Every time search changes, an acronym industry turns up before the change has finished happening. This round it's GEO, or AEO, or LLMO depending on whose deck you're reading, and they all describe roughly the same pitch.
We sell this work, so treat what follows accordingly. The packaging is mostly a rebrand. The change underneath it is genuine, and the rebranding actively hurts the credible version, because every over-promised acronym makes the measurable version harder to sell to a sceptical CFO.
What the acronym agencies are actually proposing
Read past the naming and the deliverables list is familiar. Crawlable pages, structured data, clear content organised to answer questions directly, credibility signals from third parties. That has been SEO for years, and renaming it changes the invoice rather than the work.
The reliable tell is the guarantee. Nobody can guarantee placement in AI answers - outputs vary by model, by phrasing, and by day, and there's no published algorithm to work against. A promise of a fixed spot in ChatGPT's recommendations is the guaranteed-rankings pitch from 2012 with the nouns swapped out. If a proposal opens with an acronym and a promise, keep your money.
What has genuinely changed
Three things, none of which needed a new label.
Search handed your buyer ten links and let them choose. An assistant hands them one answer and a handful of citations, and there's no page two of a ChatGPT response, so being the second-best source has gone from meaning less traffic to meaning absence.
What gets you into an answer isn't confined to your own site any more. Third-party corroboration counts, including mentions that never link to you, which changes what digital PR is for and makes it considerably harder to fake.
And the surface itself is different. Buying questions that used to be typed into a search box are being asked conversationally instead. Different retrieval mechanics, different failure modes, and measurement that doesn't fit a rank tracker.
What we'd actually do
Ignore the labels and look at the work. Ours is set out 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. Anyone telling you AI visibility replaces your SEO has misunderstood both, given the same signals feed each of them, which is the reason we run them as one programme instead of two line items.
On top of the foundations sits the newer material - entity consistency and schema, content structured so it can be lifted accurately, third-party mentions, deliberate decisions about which crawlers get access, and measurement built for a world without rank trackers, which in practice means structured prompt testing across the assistants, run repeatedly.
How to judge a vendor
When the terminology moves this fast, the useful filter is what someone will commit to measuring rather than what they call themselves.
Ask how they'd know if the work was failing. Ask to see the audit of their own site. Both questions are easy to answer if you're doing the work and awkward if you're selling the acronym, which makes them worth about an hour of due diligence before you sign anything.
