The Difference Between GEO, AEO And LLM SEO

Two asking who to hire or buy from for the thing you sell. Two describing the problem your product solves without naming the category. Two comparing named competitors. Two asking about a specific situation your best customers are in. One asking directly who your company is. One asking whether your company is any good.

None of these are traffic numbers, which is the uncomfortable part. Much of the value in this channel arrives without a click and shows up weeks later as somebody who already knew what you did before they contacted you.

Connect It to Something in the Business Referral traffic from assistant domains should be segmented in analytics and tracked, with the understanding that it undercounts. Some assistants strip referrer data and some visits arrive looking direct.

The Signals That Mean Nothing A rising composite visibility score with no methodology attached. The vendor controls both the number and the prompt set behind it, and it can improve without anything changing.

Where you do name people, make the association reciprocal. Your site names the profile, the profile links back, and ideally some independent source associates the two without either of you arranging it.

Some practitioners still use it that way, which makes it a superset of the newer work. Others use it as a synonym for the generative work specifically. Both usages are in circulation, which is why asking somebody what they mean by it is a reasonable question rather than a pedantic one.

One reframing helps when presenting this internally. Report the channel as influence rather than acquisition. Acquisition framing invites a comparison against paid media on cost per lead, which this channel will lose on the reported numbers even where it is working, because most of its effect never appears as a referral. Influence framing invites the right question, which is whether more of your market arrives already knowing who you are.

Then load your most important page with JavaScript disabled in your browser settings. If what remains is a navigation bar and no substance, that is roughly what a retrieval system reads, and it explains a great deal on its own.

If you run a business and somebody has just told you that you need generative engine optimization, you are entitled to be sceptical. The phrase sounds like it was assembled by a committee, and the industry has a long record of inventing names for things it already sells.

One check is worth running independently once a quarter, without telling anyone. Take ten prompts from the agreed set, run them yourself in a signed out session, and compare what you find against the most recent report. Broad agreement is reassuring. A consistent gap in the agency's favour is the single most informative finding available to you, and it is not something a report will ever surface.

What Honest Reporting Contains The prompt set, versioned and unchanged since last month. The raw answers, kept in full rather than summarised. Which competitors were named. Which sources were cited. What work was done. What moved, and the specific claim about which work caused it.

Pair your name with your sector and location consistently, rather than letting it appear alone. Correct third party listings that conflate you with the other business. Where the confusion is entrenched, consider whether a consistent descriptive phrase used alongside the name in all coverage is worth adopting.

Being named in answers to prompts with buying intent, as opposed to definitional prompts nobody purchases from. Being described accurately, since a confident recommendation containing a wrong price or a service you discontinued costs more than absence. And being cited on the third party sources that appear repeatedly in your category's answers.

If your category still gets meaningful traffic from those, a proposal scoped only how to get your brand recommended by AI assistants will leave that work undone. Conversely, if somebody proposes an answer engine optimization programme and delivers only snippet optimisation, they are working on the older half of the definition.

That emphasis is worth watching, since retrieval is where most current influence actually lies. A proposal built primarily on getting into training data is describing a slower and far less controllable mechanism than one built on being retrievable now.

Search marketing has a long history of reporting numbers that rise while the business does not. Impressions, rankings for terms nobody buys on, traffic to pages with no commercial intent. The new channel has arrived with its own version of this, and the version is worse, because there is no independent console to check the claims against.

Ask what was done, not what happened. If listings were corrected, pages rewritten and outreach attempted, and the numbers are still flat, that is information about the market. If none of it happened, the numbers were never going to move.

Inside your own organisation, the useful move is to write a single sentence defining whichever term you adopt and put it wherever your team will see it. Most of the confusion these acronyms cause is internal rather than external, with two people using the same word for different scopes and discovering the mismatch three months into a project.