Introduction
Digital marketing has always loved its acronyms: SEO, PPC, CRO. But lately, my LinkedIn feed is swimming with a new trio: AIO, GEO, and LLMO. At first glance, they sound like separate strategies, but in practice, they all point in the same direction: making your content understandable and trustworthy for both humans and AI systems.
Rather than chasing acronyms, the smart move is to recognise the overlap, understand what each term means, and focus on the tactics that actually help your brand appear in AI-driven results.
What is AI Optimisation (AIO)?
AIO can mean two different things in the current AI/SEO conversation. For some, it refers to AI Overviews, Google’s generative answer summaries now appearing in search results.
For others (and in this section), it means AI Optimisation.
AI Optimisation is about creating content that AI systems can easily understand, process, and present back to users. In practice, that means writing in clear, structured formats, using schema markup where possible, and making sure your content answers questions directly.
It’s far from a radical departure from SEO, it’s content optimisation tuned for the AI era. In short, it’s about producing content that reads well for humans and makes sense to machines.
What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?
Generative Engine Optimisation is designed for AI-driven search engines and generative platforms, such as Google’s AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, or ChatGPT. The aim is to have your content cited when these systems produce answers.
The core idea is authority: if your content is trustworthy, well-sourced, and easy to parse, AI systems are more likely to cite it. Think of GEO as building your brand into the “reference layer” for AI-generated answers.
What is Large Language Model Optimisation (LLMO)?
Large Language Model Optimisation takes the same principle one step further. It’s about shaping how large language models, the systems behind tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, talk about your brand.
This comes from consistency: publishing authoritative, fact-based content across your site and reputable third-party sources, so that when LLMs generate responses, they naturally reflect your expertise and brand positioning.
Why they’re essentially the same
Although these three acronyms sound distinct, they’re all pointing to the same principle: optimising your content so it’s easy for machines to process and trust.
- AIO focuses on AI assistants.
- GEO focuses on AI-powered search engines.
- LLMO focuses on large language models themselves.
But the tactics are nearly identical. You’re structuring your content, building authority, and ensuring brand consistency so AI systems can reference you, whether in a search summary, chatbot answer, or generated text.
Tactics that apply across AIO, GEO, and LLMO
So what should you actually do? Here are the practical steps that cut across all three strategies:
- Use structured data: Add schema markup to highlight key facts like product details, services, reviews, and business information.
- Focus on entities, not just keywords: Build topic authority, e.g., write in-depth about “digital PR” rather than sprinkling the phrase a few times.
- Answer questions clearly: Format content with FAQs, concise headings, and scannable summaries so AI can lift answers directly.
- Publish authoritative content: Include stats, expert commentary, and trusted references. This signals reliability both to people and to machines.
- Maintain brand consistency: Ensure your core facts (e.g., founding year, locations, service offerings) are consistent across your website and third-party mentions.
- Monitor performance: Track where your brand shows up in AI search results and chatbots. Tools are still developing, but referral traffic and mentions can show what’s working.
Should you invest in these strategies?
Yes, but don’t overthink the labels. You don’t need three different strategies for AIO, GEO and LLMO. If you’re already doing strong SEO, you’ll have covered much of the groundwork.
The next step is layering in small AI-focused experiments:
- Check where your brand appears in AI answers today.
- Identify content gaps where your expertise isn’t showing up.
- Create structured, high-authority content that fills those gaps.
It’s not about abandoning SEO. It’s about evolving your SEO so it works for both traditional search and the AI-driven discovery channels growing around it.
Final thoughts
AIO, GEO, and LLMO are three acronyms describing the same underlying shift: SEO in the age of AI. Instead of treating them as separate silos, see them as different ways of framing the same principle. Make your content clear, structured, authoritative, and trustworthy.
With approximately 190.6 million users submitting a whopping 2.5 billion prompts daily to ChatGPT alone, there’s no contesting that AI has become a major discovery channel. Optimising for these platforms is rapidly growing in importance, and will soon become a necessity for SEOs.
The brands that win won’t be the ones chasing terminology. They’ll be the ones consistently producing content that serves people first and is easy for AI to interpret along the way.If you’d like to talk about how your business can adapt to this new AI-driven search landscape, get in touch with us today. We’d love to help you build a strategy that lasts.
