GEO, AEO, LLM Optimisation — Nobody Agrees What to Call It Yet

The BBC called it Answer Engine Optimisation. A Princeton research paper called it Generative Engine Optimisation. Some people say LLMO, for Large Language Model Optimisation. Others just say "AI SEO" and leave it at that.

They all mean the same thing: making your business visible to AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.

The fact that nobody can agree on a name tells you everything about where this field is right now. It's early. Really early. Think SEO in 2005, when people were still stuffing keywords into white text on white backgrounds and it actually worked.

GEO is the term that seems to be winning in academic circles. The Princeton paper that coined it ran experiments showing that citations, statistics, and quotations in content improved visibility in AI-generated responses. Their approach was sound, but it focused on informational content -- articles, guides, that sort of thing. Local business search is a different animal.

AEO is the term the BBC and the marketing industry prefer. It's broader. Any engine that gives you a direct answer instead of a list of links is an "answer engine." Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity -- they all qualify.

LLMO is the most technically accurate but nobody outside of tech circles uses it. It won't stick.

The confusion around naming reflects a bigger problem. Most of the advice floating around is recycled SEO tactics with an AI label slapped on. "Add schema markup for AI visibility." "Create FAQ content for ChatGPT." "Update your robots.txt to allow AI crawlers." We tested all of these across 1,000 businesses. None showed more than 10% correlation with actually appearing in ChatGPT results.

The field doesn't just lack a name. It lacks proven playbooks. The people writing guides about GEO are mostly extrapolating from how they think AI search works, not from testing what actually makes a business appear or disappear.

That's the opportunity. Most businesses haven't heard of GEO, AEO, or any of these terms. The businesses that have heard of it are getting advice that our data says is wrong. And the tools that exist to help -- Otterly, Peec, Profound -- cost $189 to $399 a month and target enterprise marketing teams, not local businesses.

We don't particularly care which name wins. What we care about is that the advice attached to these terms starts matching reality. Right now it doesn't. The gap between what's being sold as AI optimisation and what our experiments show actually works is wide. We're trying to close it.