AEO GEO LLM Seeding
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AI search terminology

GEO

Also written as Generative Engine Optimisation.

What is GEO?

GEO is the abbreviation of Generative Engine Optimisation, the practice of making a source likely to be cited inside text generated by an AI system.

Who uses the term GEO?

GEO entered common use after a 2023 academic paper of the same name, and was adopted quickly by practitioners looking for a term that named generative systems directly. It is used widely in the United States and increasingly in Europe.

GEO carries an unavoidable collision with the older use of geo as shorthand for geographic or local search. Practitioners who work in local SEO tend to avoid the term for that reason.

How does GEO differ from related terms?

GEO emphasises citation inside generated text. AEO emphasises being returned as the answer itself. In day-to-day practice the two describe the same work.

LLM seeding describes the distribution side of the same goal, which is getting information about an entity into the sources a model draws on.

What does AEO GEO LLM Seeding AI SEO - Or Whatever The F$ck You Want to Call It say about GEO?

The book uses GEO as its worked example of a distinction that does not survive contact with the job. Ask a GEO purist what a GEO deliverable includes that an AEO deliverable does not, it says, and you get hand-waving about citations versus answers, as if any practitioner on earth would build one without the other. Its conclusion is that the distinctions exist on conference slides, and they do not exist in the work.

Read about the book's argument.

Related terms

  • Generative Engine Optimisation

    Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of influencing whether and how a source is cited within the text that a generative AI system produces.

  • AEO

    AEO is the abbreviation of Answer Engine Optimisation, the practice of making a source likely to be used in the direct answer a search or AI system returns.

  • LLM seeding

    LLM seeding is the practice of publishing and distributing information about an entity across independent sources so that large language models can retrieve, corroborate and repeat it.

  • AI search

    AI search is the category of search experiences in which an AI system interprets the query and composes a response, rather than returning a list of links alone.

All 12 terms AEO GEO LLM Seeding AI SEO - Or Whatever The F$ck You Want to Call It