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 sitting on top of a genuine change, 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, and credibility signals from third parties. That has been SEO for years, and renaming it changes the invoice rather than the work.
The tell we'd look for first 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.
What has genuinely changed
Three things changed, and none of them 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 is no longer confined to your own site. Third-party corroboration counts, including mentions that never link to you, and that probably changes what digital PR is for while making it considerably harder to fake.
Buying questions that used to be typed into a search box are being asked conversationally instead, and because the retrieval behind a conversational answer is different enough that the failure modes change too, a rank tracker won't measure any of it.
What we'd actually do
The labels matter less than what sits behind them. The AI search optimisation page sets out what we do, and most of it will look familiar to anyone who has run an SEO programme.
The foundations are shared with SEO - crawlability, structure, and the credibility signals that come from outside your own site. The same signals feed both, so AI visibility doesn't replace SEO, and we run the two as one programme rather than 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 running structured prompt tests across the assistants on a repeat schedule.
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, and ask to see the audit of their own site. Anyone already doing the work can answer both off the top of their head, and the vendors who can't are usually the ones selling the acronym. Between them that's about an hour of due diligence before you sign anything.
