Just as you master the currents of traditional SEO, the winds of change begin to blow again, this time, carrying the heavy clouds of Artificial Intelligence. For digital publishers, this shift feels less like a gentle breeze and more like a storm of new acronyms. You are likely hearing about AEO, GEO, and LLMO. It is easy to feel like you need to build three separate shelters to survive the weather, shuffling multiple strategies. But here is the good news: you don’t. How is that possible?
What is LLMO? AEO and GEO explanation
To put it simply, AEO, GEO, and LLMO share the same goal: making your content easy for machines to read and trust. They all rely on clear facts and an organized structure, ensuring that any AI system can quickly understand your information and use it to answer a user’s question. However, here are the main differences:
- LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization), unlike traditional SEO, focuses on optimising for conversational discovery across platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. It helps LLMs understand, trust, and accurately reuse information about your website and entities;
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is about writing content that gives a direct answer to a user’s question. It’s the practice of tailoring content specifically for platforms, ensuring your information appears, for instance, in featured snippets (a SERP feature), FAQs, and Voice Search;
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is designed to position your website as a trusted source within the summaries generated by tools like Google AI Overviews and Perplexity. While AEO focuses on satisfying the user’s specific question, GEO focuses on ensuring your brand is cited as the authority behind that information.
LLMO vs SEO
Experts disagree on whether optimizing for AI is a new field or just an evolution of traditional SEO. Some believe that the unique features of Large Language Models mean we need a separate area of study. Others argue that the basic principles of visibility remain part of the same strategy. Here are some arguments to support the first theory:
- Experts believe that content that is clearly structured and written so AI can easily understand and process it may become more important than content designed only for human readers;
- Additionally, AI systems place greater emphasis on unlinked brand mentions (as there are three main types of them – ones with the link, ones without it, and indirect mentions), while search engines rely heavily on backlinks to assess authority;
- For example, public GitHub repositories are used to train LLMs, meaning the AI can understand code, documentation, and discussions from these repositories, but that content doesn’t contribute to traditional search engine rankings.
Tips and tricks
- As we mentioned in the beginning, you don’t need separate strategies. Just start with SEO as a bedrock. To ensure visibility in AI systems, your website must be easy to crawl, fast enough to satisfy User Experience standards, and encrypted with HTTPS, meaning it has an SSL certificate;
- In the context of AI, SEO, and LLMO, an entity refers to any distinct, identifiable concept or thing that can be clearly recognised and distinguished from others. To strengthen entities, consistently use standardized names, detailed descriptions, and niche-specific language;
- When it comes to AEO, to make your page extraction-friendly for answer boxes and help generative engines pull accurate information, you need the right structure. Place scannable sections, short definitions, and question-based headers near the top of your content. A “Key Takeaways” section might also help;
- Building authority on broad topics requires more than just answering a user’s immediate question; it requires proving you understand the nuance. After delivering the quick answer, use the rest of your page to build out a detailed argument with supporting context and analysis. This signals to AI systems that your publication is not just a dictionary, but a comprehensive resource worthy of being the primary source for complex queries.
Future-proofing your content for long-term website monetization
If you optimize only for SEO, a Google Core Update could wipe you out. If you optimize only for ChatGPT, a change in their training data sources could make you invisible. The thing is, the most brilliant move isn’t picking a single channel to optimize for; it’s creating versatile, high-quality content that can be discovered through traditional SERPs, AI summaries, or AI-powered chats. If you focus too narrowly, you risk losing the audience required for effective website monetization – luckily, we can help you with this part!
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