Short answer: LLM SEO is the practice of making a brand and its pages usable by large language models when those models answer questions — retrievable, extractable, and corroborated enough to be named. It is the same work the industry also calls GEO; the terms differ mainly in which part they emphasise.
Four names, one problem, different emphases
| Term | What it emphasises |
|---|---|
| LLM SEO | The model as the new intermediary; closest to classic SEO vocabulary |
| GEO — generative engine optimization | The engine and the generated answer as the surface being optimised |
| AEO — answer engine optimization | Extraction: can a self-contained answer be lifted from this page |
| LLMO | The model's internal representation of the brand rather than the answer surface |
The distinction worth keeping is AEO's, because it names a specific, testable failure: a page that ranks fine and cannot be quoted. The others are largely the same programme under different marketing.
What carries over from SEO
More than the rebrands suggest. Crawlability, server-rendered content, entity clarity, structured data and third-party authority all still matter, and several matter more. If a retrieval agent cannot fetch your page, nothing downstream applies.
What genuinely changes
- The unit is a passage, not a page. Models retrieve and quote paragraphs; a page is just where paragraphs live.
- Position stops existing. Named, mentioned, absent — and separately cited or not.
- Variance is the default. Ask twice, get different answers. Single samples prove nothing, which means you need a fixed question set before you have any data at all.
- There is no Search Console. Nobody sends you this data. You only know what you sample yourself.
The practical consequence
Keep one technical baseline and stop treating it as two projects. Then split the measurement completely, because nothing in the search stack reports what happens inside an answer.
The mistake to avoid is driving this work off keyword volume. Buyers ask in sentences, and the sentences with the most commercial weight often have no measurable search volume at all.