This question grows straight out of the “is SEO dead” worry, which is why it sits in our branch on People Also Ask vs AI Overviews. When we searched “Is SEO dead now with AI?” in our depth pass on 27 September 2026, “What is SEO called now with AI?” was one of the child questions Google returned. People ask “is it dead?” and “what’s it called now?” in the same breath.
The names people use, and where each came from
| Term | Stands for | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| AEO | Answer engine optimization | The oldest term here we could date. In February 2018, Search Engine Watch described voice search turning search engines into “answer engines”, and said the strategy for them “has come to be known as AEO”. That was years before ChatGPT search. |
| GEO | Generative engine optimization | A research paper, “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues, first posted to arXiv on 16 November 2023 and accepted at KDD 2024. |
| LLMO | Large language model optimization | Industry shorthand. Forrester listed it among “today’s buzziest acronyms” in November 2025. |
| AIO | AI optimization | Another trade label on the same Forrester list. Easy to mix up with AI Overviews, which some people also shorten to AIO. |
| AI SEO | Plain English | The phrase searchers actually type. Google’s People Also Ask box carries “What is AI SEO called now?” word for word. |
| LMNOPEO | A joke | Google’s Danny Sullivan, talking with John Mueller, as reported by Search Engine Journal: “we should be calling it LMNOPEO because there’s just so many acronyms for it.” |
GEO is the one with a paper trail. It started as an academic idea, not a Google term. The paper defines generative engines as “search engines that use generative models to gather and summarize information to answer user queries”, and reports that its methods lifted a source’s visibility in those answers “by up to 40%” in the authors’ experiments.
The rest have no agreed boundaries, and you can watch the disagreement happen inside Google’s own box. In our “people also ask tool” harvest, the answer Google showed for “What is AI SEO called now?” split the terms apart: GEO about getting cited by chatbots, AEO about formatting answers for AI Overviews and voice search. In our “people also ask seo” harvest, the answer to “What is replacing SEO?” lumped GEO, AEO and LLMO together as one thing, and spelled AEO out as “AI Engine Optimization”. Even the letters don’t agree.
What Google and Bing call it
Google picked a side. Its guide to optimizing for generative AI features on Google Search (updated 10 July 2026) answers the naming question head on: “From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.” It adds that while AEO and GEO “are common online, many suggested ‘hacks’ aren’t effective or supported by how Google Search actually works.” Its list of things you can skip for Google includes llms.txt files, “chunking” content into tiny pieces and rewriting pages just for AI.
Bing uses the new word but not a new rulebook. Its Webmaster Guidelines say “Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) focuses on content eligibility for grounding and reference in AI responses.” The same guidelines say SEO best practices “also support eligibility for AI-generated experiences, grounding results, and citations”, and warn that “GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations in AI experiences.”
So Google calls it SEO, and Bing puts GEO next to SEO rather than in its place. Neither describes a separate set of ranking rules.
Where the fundamentals overlap, and where they don’t
The overlap is most of the work. Whatever you call it, a page has to be crawlable, indexable, clearly written and worth citing. Google’s AI features only link to pages that are indexed and eligible for a snippet. Bing says its AI experiences sit on the same crawling and ranking foundation as regular search.
The differences are real but narrower than the sales pitches suggest:
- Other crawlers. ChatGPT search uses OpenAI’s own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI’s crawler documentation says sites that opt out of it “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”. Our page on how to appear on ChatGPT covers the setup.
- Other scoreboards. You track citations and impressions inside AI answers, not just rankings. Google Search Console now has a Generative AI performance report, and OpenAI’s publisher FAQ says ChatGPT tags its referral links with
utm_source=chatgpt.com.
Forrester analyst Nikhil Lai adds a third: AEO “depends much more on Bing’s index, on which all engines other than Google rely.” His overall verdict is that AEO is “significantly, but not fundamentally, different from SEO.” He also warns that vendors selling the new acronyms “tend to exaggerate SEO and AEO’s differences to carve a startup-sized hole in marketers’ tech stacks.” Worth remembering when someone quotes you for a GEO package.
What is replacing SEO?
Nothing yet, if “replacing” means a new discipline with its own rules. Google’s box can’t quite decide, though. In our “people also ask seo” harvest, Google answered “What is replacing SEO?” with a Built In article saying GEO “is replacing traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”. Two positions later, it answered “What is SEO now called?” from Wikipedia’s GEO entry, opening with “Traditional SEO is not actually renamed”. Same results page, opposite framing.
What is being replaced is a habit: ranking a page for a simple question and counting on the click. Our page on whether SEO is dead has the click data. What gets added is work, mostly checking which AI crawlers can reach you and tracking where you’re cited.
This argument isn’t new, either. The 2018 Search Engine Watch piece that described AEO said plainly that “AEO is not going to replace SEO”, and quoted Jason Barnard telling marketers they “must continue to optimize for search engines”. The answer engines changed from voice assistants to chatbots. The advice held up.