There are now at least five names for roughly the same body of work, and every one of them shows up in somebody’s sales deck. AI SEO, AEO, GEO, LLM SEO, AI search optimisation. Before you can decide what to spend, you need a decoder. So what is AI SEO, what do the other four mean, and how much of it is one thing wearing different hats? Mostly the last one, as it turns out.
The umbrella term
AI SEO is the broadest of the labels. It covers any work aimed at being visible where artificial intelligence sits between your customer and their answer.
That includes two quite different situations, and conflating them is where most confusion starts. The first is Google using AI to summarise results while still running the search engine you already optimise for. The second is somebody skipping Google and asking an assistant instead.
Those are not the same problem. The first affects pages you already have. The second depends far more on what the rest of the web says about you.
The other four labels, briefly
AEO is answer engine optimisation. Being the direct answer to a question, which includes the box at the top of Google and anything read aloud by a speaker.
GEO is generative engine optimisation. Being one of the sources a system uses while writing a longer reply.
LLM SEO names the same territory as GEO, after the technology rather than the output.
AI search optimisation is a general phrase covering all of the above, used mostly by people selling to buyers who do not want acronyms.
None of the five has an agreed definition. If two vendors use the same word to mean different things, that is the field being young rather than either of them being wrong.
What is AI SEO asking you to do differently
Strip out the vocabulary and four practical changes remain.
Answers move to the top of the page. A passage that settles one question, in the first two sentences under a clear heading, can be quoted. One that builds to a conclusion over six paragraphs cannot. Our guide to on-page SEO for local businesses covers the structure.
Consistency stops being housekeeping and becomes a ranking issue in its own right. Systems reading about you have to decide that all those scattered references describe one business. Contradictions make them cautious.
Mentions count without links. A crawler needed a hyperlink to follow. A model reading a sentence does not, which widens the list of opportunities worth chasing.
Specificity beats coverage. Content restating what a hundred other pages say gives a summary no reason to pick yours. A figure from your own jobs, or a condition particular to houses in this valley, does.
What has not changed
More than the sales decks imply.
Proximity still governs local rankings. Your Google Business Profile still decides which searches you are eligible for. Reviews still influence both position and whether anyone picks you. A slow site is still a problem. Our essentials of local SEO for Medford and the Rogue Valley covers that foundation, and it carries every one of the five labels above.
The habit of answering complete questions in plain language is also not new. Voice search asked for the same thing, and our guide to voice search optimisation for Ashland businesses reads almost unchanged today.
How much should a small business spend on this
Less than the pitch suggests, and none of it as a separate service.
The overlap between AI SEO and ordinary search work is large enough that treating them as two budgets means paying twice. A better approach is to ask whoever handles your marketing to cover the four changes above inside existing work.
If nobody handles it, the order that returns most is unchanged: profile, listings, reviews, then a few pages that answer real questions. Our overview of Google’s AI-powered search features covers how the summaries developed, and our piece on how AI is changing modern digital marketing practices covers where the tools help with the work itself.
One more note on sequencing. The four changes above are cheap once the basics are in place and close to useless before that, because clearer pages sitting on contradictory listings still leave a system unsure which business it is reading about. Order matters more than effort here, and it is the part most proposals skip over.
The test for any pitch
One question separates a real proposal from a repackaged one. Ask whether the work still pays if AI search grows more slowly than expected.
Correct listings, a complete profile, steady reviews, credible mentions and clearer pages all improve ordinary search regardless. Anything that only pays off if assistants take over is a bet, and a bet is a different purchase from a programme.
If you would rather have this handled as one piece of work under one budget, that is what our digital marketing services cover. Our hours, directions and recent reviews are on AmpLocal’s Google Business Profile.
Frequently asked questions
Is AI SEO different from regular SEO?
It overlaps heavily. The differences are clearer page structure, stricter consistency across listings, mentions counting without links, and more weight on original detail. The foundations are shared.
Which acronym should I care about?
None of them, as a buying decision. Care about the work. If a vendor cannot describe what they will do without the acronym, that is a signal.
Do I need new software?
Very few small businesses do. Tracking tools become useful once the fundamentals are finished and you want trend data. Fix the basics first.
Will Google penalise me for using AI to write content?
Google has said it rewards helpful, original content regardless of how it was produced. The risk lies in publishing generic material, not in the tool that drafted it.
How long before this matters more than ordinary search?
Nobody knows, and anyone giving you a date is guessing. For local services the map pack still drives most enquiries today, so build for both.
