AEO vs SEO vs GEO: a plain-English guide to the acronyms
For law firms. SEO you know. Then someone says AEO, GEO, AIO, SXO, and a vendor email throws in LLMO for good measure. This guide explains what each one means, with a real legal example, so the next time the alphabet comes up you are the person who gets it.
If you have sat in a marketing update in the last year, you have been hit with the alphabet. SEO you know. Then someone says AEO, GEO, AIO, SXO, and a vendor email throws in LLMO. They all sound like the same thing wearing different hats.
SEO is being ranked in a list of links. AEO is being named in the AI's answer. GEO is being cited inside a chatbot's reply. AIO is the wider job of getting AI to know and trust your firm in the first place. SXO is what happens once someone lands on your site. For a law firm, the game moved from ranking to being recommended by name.
SEO: the one you already know
SEO is getting your firm's website to rank as high as possible in the list of blue links on Google. A client searches "employment lawyer Dallas," sees a page of firms, and decides who to click. You measured it in rankings, clicks and traffic. It still works and it is not going away: if a machine cannot read and trust your website, nothing built on top of it will help. But SEO assumes the client sees a list and makes the choice. That assumption is what is breaking.
AEO: Answer Engine Optimization
AEO is being the firm that gets named when an engine answers the question directly instead of handing back a list. Run "employment lawyer Dallas" today and Google's own AI answer often opens with "three well-regarded firms are A, B and C" before a single link. If yours is not one of the three, the client may never scroll down. The measure changed from where you rank to whether you are in the answer at all.
GEO: Generative Engine Optimization
GEO is AEO's close cousin, pointed at the chatbots themselves: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google's AI Overviews. The term comes from Princeton research in 2023. Here the client skips Google entirely, asks ChatGPT "who handles complex employment disputes in Dallas," and gets a short list of firms with the reasons. Earning a place in that reply is a different craft, because the model is reading the world around your firm, legal directories, bar publications, reported decisions, more than your site itself.
AIO: AI Optimization
AIO is the widest term: the work of getting AI systems to know your firm and trust it enough to cite it. For a law firm that means showing up, accurately and consistently, in the places the models lean on: the legal directories, the bar press, reported decisions, and your own well-structured site. AEO and GEO are slices of AIO. Some people also use AIO to mean Google's "AI Overviews," the answer box itself. Same letters, different thing.
SXO: Search Experience Optimization
SXO is about not wasting the work above. It is the experience once someone lands on your site: does it load fast, read clearly, and let a prospect find the right practice and book a consultation without friction. A client who arrives from an AI answer often shows up half sold. SXO makes sure your site closes what the answer opened.
AEO vs SEO: what is the difference?
SEO gets you found. AEO gets you recommended.
SEO rewards a page that matches the words in a search and has links pointing at it. AEO rewards a passage that answers the client's question directly, in a form a model can lift and quote, from a source the model already trusts. A firm can hold page one of Google for its practice keywords and be absent from the AI answer to the same question.
GEO vs SEO: what is the difference?
SEO earns a position in a list of links. GEO earns a place inside the answer a chatbot writes.
SEO measures where your page ranks. GEO measures whether your firm is in the answer, whether it is described correctly, and whether your own page is the source or a directory is speaking for you. A firm needs both, and the second increasingly decides which firms a client ever contacts. How to measure it is in how to choose an AI visibility platform; how ChatGPT in particular picks its sources is in how to rank in ChatGPT.
So how do these fit together?
SEO is the foundation. AEO and GEO are how you show up when AI answers a question, in Google's answer box and inside the chatbots. AIO is the campaign to become a source AI cites in the first place. SXO is what happens after the click. Five names for one job: be the firm AI recommends, and be ready when the client arrives. AEO and GEO overlap so much that vendors use them interchangeably. We use AEO as the umbrella. If a vendor says GEO, they usually mean the same thing.
The rest of the alphabet, quickly
- LLMO (large language model optimization), sometimes "LLM SEO": GEO by another name.
- GAIO and "AI SEO": looser labels for the same shift, used more in headlines than in practice.
- "Search Everywhere Optimization": the idea that you now need to show up on every surface at once, well beyond Google.
Almost all of it comes back to being the answer an AI gives.
What Google's 2026 changes shift for each
Google's 2026 changes moved AI Mode to the center of Search. They affect each discipline differently.
SEO is narrowing
For searches like "patent attorney Chicago," Google still returns links near the top, and SEO is worth maintaining. For questions like "how does an IPR proceeding work," Google's AI answers before the links appear, and fewer clients scroll down. The question has become which of your searches still send clicks.
AEO now means answering the whole conversation
Clients ask several follow-up questions before forming a view of which firm to contact. A firm whose content answers only the first question gets cited once and drops out. The firm whose content holds up through the follow-ups gets cited more often.
GEO presence can now be checked without a new question
AI assistants can now run a saved question on a schedule and report back, so a shortlist can refresh without anyone typing a new query. If a general counsel sets one up to track firms handling a specific kind of matter, firms AI can read appear in those reports, and firms it cannot read are left out each time.
Why this hits law firms harder
Legal questions are the kind AI loves to answer directly, so they trigger Google's own AI answer more often than the average search does.
To an AI, a law firm is three brands: the firm, the practice, and the individual lawyer. A client might ask about your firm, or about the best securities litigators in New York, or about one partner by name. You can be named on one layer and invisible on the other two. A tool that scores a single brand misses most of that picture.
What to do with this
Read this as a change in the question. For twenty years the question was whether you rank. That is now the floor. The question that decides whether your firm is in the conversation is whether you are named. If you are not sure, open ChatGPT or Google's AI answer and ask the question your best client would ask. If your firm's name does not come back, you have just seen the gap this whole alphabet is about.
Sources: Ahrefs, November 2025 (share of legal queries that trigger Google's AI answer); Princeton University, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" (2023). AEO, GEO, AIO, and SXO definitions reflect Selectio's working framework for law firms.
Frequently asked questions
SEO gets you found; AEO gets you recommended. SEO ranks a page in a list of links. AEO gets a firm named inside the AI answer above those links. A firm can rank on page one and be absent from the AI answer to the same question.
SEO earns a position in a list of links. GEO earns a place inside the answer a chatbot writes, and measures whether your firm is in it, described correctly, and cited from your own page. A firm needs both.
No. Search results still send visitors, especially when someone looks for a specific firm by name. What changed is that for many questions about hiring a lawyer the client reads an answer first and may never reach the links. AEO covers the part of the journey SEO cannot see.
Answer engine optimization is the work of getting AI engines to cite and recommend a firm when someone asks a question, instead of ranking a page in a list of results. In practice: direct answers on the page, consistent facts about the firm everywhere an engine reads, and presence on the sources each engine trusts.
They overlap heavily and are often used interchangeably. AEO is being the answer anywhere an engine answers directly. GEO is being cited inside chatbot replies such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. Selectio uses AEO as the umbrella term.
Usually "AI optimization," the broad work of getting AI to know and cite your firm. Some people use AIO to mean Google's "AI Overviews," the answer box itself, which is a different thing.
AEO and GEO, on a solid SEO foundation. Legal questions trigger AI answers more often than the average search, so being named in those answers increasingly decides who makes a client's shortlist.
Yes. It is now the floor. Ranking gets you found; being named in the AI answer gets you chosen.
Are you in the answer, or just in the links?
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