Table of Contents

AEO, LLMO and GEO all describe the same broad aim: getting your page used in the answers AI returns. Most of what they involve overlaps; what differs is the focus, meaning which answers you are trying to appear in. This article only sorts out the terms and leaves the tactics to the dedicated articles.

1. The Short Answer: AEO, LLMO and GEO in One Table

Term Full name Focus Read more
AEO Answer Engine Optimization Being chosen as the source of answers in search that returns answers directly (Google featured snippets and AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity and others) What Is AEO
LLMO Large Language Model Optimization Being read and cited by AI in general, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini (including whether your content is used as training data) What Is LLMO
GEO Generative Engine Optimization Improving how visible your page is in AI that searches and then generates an answer (generative engines); the term was proposed in a paper published in 2023, making it the only one of the three with a clear origin What the paper found

For AEO and LLMO, we could not find a definition with a clear origin comparable to the GEO paper. That is why their scope shifts depending on who uses them. Hierarchies such as "AEO ⊂ GEO" are not settled definitions either, so there is no need to worry about which term sits above which.

2. The Real Difference: Where You Appear and How You Are Read

The terms can be told apart most concretely along two axes:

  • Where you appear: in an answer within search results (AEO's focus) or in an answer within a conversation with AI (LLMO's focus)
  • How you are read: through search and reading at answer time, or through training data used when a model is built

Each company provides separate crawlers (or controls) for these routes. Filling in the names used in robots.txt gives the following (checked against each company's original documentation on October 1, 2026):

Route Answers within search results Answers within AI conversations
Search and reading at answer time Google: Googlebot and Search Console's Search generative AI control OpenAI: OAI-SearchBot / Anthropic: Claude-SearchBot / Perplexity: PerplexityBot
Training data — (Google points to Google-Extended as the way to limit training of the models behind its Search AI features) OpenAI: GPTBot / Anthropic: ClaudeBot / Google (Gemini Apps): Google-Extended

What this table shows is that the difference between AEO and LLMO lies more in the entry points than in how you write. Whether you appear in search answers or in conversational AI answers depends on which crawlers you let through. If you want to be in answers but not in training data, open the top row and close the bottom row. The role of each robot and the effect of blocking it are in the cheat sheet in our LLMO article, and the differences between Google's controls are in our AI Overviews article.

3. How Google Sees These Terms

In the guide to AI search it published in May 2026, Google addresses AEO and GEO and writes that "from Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO" (Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search). The same guide lists tactics circulating as "AEO/GEO hacks," such as llms.txt, chunking content and inauthentic mentions, as things you can ignore.

So, at least for Google Search, whichever term you use, what you need to do is the same as the basics of SEO. Distinguishing the terms is useful mainly when you need to agree internally or with clients on which answers you want to appear in and which AI you are dealing with.

4. Which Article to Read for Your Goal

What you want to knowArticle
How to appear in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, how to opt out, and how to measure in Search ConsoleWhat AI Overviews Changed for SEO/AEO
Whether commonly recommended AEO tactics actually work (verdicts from the official documentation)What Is AEO
robots.txt settings and writing that get you cited by ChatGPT, Claude and PerplexityWhat Is LLMO
Whether to add llms.txt (with measurements from this site's logs)What Is llms.txt

FAQ

Should I work on AEO or LLMO?

In most cases you don't need to treat them separately. Both start from the same prerequisites: being crawlable, being indexed and having content worth reading. The difference is in the entry-point settings. To appear in search answers, check Googlebot and your Search Console setting; to appear in conversational AI answers, check that you are not blocking OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot.

Is GEO an umbrella term for AEO and LLMO?

It is sometimes described that way, but that is not a settled definition. GEO is the name a 2023 paper gave to a research framework for improving visibility in AI that searches and then generates answers. We found no source that defines a hierarchy between GEO, AEO and LLMO.

Is SEO no longer needed?

It is still needed. Google explains that AI Overviews and AI Mode find pages using its core Search ranking systems, and it calls AEO and GEO SEO. ChatGPT and Perplexity also search and read pages when they answer. Being findable through search is the starting point, whichever term you use.