Four acronyms, one goal: showing up when someone searches, whether that search happens in Google, an AI Overview, ChatGPT, or Claude. Here is what each layer actually adds, and the one system that covers all four without four separate strategies.
Every few months a new acronym shows up promising a whole new strategy. First SEO, then AEO, then GEO, and now LLMO. It is tempting to treat each one as its own project with its own checklist. It is not. All four are chasing the same outcome: a person types or asks a question, and your business becomes part of the answer they get back. The differences between them are real, but they are small, and they stack on top of each other instead of replacing each other.
If you already do SEO well, meaning keywords that match how people actually search, genuinely useful writing, and other sites linking back to you, you have already done most of the work for all four. What changes at each layer is the format of the answer you give, and how easily a machine can lift that answer and repeat it somewhere else. Get that part right and you do not need four separate content plans.
Here is what each layer actually means, and where two of them stop being different things wearing different names.
Four plain-language definitions, each one building on the last.
If the SEO foundation is not there, nothing else in this guide matters, because there is nothing solid for AEO, GEO, or LLMO to build on. Confirm three things on the page you are working on. It targets a real phrase people actually search. That phrase appears naturally in the title, the first paragraph, and one heading. The writing is genuinely useful enough that another site would want to link to it. Everything below assumes this part is already true.
Add one short, direct sentence that answers the reader's actual question, placed before any story, hook, or throat-clearing. If someone read only that one sentence, they should walk away with the real answer, not a teaser for it. This single habit is what separates a page that ranks from a page that also gets read aloud by an AI Overview or a voice assistant.
Structure the page so a generative AI can lift it cleanly: short paragraphs, one idea per section, a visible published date, and schema markup that names the author, the organization, and the date. This site's own llms.txt file and the FAQ schema on this exact guide are both built for that purpose, making the facts about who wrote this and what it says easy for a model to find and quote correctly.
Ranking gets you a position in a list of links. Extraction gets your sentence copied into someone else's answer. Write in short, definitive sentences instead of long, qualified ones. Turn your subheadings into the literal questions people ask. Give each paragraph exactly one idea, so a model can quote it without needing the paragraph before or after it for context.
The theory is simple. Here is what it looks like applied to a real page.
You do not need new software to do any of this. You need two prompts, saved somewhere you can reuse them.
Look at this page or post: [paste the content or URL]. Score it 1 to 5 on four things. SEO: does it target a real search phrase and use it naturally in the title, first paragraph, and one heading. AEO: is there one short, direct sentence early on that answers the main question a reader would type into Google. GEO and LLMO: does it have clear structure, short paragraphs, one idea per section, and dates, that an AI could quote directly. Clarity: would a stranger understand the point in the first two sentences. For every score under 4, tell me exactly what to change, in one sentence.
Here is the opening of my page or post: [paste the opening]. Rewrite the first two to three sentences so they answer the core question directly and completely, in plain language, the way you would say it out loud if someone asked you. Keep it under 40 words. Do not add a hook or a story before the answer. The direct answer comes first, and the rest of the piece builds the case after that.
Clicks are not the only signal anymore. Start watching for when your business gets named directly inside an AI Overview, a ChatGPT answer, or a Perplexity summary, even when no one clicks through. Ask an AI assistant the exact question your ideal reader would ask, and see whether you show up in the answer. That is the new scoreboard, and it runs alongside your regular traffic numbers, not instead of them.
You do not need four separate strategies. You need the SEO foundation done well, a direct answer near the top of the page, and a structure clear enough for an AI to quote you correctly. That is SEO, AEO, GEO, and LLMO, done once.
Building the systems that make founders' content and businesses easy to find and easy to cite, in Google and in every AI assistant people are starting to ask instead, is exactly what we do inside Her AI Systems™.
Almost entirely. Both describe formatting your content so a generative AI model can find it, understand it, and quote it correctly. GEO is the more general term and LLMO points specifically at large language models like ChatGPT and Claude, but the actual work of doing them is the same.
No. AEO is one extra habit layered on top of SEO, not a replacement for it. You still need the keywords, the useful writing, and the backlinks that SEO has always required. AEO adds a short, direct answer near the top of the page so that work can also be read aloud or surfaced without a click.
No. The same page, written with a direct answer near the top and a clear structure, works for a Google AI Overview, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity at once. What changes between platforms is which one surfaces you more often, not what you need to write.
Clear structure a machine can lift without guessing: short paragraphs, one idea per section, a visible date, and schema markup that states who wrote the page and when. Confusing structure is the most common reason a genuinely good page still never gets quoted.
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