GEO, AEO, AI SEO —
It's All Just SEO
Coming from an agency that bills for GEO, that's an unusually honest thing to say. The names are new, the fundamentals are old — the only thing we actually swapped out is how you measure.
GEO、AEO、LLMO、AI SEO、GSE、SGE、AIEO、LLM SEO、Generative Engine Optimization、Answer Engine Optimization、AI Search Optimization、LLM SEO、AI Visibility、Citation Rate Optimization、Generative Search Optimization
— the names marketing has invented for the same thing since 2023
Our day job is getting clients cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews — the line item on the invoice literally reads GEO. So when we say "GEO is just SEO," it isn't a rhetorical flourish; it's honesty that cuts against our own interest. Admitting this does nothing for an agency that would rather charge a premium for a shiny new acronym.
But only honesty gets the work right. The same fundamentals that got you ranking on Google for the last twenty years — content quality, site structure, topical authority — are the exact same fundamentals getting you cited by LLMs today. The one thing that genuinely changed is measurement. Rankings and clicks exit; citation rate and answer share take the stage.
LLM visibility has only three mechanics — every one of them is SEO
Whether an LLM brings you up on its own comes down to how densely — and how consistently — your brand shows up in the training corpus. There's exactly one way to raise that prevalence: keep publishing well-structured, citation-worthy content on your core topics. That's been SEO's central creed for twenty years, and not a word of it needs to change.
For live questions, an LLM doesn't lean on memory — ChatGPT retrieves from the Bing index, while AI Overviews and Gemini ground directly in the Google index. The better you rank, the higher your odds of being retrieved and cited. Getting a search engine to rank you up top has a name, and that name is SEO.
That leaves one road: prompt injection and feeding false data to trick an LLM into recommending you. In the search era we called this black-hat SEO; in the LLM era it's still black hat — still SEO, just as quickly countered by the platforms, and just as not worth doing.
Mechanics framework: Ryan Law, Ahrefs
“GEO, LLMO, AEO… it's all just SEO.”
We agree — which is why we build GEO as engineering, not as a new acronym.
Agreeing it's SEO doesn't mean nothing is new — the six things that actually changed
Unlinked brand mentions now carry weight
LLMs infer entity authority from mention density in the training corpus — a positive discussion with no hyperlink is still a vote for your brand. Backlinks are no longer the only currency.
What to do → Track and chase unlinked mentions, not just backlinks.
Off-topic links are worth even less
Site reputation abuse — renting placements on unrelated sites to juice your backlink count — barely registers with LLMs. The models care about contextual relevance, not domain authority being shuttled around.
What to do → Redirect the link budget toward topically relevant, genuine coverage and community discussion.
Content-type preferences are different
Core pages — your homepage, pricing page, about page — get cited directly by AI engines far more often than listicles. The models prefer first-hand sources of fact over second-hand roundups.
What to do → Start your content audit with core pages, not the blog.
Document structure has to be built for machines
LLMs read documents in chunks: keep it plain-text-readable, give every paragraph its own context, and let key subjects recur within each chunk — that's Karpathy's observation on how LLMs read documents.
What to do → Put the subject right in the heading, make each paragraph self-contained, and don't lean on pronouns that point back to earlier text.
Training sources reach well beyond your site
GitHub READMEs, developer forums, comment threads — they're all feeding the LLMs. Your brand narrative doesn't live only on your own domain; wherever the model reads about you is where you get defined.
What to do → Plant your brand narrative across the third-party venues models actually read.
The JS-rendering gap
Most LLM crawlers don't run JavaScript — content rendered purely client-side simply doesn't exist to them, no matter how good the copy is.
What to do → SSR/SSG every piece of critical content; if curl can't see it, it doesn't count.
The numbers aren't on the skeptics' side
16%
of US searches now show AI Overviews
Ahrefs, 2025
-34.5%
drop in clicks to the #1 link when AI Overviews appear
Ahrefs
23×
conversion multiple of Ahrefs' own AI-driven traffic
Ahrefs, 2025
4.7×
AI-driven traffic conversion vs Organic
Our DTC case · 90-day live test
External figures are cited from Ahrefs' public research; defer to the original sources.
So what should you actually do?
- 01
Keep the fundamentals running: content quality, site structure, topical authority — not one of SEO's core duties gets skipped.
- 02
Bring unlinked mentions into your tracking — a brand mention with no link is now an authority signal too.
- 03
Audit core pages first — homepage, pricing, and about pages get cited more often than listicles.
- 04
Build for machine-readability: schema markup, llms.txt, and plain-text-friendly document design.
- 05
Change the unit of measure: from rankings and clicks to citation rate and answer share.
You don't need a "GEO expert."
You need someone who finishes the SEO and swaps in a new way to measure.
Live visibility snapshot across all six engines · yours to keep, even if we don't work together