vs. AEO

Whatever you call it, the priority is understanding where your audience is searching, whether your brand is showing up, and whether that visibility contributes to meaningful business results.

At Avenue, we see SEO and GEO as deeply connected, but GEO as a valuable strategy in its own right. That’s why we’ve adapted our SEO work for AI visibility and built dedicated GEO services to help brands identify visibility gaps and strengthen how they’re represented, cited, and recommended across AI-powered search.

Call that SEO. Call it GEO. Call it AEO. Call it AI visibility. Just don’t call it late for dinner. Just kidding, but please don’t spend more time naming it than doing it.

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