Search has quietly split in two. One half still types a query into Google and clicks a blue link. The other half asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overview a question and reads the answer without ever visiting a website. A new set of acronyms has sprung up to describe optimising for that second half, and most businesses have not yet worked out what any of them mean.

Here is the plain English version.

SEO got you ranked. This gets you cited.

Traditional SEO has always had one job: get a page onto page one. That still matters, and it still forms the foundation everything below is built on. But ranking on page one no longer guarantees anyone sees the page at all. Google’s AI Overviews now appear in roughly 45 per cent of searches, and when they do, clicks to the underlying websites drop by as much as 58 per cent. The answer is being read directly off the results page, and the only way to still get credit for it is to be the source the AI actually names.

That is the shift these new terms are all circling.

The acronyms, defined

AEO, Answer Engine Optimisation. The practice of structuring content so it can be lifted directly into a short, direct answer, the kind that shows up in featured snippets, voice assistant replies and the boxed answer at the top of a search page. AEO is the oldest of these ideas and the closest relative of traditional SEO.

GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation. A term that came out of a 2024 research paper studying how content gets selected and cited by generative AI systems like Perplexity. GEO is about earning a citation inside an AI-generated answer, on top of a ranking. The research behind it is genuinely useful: certain changes, like adding statistics or citing sources, measurably increase how often content gets pulled into an AI answer.

LLMO, LLM Optimisation. The broadest and newest of the three, and the one with the least agreed definition. Most commonly it refers to structuring content so large language models can parse, weight and recall it accurately, both when a model is answering a live query with search enabled and when content may influence a model’s underlying training. Some people use LLMO interchangeably with GEO, and that distinction is still being argued over in the industry.

None of these acronyms are fully standardised yet, and you will see them used slightly differently depending on who is writing. The useful thing to take from all three is the shared idea underneath them: content now has to be readable by a machine that is going to summarise it, as well as by a person who is going to click it.

Why this actually matters

A few numbers make the case better than any definition can. Optimised content gets cited roughly three times more often than content that has not been structured for it. Adding statistics with sources boosts visibility by around 40 per cent. And brands are 6.5 times more likely to be cited through a third party, a review site, a comparison article, a forum thread, than through their own website. That last one is uncomfortable for a lot of businesses, because it means the old instinct to control the message on your own domain matters less than making sure the right facts about you exist anywhere AI can find them.

The three things that actually move the needle

Strip away the acronyms and the practical work sits on three pillars.

Structure. AI systems extract passages from pages. Every important claim needs to work as a standalone statement someone could lift out of context and still understand. That means leading each section with the direct answer, using headings that match how people actually phrase questions, and choosing tables and numbered lists over long paragraphs wherever a comparison or a process is involved.

Authority. AI systems favour content that reads like it was written by someone who actually knows the subject. Concretely, that means citing sources, including specific statistics, and using real expert quotes with a name and title attached. “We’re the best in the industry” gets ignored. “Our customers see a 40 per cent improvement in X” gets cited.

Presence. None of the above helps if the AI cannot reach the content in the first place. Gated content is invisible to AI crawlers. Undated content loses to dated content, because recency is weighted heavily. And it is worth an actual check of your robots.txt file, because if GPTBot, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot are blocked, that platform simply cannot cite you, no matter how good the content is.

What to actually do with this

Pick your ten most important questions, the ones a genuine customer would ask before buying from you, and run them through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google. See who gets cited and who does not. If a competitor is showing up and you are not, that gap is now closable, and it is closable without waiting for a slow-moving SEO campaign to pay off. Structure, sourced statistics and an open door for AI crawlers move faster than traditional ranking ever did.

The acronyms will keep shifting for a while yet. The underlying shift, being written for a machine that summarises you as well as a person who clicks you, is here to stay.

Want to know whether your own content is actually showing up in AI answers right now? Start the conversation.