The vocabulary, in plain terms
- SEO is getting a page to rank in a list of results.
- AEO, answer engine optimization, is being the source a direct answer is drawn from, whether that is a featured snippet, a voice assistant or a chat reply.
- GEO, generative engine optimization, is being cited or reflected in text a model generates, in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot or Gemini.
- LLMO and AIO are the same idea under other names. Nobody has settled the terminology, and a provider using the newest acronym is not evidence they can do the work.
The useful distinction is not between the acronyms; it is between ranking a page and being the source of a sentence. The second is what changed.
How AI answers pick sources
Three mechanisms are worth understanding, because they respond to different work.
Retrieval from the search index. AI Overviews and most assistant answers with citations run a search behind the scenes and summarise what they retrieve. If your page is not retrievable, it cannot be cited. This is why crawlability, indexation and topical relevance still decide most of the outcome, and why technical SEO is the foundation rather than a separate discipline.
Passage-level extraction. Models quote and paraphrase specific passages, not whole pages. A page that answers a question in one clean paragraph under a heading that matches the question is easier to extract from than the same information spread across a page. This is where the practical writing change lies.
Training data and brand memory. Some of what a model says about your market came from its training data, months or years old, and no amount of on-site work changes it quickly. Mentions on sites the model has seen matter more here than anything on your own domain.
What is actually new, and what is renamed SEO
New, or newly important:
- Writing a direct, self-contained answer near the top of a page, then the detail beneath it, so a passage can be lifted without losing meaning.
- Making entities explicit: who you are, where you operate, what you do, in text and in structured data, so a model can attach facts to the right entity rather than guessing.
- Tracking whether your brand appears in AI answers for your own commercial questions, and where the answer gets it wrong.
- Deciding what to do about zero-click answers: if the answer is fully given, the page needs a reason to be clicked, usually a tool, a calculator, a template or specificity the summary cannot carry.
Renamed, and already SEO:
- Clear headings, clean HTML, fast pages, internal links, schema markup.
- Original information, first-hand experience and named authorship.
- Consistent facts about your business across the web.
If a proposal is entirely items from the second list under a GEO label, you are buying SEO at a premium.
What can be measured, and what cannot
Measurable: whether your brand or page is cited for a defined set of prompts, checked on a schedule; how the answer describes you and whether it is accurate; the share of your organic clicks arriving on pages that answer questions; impressions and clicks in Search Console, where AI Overview appearances are folded into normal search data rather than reported separately.
Not measurable today: how many people saw an AI answer about you and never clicked; which specific sentence a model drew from your page; whether an answer changed because of something you did rather than a model update. Anyone selling a dashboard that claims those numbers precisely is estimating.
Availability also varies. AI Overviews and AI Mode roll out by country and language on Google’s schedule, so what appears for a search in Kathmandu can differ from the same search in Sydney. Check what actually shows for your own queries in your own market before planning around it.
Where to start
- List the 20 questions a buyer asks before choosing you, in their words.
- Run each one in Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity and record what the answer says and who it cites.
- For every question where a competitor is cited and you are not, check whether you have a page that answers it directly. Usually you do not, or the answer is buried.
- Fix the retrievability of the pages you do have: indexation, speed, headings, schema.
- Write the missing answers as their own passages, with the specific detail a summary cannot reproduce.
- Re-check on a schedule, because answers move.
That sequence is what the AI search optimization service runs, with the visibility audit as the first step. The SEO guide for Nepali businesses covers the foundation it depends on.
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