Agent Experiences

GEO, AEO, LLMO: What Do You Actually Call This?

By Agent Experiences TeamPublished 9 min read

Has the naming settled?

No. Wikipedia's article on this discipline has been under an open rename dispute since 26 July 2026, relisted twice, with editors still arguing in it this week. If the encyclopedia cannot close a naming question after a month of applying its own common-name test, the field has not converged.

Source: Wikipedia: Talk:Generative engine optimization

What has happened instead is more useful to know: the names stratified. Different constituencies settled on different words for different jobs, and that arrangement looks stable. Here is where each term came from, which distinctions are real, and how much of your attention any of this deserves.

Not much, is the short answer. But you need to recognise the terms when you meet them, and there is one thing underneath the argument that genuinely matters. If you want the one-screen version instead, the same comparison sits in a table on What is AXO?, and every term below has an entry in the glossary.

The trade press named it before academia did

The usual story is that GEO came out of a research paper. That is true, and the paper is easy to point at: Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan and Deshpande, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization", posted to arXiv on 16 November 2023 and published at KDD 2024. It is the only name in this whole mess with a clean citation behind it, which is part of why it stuck.

But it was not first. Five weeks earlier, Olaf Kopp had already used both LLMO (LLM optimization) and GAIO (generative AI optimization) in Search Engine Land, on 12 October 2023. The practitioners got there before the researchers. The researchers just supplied the better-provenanced word.

That is roughly the whole explanation for the acronym pile-up. The thing got named repeatedly, at nearly the same moment, by people doing different jobs: academics needed a term for a research problem, agencies needed one for a service they could sell, which is why almost every candidate is something-Engine-Optimization, and tool vendors needed one for a product category. Naming ran ahead of the practice. People were selling GEO services before anyone had established what reliably worked.

The names

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization. The most common name in trade publications and agency service pages, and the one with academic provenance. If you use one word at a conference, use this one.

AEO — Answer Engine Optimization. Used interchangeably with GEO in practice. Its lineage is older and vaguer: "answer engine" predates generative AI and attached to featured snippets and voice assistants before being retrofitted to LLMs. Nobody appears to have coined it deliberately. It is noticeably more common in job titles than in article headlines.

AI visibility. Not a methodology but a measurement, and the clearest winner in its lane. Semrush named a product line after it, Ahrefs' Brand Radar sits under an "AI Visibility" header, and most trackers describe themselves the same way.

LLMO, GAIO, AIO, AISO, ASO. Proposed, defined in glossaries, rarely used. Search Engine Land has never run an article with LLMO in the title. ASO is dead on arrival because it already means app store optimization.

Relevance Engineering. iPullRank's deliberate rejection of the whole optimization frame, introduced May 2025, on the grounds that the work is information retrieval rather than tweaking. It has not escaped its originators. But the underlying objection, that the SEO frame imports wrong assumptions about how these systems work, is the most substantive criticism anyone has made of any of the names.

SGE — Search Generative Experience. Google's name for generative results while they were an experiment, announced May 2023 and rebranded to AI Overviews a year later. Useful only for dating things. If a page still says SGE, it is old.

Do GEO and AEO mean different things?

Practitioners often say AEO descends from the featured-snippet world and means winning the single direct answer, while GEO means being synthesized into generated output alongside other sources.

We could not find an authority behind that. Search Engine Land maintains an AEO library section that never defines AEO or contrasts it with GEO. Wikipedia records that no consensus definition distinguishing the terms exists in the literature, and that they are used interchangeably in practice. Treat the distinction as practitioner convention, not doctrine.

The more interesting thing is that nobody with standing is arguing for a GEO/AEO split at all. The live fight is one level up: is any of this different from SEO?

Mike King argues yes, pointedly: when a brand asks how to show up in ChatGPT, treating it as an SEO problem sends you optimizing pages, and "the actual answer often has very little to do with your website." His charge is that "it's just SEO" delivers "more scope, same budget, no new authority."

Forrester's Nikhil Lai argues no: AEO is "significantly, but not fundamentally, different from SEO," and the newer acronyms exist because vendors "exaggerate SEO and AEO's differences to carve a startup-sized hole in marketers' tech stacks."

Both sides accuse the other of naming things to protect a budget. Both are probably right.

The platforms disagree, and the split runs along competitive interest

Google does not ignore these terms. It names them in order to reject them. From its AI optimization guide:

From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.

Its documentation adds that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and its mythbusting explicitly waves off llms.txt, content chunking and AI-specific markup. Gary Illyes put it more bluntly in 2025: "You don't need GEO, LLMO or anything else."

Microsoft went the other way. When Bing Webmaster Tools shipped an AI Performance report in February 2026, Microsoft described it as an early step toward Generative Engine Optimization tooling.

That is not a linguistic disagreement. Google owns the incumbent category and benefits from keeping this work filed under SEO. Microsoft is the challenger and benefits from a new category where nobody is incumbent yet.

So who settled on what

The reason the naming feels unresolved is that people are describing different layers and assuming they disagree.

That last point is worth sitting with. The main surviving function of these acronyms is as keywords, which is a fittingly recursive fact about a discipline concerned with being found.

If you need to pick one

  • Use whatever your organization already says. Being understood beats being right.
  • Name the alternatives once in your own content, so people searching the other term can find you.
  • With no constraint: GEO for the practice, AI visibility for the metric. Both are understood almost everywhere.
  • Do not correct anyone. If someone has a private distinction they care about, ask what they mean rather than which acronym they used.

The naming is unstable because the evidence is

Here is the part that should worry you more than the vocabulary.

The founding paper claimed GEO could "boost visibility by up to 40%." A critical survey of 45 studies published in July 2026 concluded those gains are "valid within its experimental setting but conditional on a source already being present in a fixed context," and that across the whole corpus "no reviewed technique shows a stable, longitudinal, cross-platform causal effect on organic discoverability." Other 2026 work points the same way: one study of 112 startups found GEO showed no correlation with discovery rates; another concluded visibility tracks brand maturity rather than optimization.

In other words, the effect that made the name marketable has been substantially walked back by the same literature that produced it, inside three years.

The sharpest demonstration came in August 2026, when Mark Williams-Cook invented a fake standard called cats.txt, listing fictional office cats and their "PurrLevel" ratings. It passed every proof commonly offered for llms.txt: bots crawled it, Google indexed it, ChatGPT repeated its invented details and recommended it for ranking. His verdict is the best line anyone has written on this field: the evidence bar "is so low that a file about a Tuxedo cat called Odd cleared it without breaking stride."

A discipline argues hardest about its name when it is least sure what it does.

The distinction that actually matters

Underneath the acronyms there is one real gap, and it is about scope.

Every name above describes the same job: getting a machine to read your content and repeat it accurately somewhere else. It assumes the AI is a reader.

But agents increasingly arrive to do something on a person's behalf: compare products, check stock, fill a form, complete a purchase, call an API. That is a different problem with different solutions, about structure, machine-readable state and access rather than phrasing and attribution. None of GEO, AEO or AI visibility covers it, because all three were coined when the AI only ever read.

We are not the only people who noticed. In February 2026 Jason Barnard proposed AAO, assistive agent optimization, for being chosen "when no human is in the loop." In April, Google Cloud's Addy Osmani proposed Agentic Engine Optimization, structuring content "so AI agents can use it, not just render it", which gives AEO a second live meaning. That is his own framework rather than Google policy, but three independent coinages reaching for the same missing concept in six months is a decent sign the gap is real.

Our name for it is AXO — Agent Experience Optimization, covering both halves, because in practice the same team owns both. It is our coinage and has no industry currency, which is worth saying plainly rather than implying otherwise. If you only need the citation half, read our material and file it mentally under GEO. Nothing is lost.

The words that will outlive the argument

The names will keep moving. The mechanical vocabulary underneath them is stable and worth learning, because it describes things that stay true whatever the job ends up called: citation as the unit of visibility, retrieval and passage for what actually gets fetched (not your page, a chunk of it), query fan-out for one question decomposed into many, zero-click, and AI visibility measured per engine, because the engines disagree sharply.

Those will still mean what they mean in three years. Whether anyone is still saying GEO is a different question, and the encyclopedia is currently arguing about it.

If you came here to work out what to do rather than what to say it in, skip to what actually gets you cited, which ranks the tactics by how much evidence supports them, or the quick start if you want the ten changes in order.

References

Skip the naming, learn the mechanics

Our evidence-ranked guide covers what the research supports, what has been debunked, and what remains genuinely contested.

What gets you citedGlossary