AEO, GEO, LLMO, SEO: three of these are the same job

Where did each term actually come from?

Different rooms, at different times, for different reasons. AEO grew out of the featured snippet and voice assistant era. GEO arrived through an academic paper on optimizing content for generative engines. LLMO and AIO are largely vendor coinages layered on top.

That history is the whole explanation for why the definitions never quite line up. Nobody sat down and divided the territory. Two groups named an overlapping problem a few years apart, and a third group started selling the newer name because it sounded like a different product.

You can watch the confusion propagate. Read four agency pages defining GEO and you will get four different boundaries against AEO, each one drawn to make whatever that agency sells look like the necessary half.

None of this means the underlying work is fake. The work is real and it matters. It is the taxonomy that is noise.

The terms, side by side

Read the last column. That is where the practical difference lives, and mostly there is not one.

If you take the tactic lists published under AEO and GEO and put them next to each other, the overlap is close to total. Answer the question early. Write self-contained passages. Keep your facts consistent everywhere they appear. Make sure crawlers can reach you. Earn corroboration from sources other than yourself.

So when someone proposes AEO and GEO as two line items on a proposal, that is a pricing decision, not a technical one.

What is the distinction that actually matters?

Retrieval versus selection. Whether a system can find your page at all is one problem, and whether it chooses to quote your page once found is a completely different one. Almost every failure is the first, and almost all published advice is about the second.

This is the split worth organizing your work around, and it cuts across all four acronyms. A page can be beautifully structured, perfectly answer-first, rich with original evidence, and completely absent from an assistant's answers because it is not in the index that assistant retrieves from.

Which index depends on the system. Some assistants lean on a live search index, some run their own crawl, and the mix keeps shifting. The practical consequence for a B2B site is unglamorous: check that you are actually present in more than one index, not just the one you have watched for a decade.

Fix retrieval first. Selection advice applied to a page nothing can retrieve is decoration.

So what is the actual work?

One list, not three. It has not changed much in substance since the term AEO appeared, which is itself the strongest evidence that the naming argument is empty.

Notice how much of that is ordinary technical and editorial hygiene. That is not a disappointment, it is the point. The systems changed how the answer is displayed far more than they changed what makes a source worth using.

• Be reachable. Crawlers allowed, pages rendered without requiring script execution, nothing important behind a wall
• Be in more than one index, and verify it rather than assuming
• Answer in the first third of the page, before the argument
• Write passages that survive being lifted out of their context, because that is how they get used
• Keep your entity facts identical everywhere: name, location, founding, people, services
• Publish something only you have, since a summary needs a specific claim to point at
• Earn corroboration elsewhere, because a claim that appears only on your own domain is weak evidence

Does structured data or an llms.txt file force a citation?

No. Structured data helps a machine understand a page it already reached, and it does not compel a system to quote you. Files that claim to instruct AI systems have no guaranteed effect on any major engine.

This comes up constantly because it is a satisfying kind of advice. Add a file, add a schema block, get cited. If that worked, everyone would do it within a week and it would stop working, which tells you it was never the mechanism.

Use structured data where it describes what is genuinely on the page. Skip anything that describes content a visitor cannot see, both because it can be treated as spam and because it is a bad habit.

The same goes for anyone offering guaranteed citations or placement in an AI answer. There is no submission form and no inventory to buy. Being cited is an outcome, and treating it as a purchasable slot is the clearest signal you are talking to the wrong supplier.

How should you read a proposal that sells GEO?

Look at the deliverables, not the acronym. If the GEO line item and the SEO line item describe overlapping work, you are being charged twice for one job with two names on it.

Three questions settle it quickly. What specifically will you do that you would not do for search. How will you know whether it worked. And what does failure look like at ninety days.

A supplier doing real work here can answer all three. They will talk about a fixed set of prompts tracked over time, which pages get cited and whether the citation is accurate, entity consistency across the profiles that describe you, and whether any of it moved qualified conversations. That is a measurement plan, and it is uncomfortable to fake.

A supplier selling a label will answer with tooling names and a promise about being ready for the future. That answer costs money and buys a rename of the work you already had.

Does any of this matter for a small B2B company?

Yes, and less dramatically than the marketing implies. It matters most at the shortlist stage, where being named in an answer puts you in a consideration set you would otherwise never enter.

The honest framing is that this is a distribution channel that is still forming, with poor measurement and real upside for companies with genuine expertise and few competitors making specific claims. Small B2B firms in narrow niches are often better placed here than large brands, because the queries are specific and the competition is thin.

What it is not is a replacement for the fundamentals, or a reason to buy a second retainer. Do the single list above, measure a fixed prompt set every month, and spend the argument about what to call it on something else.