AEO stands for answer engine optimization: the work of being the page an AI assistant pulls when someone asks a question. You’ll hear it alongside SEO, GEO, and LLMO, so the setup underneath matters more than the acronym. AEO is also older than it sounds.
What AEO stands for and where it started
The history starts with the answer engine, anything that hands back an answer instead of a list of links: a voice assistant reading a result out loud, or the boxed answer Google sometimes shows above its results. In Jason Barnard’s account of AEO’s beginnings, he and Trustpilot distributed a voice-search and AEO white paper in September 2017. That work was a corner of SEO (search engine optimization), the effort to show up in Google’s regular results.
Barnard, founder of Kalicube, presented AEO at BrightonSEO on April 27, 2018, in Trustpilot’s sponsored speaker slot. His original presentation slides cover voice assistants and providing the answer.
So the word is a few years older than ChatGPT, which takes some of the fear out of hearing it on a sales call.
Which brings us to the two newer names, GEO and LLMO, and whether they name something different.
Where GEO and LLMO came from
GEO came out of a research lab. It stands for generative engine optimization (“generative” meaning the AI writes a fresh answer instead of pointing you to a page), and traces to a November 2023 paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi.
LLMO stands for large language model optimization. A large language model is what writes the reply in tools like ChatGPT. Search Engine Land’s LLMO guide uses the term for work that helps a brand appear in AI-generated responses.
In Kelsey Libert’s analysis of 75 selected SEO influencers, 59% referenced GEO in their 2025 LinkedIn posts. The study tracked several overlapping terms, so mentioning one didn’t mean preferring it over the others.
When I first went down this rabbit hole, some writers made each name sound like a brand-new skill I’d have to learn. A new acronym can feel like news you’re already late to, and plenty of pitching leans on that feeling. Knowing what each name means helps you compare the work behind the labels.
That leaves the question you came with: how much of the work differs from plain SEO?
How AEO, GEO, and LLMO differ from SEO
For Google Search, the overlap is clear: Google’s own guide to AI search treats AEO and GEO as part of SEO. That guidance applies to Google’s AI features, rather than every AI assistant.
Those AI answers use the same core ranking and quality systems as regular search. To appear there, a page has to be indexed (stored in Google’s catalog) and eligible for a snippet, the short preview under a link (Google’s AI search guide). That’s the same door SEO has been working on, which is a big part of why I don’t think AI is replacing SEO.
The original GEO paper puts the difference in the goal: traditional SEO helps a page rank higher in the results, while GEO aims for visibility inside the AI’s answer. AEO and LLMO aim there too.
So if one line on a proposal says SEO and the next says AEO, it’s worth asking what the second line adds, or you could pay twice for the same hours.
Google also names a few extras you can skip.
What Google says you can skip
That list sits in the same guide, last updated July 10, 2026 (Google’s AI search guide).
The first is llms.txt, a text file meant to hand AI tools a summary of your site. Google says its search does not use llms.txt files or other special markup for its AI features (Google’s AI search guide).
The second is chunking, chopping a page into tiny pieces so an AI can digest it. In Digiday’s interview reporting on GEO, iPullRank founder Michael King describes chunking as a tactic for AI visibility. Google’s guide says there’s no requirement to break content into tiny pieces for AI to understand it (Google’s AI search guide).
Both can show up as line items under the new names, and on a small budget each hour on them comes out of the pages that bring people in.
With the extras cleared away, what’s left is the traffic.
Which one a side-income website needs
For a side-income site, visitors are the business: each sale or sign-up starts with somebody arriving on the page.
In Digiday’s interview reporting, Michael King describes traditional search as a referral traffic channel and AI search as a branding channel. That distinction matters when you’re measuring visits rather than mentions.
The AI side still counts. In Semrush’s study of more than 10 million keywords, Google’s AI Overviews appeared for 15.69% of the sampled keywords in November 2025, about 1 in 6. That measures the study’s keywords, rather than the share of all searches people made. Being cited there can add reach beyond the click.
I’d put the plain SEO underneath the four names first: pages that answer the questions your buyers type.
This week I’d set up Google Search Console, Google’s dashboard for how your site appears in search. Its Generative AI performance report tracks visibility in Google’s AI features. Checked monthly alongside your search traffic, it helps you see how people find you. For the next layer, I’ve walked through the answer engine tactics step by step, and the traffic question in is SEO dead.
If you’d like a second set of eyes on your setup, that’s a consultation: $125 for the hour, & you leave with the list whether or not you hire me afterward.
Bookings are unavailable before January 12, 2027. Inquiries are open.
I hope this helps.