Every time search changes, an acronym industry appears before the change finishes happening.
This round it's GEO. Or AEO. Or LLMO, depending on which deck you're reading. They all describe roughly the same pitch, and the pitch is mostly a rebrand.
Our position is simple: the acronyms are junk. The shift is real. Both halves of that sentence matter.
The junk half
Look at what most "GEO agencies" actually propose doing.
Crawlable pages. Structured data. Clear, well-organised content that answers questions directly. Credibility signals from third parties.
That's SEO. It's been SEO for years. Renaming it doesn't change the work - it changes the invoice.
The tell is the guarantee. Nobody can guarantee placement in AI answers - outputs vary by model, phrasing, and day, and there's no published algorithm to game. Anyone promising you a spot in ChatGPT's recommendations is running the guaranteed-rankings playbook from 2012 with new nouns.
If a pitch leads with an acronym and a promise, keep your money.
We say this as an agency that sells this work. The rebranding hurts the credible version of it, because every over-promised acronym makes the measurable version harder to take seriously.
The real half
Dismissing the branding is easy. Dismissing the shift would be a mistake, because some of this is genuinely new.
The one-answer dynamic is new. Search gave your buyer ten links and a choice. An assistant gives them one answer and a few citations. There's no page two of a ChatGPT response. Being the second-best source used to mean less traffic; increasingly it means absence.
The citation economy is new. What gets you into an answer isn't just your own site - it's third-party corroboration, including mentions that never link to you at all. That changes what digital PR is for.
And the surface is new. Buying questions that used to be typed into Google are being asked of assistants that answer conversationally. Different retrieval, different failure modes, different measurement.
None of that needed a new acronym. It does need attention.
What to actually do
Ignore the labels and look at the work. Ours is described plainly on our AI search optimisation page, and most of it will look familiar because it should.
The foundations are shared with SEO: crawlability, structure, credibility. If someone tells you AI visibility replaces your SEO, they've misunderstood both - the same signals feed both, which is why we run them as one programme.
On top of the foundations sits the newer work: entity consistency and schema, content structured to be lifted accurately, third-party mentions, deliberate crawler-access decisions, and measurement built for a world without rank trackers - structured prompt testing across the assistants, tracked over time.
A rule of thumb
When the acronyms change this fast, judge vendors by what they'll commit to measuring, not what they call themselves.
Ask how they'd know if the work was failing. Ask to see their own site's audit.
The ones selling the acronym can't answer either question. The ones doing the work can.
