What is AI SEO? (And what AEO, GEO and LLMO mean)

Ask what AI SEO means and you will get two answers that are close to opposites. That is not a failure of your reading. It is genuinely how the term is being used, and it is the first thing worth clearing up.

Two different things, one name

Meaning one: using AI to do SEO. Software that drafts content, clusters keywords, writes meta descriptions, audits a site. The work is ordinary SEO and the AI is the assistant doing it faster.

Meaning two: being found by AI. Getting your business named and quoted when somebody asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity a question instead of typing it into a search box. Here the AI is not your tool — it is the thing standing between you and your customer.

One is AI working for you. The other is you working to be seen by AI. They share a name, cost different amounts, and produce completely different deliverables.

You can watch the confusion happen on the search results page. When we checked this question on a UAE search in September 2026, the top results split almost evenly — some explaining which AI tools speed up your SEO, others explaining how to appear inside AI answers, and the single highest-ranked result was a forum thread of people asking what the term means. Nobody on that page thought to mention that the others meant something else.

This post is about the second meaning. When we say AI SEO, that is what we mean.

The other names, and what they actually refer to

The second meaning has collected several names, because a lot of people started selling it at once and nobody agreed on a label. Expanded on first use, because the initials cause more trouble than they save:

AI search optimisation. The plainest description of the work. No baggage, no acronym, reads clearly to someone outside the industry.

Answer engine optimisation (AEO). Frames the machine as an answer engine rather than a search engine — it returns an answer, not a list. Useful framing. The initials are a problem here, and we will come back to that.

Generative engine optimisation (GEO). The most formal of the set, and the only one with a traceable origin. It comes from a 2023 research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan and Deshpande, published on arXiv in November 2023, which formalised "generative engines" and asked what a website owner is supposed to do about them. The term escaped into the industry from there.

LLM optimisation (LLMO). Names the underlying technology — a large language model — rather than the product. Common in technical writing, rarer in sales.

AI visibility. Not a method, a measurement: whether you are showing up at all. It usually describes the reporting rather than the work.

Do these describe different disciplines? Mostly, no. An agency selling generative engine optimisation and an agency selling answer engine optimisation are, in nearly every case, describing the same work: make the page retrievable, make the answer liftable, make the business unambiguous, then check whether the machines name you. Where they differ is emphasis and vocabulary, not method. If somebody tells you their acronym is a distinct discipline, ask what they do differently under it.

A warning about the initials, especially here

Three of those acronyms are already taken by something else, which we found the blunt way — by searching them in the UAE in September 2026 and reading what came back.

Searching AEO in the UAE returns the Authorized Economic Operator programme, not answer engine optimisation. It is a real customs accreditation, the UAE runs its own, and that programme took the top result — with Abu Dhabi Customs directly beneath it. Six of the seven results on that page were customs guidance; one was about answer engines. If you tell a UAE business you do "AEO", a meaningful share of them will think you help with import clearance.

GEO is no better: that search returns a news network, a United Nations environmental report and a stock ticker, with nothing about search on the first page. AIO returns computer cooling hardware. And ASEO, globally, is mostly Spanish — it means cleanliness.

The practical rule we follow on this site: write the words out, and put the initials in brackets after them if you use them at all. It costs three words and removes the ambiguity entirely.

Which name is actually worth using

We measured the whole naming set — every term above, in the UAE and worldwide, in September 2026. Reporting it in relative terms, because the absolute numbers are commercial research and not the point:

• AI SEO is by far the most-searched of these names, both in the UAE and worldwide. It is not close.
• Generative engine optimisation has real global demand and no measurable UAE demand at all.
• Answer engine optimisation is searched here, but far less than AI SEO.
• LLM optimisation and LLMO are almost entirely a global-industry vocabulary. We found no UAE search demand for either.

So for a UAE business, the answer is unglamorous: say AI SEO, explain what you mean, and mention the other names once so people arriving with a different vocabulary know they are in the right place. Which is what this page is doing.

Is any of it really new?

Less than the naming suggests, and Google is surprisingly direct about it. On what it takes to appear as a supporting link in its AI features, Google's Search Central documentation says a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet… There are no additional technical requirements."

No separate index, no special markup, no submission. On Google's surface at least, the eligibility bar is the ordinary one.

What has genuinely changed is emphasis. Ranking is won across a page and a domain. Being quoted is won by a passage — a few sentences a machine can lift and stand behind without the surrounding context coming apart. A page can be excellent at the first and poor at the second, which is why sites that rank well sometimes never get cited.

The practical version of that — where to put the answer, letting the crawlers in, making the entity unambiguous — is in how UAE businesses get cited by ChatGPT. Google's own feature, how it picks sources and whether you can switch it off, is in Google AI Overviews. This post is only trying to settle what the thing is called.

What to ask when someone sells you this

The naming confusion is useful for one thing: it makes a good filter.

Ask which of the two meanings they are selling. Ask which assistants they check, what questions they put to them, how often they re-check, and what your number was last month. Ask what they would do differently under their preferred acronym that they would not do under another one — the answer is usually nothing, and a straight admission of that is a good sign.

An agency that answers those specifically is worth talking to whatever it calls itself. One that leads with the acronym and cannot describe the measurement is selling you a label.

For what it is worth, here is our version: we score how often ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews name your business, on your own questions, re-checked monthly. The first check is free and comes back within one working day, whether or not anything follows it.