How AEO, GEO and LLMO work
The three labels grew up separately and now overlap almost completely. Answer engine optimisation came out of the featured snippet and voice era: writing so a machine can lift a clean, correct answer straight off your page. Generative engine optimisation aims the same idea at systems that write a paragraph and name their sources. Large language model optimisation stretches wider still, to how a model describes your business when it answers from what it already learned and never visits your site at all.
Mechanically there are only two routes in. Either the system fetches live pages, reads them and quotes what it finds, or it answers from the picture of you it built from the wider web. The first route rewards pages that are crawlable, plainly structured and actually answer the question in the heading. The second rewards consistency: the same description of your business, the same services, the same locations, wherever your business is written about.
Why AEO, GEO and LLMO matter
An answer that summarises your page and names you is a real entry point, and one that barely shows up in a normal ranking report. A business can gain or lose this visibility without a single dashboard flagging it, which is why the honest measure is a question rather than a position: when a buyer asks an assistant what you do, is the reply accurate?
The stakes are highest when the model gets something wrong. A price you no longer charge, a service you dropped, a city you never covered — stated confidently in a summary — costs more than a missing citation, because the reader has no reason to doubt it and no obvious way to check.
Common mistakes with AEO, GEO and LLMO
The most expensive mistake is buying it as a brand new discipline. Almost everything that helps was already good practice: pages that answer what they promise, honest headings, facts a reader can verify, and an accurate description of the business in the places that describe businesses. Sold under a new acronym, that same work gets paid for twice.
The second is the market for shortcuts. Nobody sells a citation in a generated answer, so any tool or agency guaranteeing one is describing something it does not control. Stuffing a page with question-shaped headings, or hiding instructions aimed at models in the markup, does not earn a mention either and can read as manipulation.
What to do about it
Start with the answer. On every page that matters commercially, put a short, direct response to the page’s own question near the top, then give the detail a person would need next. A page that buries its answer is hard for a model to quote and hard for a reader to trust.
Then fix how you are described elsewhere. Same business name, same services, same contact details, same claims across your site, your profiles and your listings — that consistency is what a model has to work with, and it is the same groundwork behind AI visibility generally.
Finally, test by asking. Put your customers’ real questions to the main assistants yourself, note what comes back, and correct the sources behind any answer that is wrong. That loop, repeated, is most of what AI search optimisation actually consists of.