Four acronyms turned up in about eighteen months to describe roughly one job: being the business an AI assistant names. Most of them mean the same thing, and knowing which is which saves you from buying the same service twice.
The short version
- SEO — Search Engine Optimization. Getting your link ranked.
- AEO — Answer Engine Optimization. Getting your content used as the answer.
- GEO — Generative Engine Optimization. Same idea, framed around generative assistants like ChatGPT and Claude.
- AIO — AI Optimization. The broadest and vaguest of the four.
AEO, GEO and AIO substantially overlap. If someone sells you all three as separate line items, ask what differs between them. There should be a real answer, and often there isn’t.
What genuinely changed
Ranking and being quoted are different outcomes.
Ranking puts you in a list of ten and lets the person choose. Being quoted means an assistant states an answer and names two or three businesses. There is no page two of an AI answer. You’re in it or you aren’t.
That’s the actual shift, and it’s why the acronyms exist. It isn’t marketing noise — but it also isn’t a separate discipline requiring a separate retainer.
What the work actually involves
Unglamorous, and mostly things that were already good ideas:
Being readable without JavaScript. AI crawlers run JavaScript far worse than Google does — several barely run it at all. A site assembled in the browser can look perfect to you and near-empty to them. Server-rendered HTML is a real advantage here and most sites don’t have it.
Answering in the first forty words. Assistants quote passages that answer cleanly. Pages that warm up for three paragraphs get skipped. This applies to service pages more than blogs.
Consistency about who you are. Same name, same address, same phone, everywhere. Assistants assemble a picture from scattered sources, and contradictions make them hedge rather than name you.
Structured data. The machine-readable version of your pages. Costs nothing, removes ambiguity.
An llms.txt file. A plain summary of your site for AI crawlers. Cheap,
uncontroversial, and still rare.
What to be skeptical about
Anyone promising a position in an AI answer. There’s no ranking table to check and no ad slot to buy. The honest claim is “we make you the obvious thing to name”, not “we’ll get you named”.
Also be skeptical of AI-generated content at volume as the strategy. Assistants are unusually good at recognizing text that says nothing, because that’s precisely what they were trained on.
The practical bit
Ask an assistant what it knows about your business. Ask it who it would recommend for your service in your town.
Whatever comes back is your current standing. It’s free to check, it takes two minutes, and it’s usually more instructive than a report — occasionally more alarming, too.
Then fix the first forty words of your most important page. That single edit does more than most of what gets sold under these acronyms.