Glossary — AEO, GEO, LLMO and the AI-search alphabet

Tap any acronym below for the full definition, the per-term FAQ, and a "How Mentionwell handles it" section.

1. AEO — Answer Engine Optimization

   Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so it surfaces as the direct answer in answer engines — Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, Perplexity, voice assistants, and featured snippets. Where SEO optimizes for the blue-link list, AEO optimizes for the box that shows the answer above it.

2. GEO — Generative Engine Optimization

   Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the newer term — coined in a 2023 Princeton paper — for optimizing toward generative engines like ChatGPT Search, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok, where the model synthesizes an answer and cites a handful of sources. The goal of GEO is being one of those cited sources.

3. LLMO — LLM Optimization

   LLM Optimization (LLMO) is the practice of making your content reachable, parseable, and trustworthy to the LLMs themselves — at both training time (large-scale crawls) and retrieval time (RAG pipelines, browsing tools, agent crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot). LLMO is the plumbing layer that AEO and GEO sit on top of.

4. SEO — Search Engine Optimization

   Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the original discipline: ranking in the blue-link results of Google and Bing. It's still the largest single source of traffic for most sites and the foundation that AEO, GEO, and LLMO are layered on top of. AI didn't kill SEO — it just added new surfaces above it.

5. AIO — AI Optimization

   AI Optimization (AIO) is an umbrella term sometimes used interchangeably with LLMO or GEO. In practice, when someone says "AIO" they mean the bundle of AEO + GEO + LLMO — the combined practice of optimizing for any AI-mediated surface. It's not a separate channel; it's the whole stack.

6. SGE — Search Generative Experience optimization

   SGE optimization originally targeted Google's Search Generative Experience — the experimental AI-generated answers Google launched in 2023. SGE has since been folded into Google AI Overviews, so SGE optimization is now largely a subset of AEO, with a Google-specific tilt.

7. AISO — AI Search Optimization

   AI Search Optimization (AISO) is a rarer enterprise term that overlaps almost completely with GEO and LLMO. It's mostly used in B2B / enterprise content marketing pitches. If you're optimizing for AEO, GEO, and LLMO, you're already covering everything AISO refers to.