AI search acronym map

Four acronyms get used to sell AI search services, and they overlap in ways nobody explains. This maps them out so you can see what each one is used to mean, where the claims come from, and which parts are documented rather than asserted.

Open the tool in its own window

There are four views. A map of how the terms relate to each other, a walkthrough of what happens when someone asks an AI system a question, a comparison table, and a readiness scorecard you can run against your own site.

What it’s for

If you’ve been handed a proposal with GEO, AEO, AIO or LLMO in the deliverables, start with the comparison table. It shows what each term targets, what counts as winning, and how much of the work is ordinary SEO underneath. That last column is usually the useful one.

If you’re trying to understand where your pages fit, the map view is the better starting point. Click any part of it and the panel explains what that term covers, which platforms it applies to, and what can actually be measured.

The scorecard is eight checks. It won’t tell you anything a good audit wouldn’t, but it takes two minutes and it tends to surface the crawler problem, which is the one I find most often.

What it isn’t

It isn’t a diagram of how Google works. No platform publishes the mechanism behind its AI features, so where a panel describes one, it says plainly that it’s inference. The LLMO panel in particular is labelled as a hypothesis, because how training data maps to what a model says is not something anyone outside the model providers can verify.

The query walkthrough is an illustration of the shape of a generated answer. The names and sources in it are placeholders. No assistant was queried to produce it, and inventing citations from real companies would be exactly the sort of thing this tool exists to argue against.

A note on the acronyms

Google uses none of them. Not GEO, not AEO, not AIO, not LLMO. That’s worth knowing before you pay for any of them as a separate discipline, and it’s the thing the map is really there to show.

The full argument, with the sources, is in the article on GEO, AEO, AIO and LLMO.

Using it on your own site

There’s an embed button at the bottom of the tool. It copies an iframe you can paste into a post or page, and it’s free to use as long as the attribution link stays in place.

If you’d rather have someone run the underlying checks properly against your site, that’s what AI search visibility covers.

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