The Difference Between GEO, AEO And LLM SEO
Long sections on activity that produced nothing, described in the language of effort rather than outcome. And the most reliable indicator, a report you cannot disagree with, because it contains no specific claim to test.
Generative Engine Optimization The broadest of the three in common use. It refers to being visible in systems that generate an answer rather than returning a list, which covers assistants, AI summaries on results pages and any interface that synthesises rather than links.
The monthly report is where an engagement is either accountable or theatrical, and the difference is visible from the first page. A useful report can be argued with. A padded one cannot, because there is nothing in it specific enough to disagree about.
Answer Engine Optimization Older and broader in origin. It predates the current generation of assistants and originally covered any surface that answers directly, including featured snippets, knowledge panels and voice assistants.
Refusals matter. A report that only contains successes is either describing a suspiciously easy month or omitting the parts that did not work, and the omitted parts are usually where the useful information is.
Ask What They Cannot Measure A competent practitioner will volunteer limitations before you ask. Assistant answers vary between sessions. Referral attribution is inconsistent. Some assistants cannot be measured reliably at all. Sample sizes in the published research are small.
The last of these is the most common and the hardest to see, because it produces no error anyone internally encounters. Your site works perfectly in every browser while returning a challenge page to every legitimate retrieval agent.
Finally, pay attention to how they talk about their existing clients. Somebody who describes a client's category accurately, names the specific constraint that made the work difficult, and mentions something that did not work has actually done the job. Somebody who describes every engagement as a success in identical language has either been unusually lucky or is describing a template.
And pick a narrow enough definition of what you do that the existing coverage is thin. Competing to be the best documented answer to a specific question is a solvable problem. Competing for a broad category against everyone is not, and the small operators who do well here are almost always the ones who narrowed first. llm visibility tracking
What Padding Looks Like Screenshots of favourable answers with no indication of how many runs produced them. Industry news summaries that could have been written without opening your account. A rising score with no methodology. Traffic charts from unrelated channels included to fill space.
Coverage in a publication nobody cites is still worth having for reach and credibility. It is simply not visibility work, and counting it as such is how a public relations budget gets defended for years without moving anything measurable in this channel. llm visibility tracking
It is also worth asking for the report a day before the meeting rather than seeing it in the room. A document presented live is experienced as a narrative and approved on the strength of the delivery. The same document read beforehand is experienced as evidence, and the questions that occur to you reading it alone are usually the ones worth asking.
That means an unlinked mention in a trade publication can be worth more here than a linked mention in a low quality outlet, which inverts the priority most digital public relations programmes were built on.
Three acronyms, considerable overlap, and no governing body to settle the definitions. Different agencies use them differently, some interchangeably, and a few have invented a fourth to differentiate a proposal.
That emphasis is worth watching, since retrieval is where most current influence actually lies. A proposal built primarily on getting into training data is describing a slower and far less controllable mechanism than one built on being retrievable now.
What Transfers to an Ordinary Business Three things, and they are the three that most small operators skip. Check that you are readable before assuming you have a content problem, since on a small site an access failure is total rather than partial.
Legacy Content Is an Asset and a Liability An older site carries accumulated mentions, which is genuine value that a new domain does not have. It also carries accumulated inconsistency: superseded pages, old contact details and descriptions that no longer match what the organisation does.
A Numeric Name Is an Entity Problem Names beginning with digits behave differently across the web than names beginning with letters. They get written several ways, they sort strangely in directories, and they collide with unrelated numeric strings in ways that letter based names do not.
The lesson generalises to any brand whose name is short, generic or ambiguous. The correction is not clever, it is repetitive: pick one written form, use it everywhere, and pair it with a descriptive phrase so that a mention alone is never the only clue about what it refers to.