The Difference Between GEO, AEO And LLM SEO

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.

The honest framing first: nobody outside these organisations knows the selection logic, and the systems change without announcement. What follows is drawn from observable behaviour, visible citations and published research, which supports useful generalisations and does not support precision.

How to Test Rather Than Trust Everything above is a starting hypothesis. Run twenty prompts in your own category across all three, from signed out sessions, recording the mode and the date, and count the cited domains for each.

Nineteen properties can show a real trend and cannot support a confident statement about the market. When that number is repeated without its sample size, as it usually is, it stops being evidence and becomes a slogan.

The condition is that the output has to be yours to keep and act on elsewhere, including the prompt set. An audit that only makes sense inside that geo seo agency's retainer is a sales document with a price attached.

Second, prompts that presuppose a weakness: is this company expensive, are they slow, are they suitable for small clients. The answers reveal what the system believes about your reputation, and where the belief is wrong it points at a specific source you can correct.

If you want your own figure, the segment worth building is narrower than most people set up. Compare assistant referrals against branded organic search rather than against all organic, over at least a quarter, and exclude any campaign traffic. It will be a small sample and it will be about your audience, which makes it more useful for your decisions than a published study about somebody else's.

The Shared Architecture All three now commonly retrieve live sources rather than answering purely from training. Your question becomes one or more searches, a set of pages is fetched and read, and the answer is composed from what was read.

Where the Distinction Does Matter One place, and it is worth being alert to. Read broadly, answer engine optimization includes surfaces that are not generative at all, such as featured snippets and structured result features.

Days One to Fourteen: Find Out Where You Stand Somebody writes fifty questions your buyers would ask, in their words. They run each one three times across the two or three assistants your customers use, from a signed out session, and record the full answers and every source cited.

In practice it is used to mean roughly the same thing as generative engine optimization, occasionally with a stronger emphasis on training data and brand presence in the underlying corpus rather than on live retrieval.

What to Spend Where If the budget is small, buy the audit and do the listings work yourself. Correcting your presence on the sources that already get cited is the highest return activity available and it requires attention rather than expertise.

A retainer describing ongoing optimisation and strategic guidance with no countable deliverable is a subscription to a relationship. It may still be worth having, and you should know that is what you bought.

Performance and Score Based Models Both sound aligned and both create problems. Payment tied to mentions creates pressure to shape the prompt set toward questions you already win, which is measurable improvement that means nothing.

Where to Get Real Language Four sources, all of which you already own. Sales call notes, where prospects describe their problem before anyone corrects their terminology. Support tickets, where customers describe things going wrong in their own words.

Keep a small number of deliberately hostile prompts in the set permanently. Questions asking whether you are expensive, slow or suitable only for large clients reveal what the system believes about your reputation, and the belief is often traceable to one specific source. Nobody enjoys reading those answers, and they generate more actionable work than the flattering prompts do.

What the Evidence Actually Is The figure quoted most often comes from Opollo, which reported assistant referred traffic converting at 14.2 percent against 2.8 percent from conventional search. The sample was 312 business to business brands, attributed through UTM parameters, covering the third quarter of 2024 through the first quarter of 2025.

Statistics without sources. This field circulates figures faster than it checks them, and a number arriving without a publisher, a sample size and a date should be discounted rather than repeated to your board.

Be wary of proposals where the largest line is content production. It is the easiest work to scale, the easiest to bill and the least likely to be the constraint, particularly before a baseline exists. A proposal weighted toward diagnosis, technical fixes and third party corrections is usually cheaper and almost always sequenced better.