What if I told you there’s a proven process to optimize one’s online presence to attract more business from relevant searches?
It’s called SEO: search engine optimization.
According to BrightEdge, venture-backed by some of the top venture capitalists in silicon valley,
“SEO is important for business because it provides organizations the visibility they need to attract customers during this digital era.”
“Eighty-one percent of customers and 94% of B2B (Business to Business) buyers will perform searches online before they make a purchase, so brands that do not have a strong online presence will find themselves falling behind the competition” (BrightEdge).
That may seem like “pointless marketing talk” when you have an overloaded schedule, and you’re exhausted in the moment…
but when you begin identifying your business’s seasonal “droughts” & begin navigating through yearly planning, there comes a point where you have to acknowledge how important knowing your data metrics is
Also, you can’t beat owning your own domain where you can write/build a content pipeline to and propagate from your other platforms.
If you ask any marketer whether they track Google rankings, the most common answer is yes. However, the process for improving how your brand appears from AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews / AI mode, is significantly different.
There are a lot of people that are attempting to capitalize on the ambiguity of AI and the emerging metrics showing a decline in revenue due to a decrease in traffic to their website.
Utilizing the buzzwords of AEO, GEO, & LLMO & making no correlations to the age old traditional practices of SEO.
While getting cited by an AI answer engine isn’t the same as traditional SEO ranking. AI systems like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews process answers from multiple sources using large language models (arXiv). They pull what seems to “explain” the best, not what ranks highest. Regardless of the rise of AI answers, these systems are still utilizing Google’s built ranking system for data mining.
What is AEO?
AEO is answer engine optimization. The pitch: instead of just trying to rank a page, you’re trying to be the answer an AI hands back.
As I was researching it, some authors made it sound like a brand-new skillset I’d have to go learn. But the more I traveled down the rabbit hole, the clearer the data relationships got.
Here’s what got clear: the work that wins you that answer is the work that’s always won customers. Be a business people talk about, and answer their questions plainly. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found the number one predictor of showing up in an AI answer is simply how often people mention your business around the web, with the top quarter getting about 10x the visibility of everyone else (Ahrefs). You don’t buy a reputation like that; you build it, the same slow way you always have.
Now the elephant in the room: is this AI shift going to dry up your website, & your sales with it? Fair question. Pew Research watched real Google users and found that when an AI summary sits up top, only 8% of those searches end in a click to a website, against 15% when there’s no summary (Pew Research). Close to half the visits, gone. That’s real money you’d never know walked past. But keep it in proportion: those summaries still only show on about one in ten searches (Ahrefs), and you win a spot in them with the same work that earns the regular results right below.
So for a busy owner, the good news is this: AEO isn’t a second bill to pay; it’s the page you already own, answering real questions & getting talked about. Do that, and the AI mostly sorts itself out.
What is GEO?
GEO is generative engine optimization. Same idea as AEO, pointed at the chatbots: showing up when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini instead of typing into Google.
Here’s the part I like. GEO didn’t start as marketing folklore; it started as a research paper. The team that coined the term (out of Princeton & a few other labs) ran thousands of real queries to see what actually made an AI cite a source. The thing that worked best wasn’t clever wording but substance: back your claims with real statistics, name your sources, quote the people who’d know. Do that, and they measured a source’s visibility in AI answers climbing by up to 40% (arXiv).
That’s the whole game: the move that wins with the robots is the move that wins with a skeptical human. Say something true, & show your work.
So GEO is one more acronym, but it isn’t one more skill to buy. If you already write honestly & cite where your numbers come from, you’re doing GEO. If you don’t, that’s the cheapest improvement on this whole list.
What is LLMO
LLMO is large language model optimization. Of the four, it’s the one to be most careful with, because the name promises something you can’t actually buy.
It sounds like you can reach into the AI and tune it to favor you, but you can’t. A model like ChatGPT was trained on a mountain of text long before you showed up, & you don’t get to edit the mountain or the math. What you can do is be worth quoting when the model looks something up, which is exactly the AEO & GEO work we just covered.
So strip the label off and there’s nothing new underneath: write clearly, be a trusted name, cite your sources. LLMO is AEO and GEO wearing a lab coat.
Here’s the practical part, especially if someone’s pitching you. When you hear “LLM optimization,” translate it in your head to “AEO & GEO + a good reputation,” and price it accordingly. If the pitch promises to change what the AI thinks of you, that’s your tell you’re being sold snake oil.
“Well, my business gets majority of it’s clients from Facebook/Instagram; Why should I care about SEO”
Fair. If Facebook & Instagram are filling your calendar, you’re doing something right, & I’d never tell you to walk away from what’s working.
Here’s the honest catch, owner to owner: you don’t own that audience, you’re renting it. The platform decides who sees your posts. A Facebook page’s organic reach sat around 16% of followers in 2012; by 2025 it was 1–2% (Hootsuite). You built that following, & now maybe two of every hundred see a post unless you pay to boost it. The feed got tuned toward paid reach, & the rent’s climbed ever since.
There’s a harder thing worth knowing, especially if you’re a woman or a business owner of color. On Meta, you don’t fully pick who sees your ad. Its system does, & it has sorted people by race & gender even when you asked for everyone. Researchers at Northeastern ran identical, neutral targeting & Meta still delivered lumber-industry jobs to an audience 90% male, cashier jobs to 85% women, & some housing ads to over 72% Black users (Northeastern study). It wasn’t only ads: in 2019 HUD charged Facebook under the Fair Housing Act over who its system let see housing ads (HUD), & in a 2022 Justice Department settlement Meta agreed to rebuild that delivery system to cut the skew by sex & race (Justice Department). So you can pay good money to reach your customers, & the platform still decides who actually sees you, by lines you never drew. I’m telling you so you know the field was tilted, & it wasn’t your fault.
That’s the real case for owning a piece of this yourself. Your website answers to you. Search is where someone types exactly what they need & is ready to act, & your site is the home base your social posts, your Google listing, & the AI answers all point back to. So keep the social. Just plant your storefront on ground nobody else gets to redline or shrink.
Final Takeaways
So here’s the bottom line, with the acronyms set aside.
Peel the labels off AEO, GEO, & LLMO and it’s the same job underneath: write something true & useful, make it easy to find, & be a name people trust. That’s all SEO has ever been, and the AI layer just rides on top of it. Nobody can sell you a shortcut around the foundation.
Even as a level-1 student still figuring this out, I’m sure of one thing: the customers are already looking. 80% of Americans search online for a local business every week, & a third do it every day (BrightLocal). When they go searching for what you do & you’re not there, they just find someone else, & you never see the sale you lost.
So if you don’t have a website yet, that’s where your biggest gains are, & it’s the plain, proven stuff rather than another acronym:
- Claim & finish your Google Business Profile. It’s free, & it’s the biggest lever most owners leave half-pulled.
- Get a simple site you own that loads fast & answers the questions people actually ask.
- Ask your happy customers for reviews. Reputation is the currency all of this runs on.
I can’t promise you a ranking, & nobody honest will. What I can tell you is the demand is already out there, searching every day, & the work to catch it is older & plainer than any acronym in this post.
Since writing this, I’ve folded the whole approach into every site we build; the plain-words version lives at AI search optimization for small business.