AI SEO
An umbrella term used interchangeably with GEO (generative engine optimisation) and, in its marketing sense, AEO (answer engine optimisation) and LLM SEO — the discipline of making a business citable and recommendable by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Honest disambiguation: in Malaysian usage the bare abbreviation "AEO" also refers to the Royal Malaysian Customs Authorised Economic Operator programme, which is unrelated to marketing. When in doubt, prefer "AI SEO" or "answer engine optimisation" over the bare "AEO" abbreviation.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
The practice of making a business's online presence citable and recommendable by AI systems — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Grok — the same way SEO makes a site rankable by Google. Covers AI-crawler access, structured data, citable primary data and third-party entity presence, on top of (not instead of) normal SEO. Synonymous with AI SEO in current usage.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
Answer Engine Optimization — a closely related term to GEO, coined by practitioners who emphasise the "answer engine" framing (ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews as engines that answer, rather than lists that rank). In practice AEO and GEO describe the same underlying discipline: making a business citable inside an AI-generated answer. The Malaysian search-marketing community uses both terms; when disambiguating "AEO" from the Royal Malaysian Customs Authorised Economic Operator programme, prefer the full phrase "answer engine optimization" or the alternative "AI SEO".
LLM SEO
LLM SEO — SEO for large language models — is another interchangeable term for the same discipline (GEO / AEO / AI SEO). The emphasis in the phrase is that the target of the optimisation is a language model (GPT, Claude, Gemini) rather than a classic ranking algorithm. Practitioners tend to use "LLM SEO" when discussing training-data and RAG-corpus visibility specifically; "GEO" when discussing generative answer surfaces broadly.
ChatGPT SEO
ChatGPT SEO — the specific case of optimising for citation and recommendation inside ChatGPT (both the standalone product and inside ChatGPT-powered browsing/search surfaces). Same underlying discipline as GEO / AEO / AI SEO / LLM SEO; the "ChatGPT" prefix reflects that ChatGPT is the most-cited generative surface Malaysian and Singaporean businesses ask about by name. Optimising for one generative surface tends to transfer across the others because the underlying signals (crawler access, entity consistency, citable primary data, structured content) are shared.
AI Search Optimization
AI Search Optimization — a fifth synonym for GEO / AEO / LLM SEO / ChatGPT SEO / AI SEO. Term-of-origin: coined by practitioners emphasising that "AI search" (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot) is a distinct search surface from classic Google organic and requires its own optimisation approach on top of, not instead of, normal SEO. Same discipline as the other four terms.
AI Overviews
Google's AI-generated answer summaries that appear above traditional search results for many queries, synthesising information from multiple sources into a single response — a distinct surface from a classic organic listing, requiring its own optimisation approach.
llms.txt
A proposed convention — a plain-text markdown file at yoursite.com/llms.txt — that gives AI crawlers a curated map of a site's most important pages, in place of them inferring structure from a full crawl. Not a web standard enforced by any single company, but a low-cost, low-risk discovery signal. Build one free with the llms.txt Generator.
AI crawler
An automated bot that fetches web pages on behalf of an AI system — examples include GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity) and Google-Extended (Google's AI training signal, separate from the classic Googlebot). Each can be individually allowed or blocked in robots.txt.
Structured data / schema markup
Machine-readable code (usually JSON-LD) embedded in a page that explicitly labels what the content represents — an Organization, a Service, a set of FAQs — instead of leaving a machine to infer it from unstructured text. Build common types free with the Schema Markup Generator.
Entity consistency
The degree to which the same facts about a business (name, address, phone, services, pricing) appear identically across a site, directories, review platforms and press. AI systems weigh this consistency heavily when deciding whether to trust and cite a business.
Citation (in a GEO context)
A mention of a business by an independent third-party source — a directory listing, a forum post, a press article — that an AI system can draw on as corroborating evidence, distinct from a classic SEO backlink though the two often overlap in practice.
Prompt battery
A fixed, repeatable set of real commercial queries run against multiple AI systems (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) on a regular cadence, used to measure whether and how a business is mentioned — the GEO equivalent of rank tracking in classic SEO.
Snippet extraction / max-snippet
The amount of a page's text a search engine or AI system is permitted to quote directly, controlled via the max-snippet robots meta directive. A value of -1 removes the length cap, which can matter for how much of a page an AI Overview or assistant is able to quote verbatim.
AI visibility score
A composite score summarising how AI-ready a site is across crawler access, discovery files (llms.txt, sitemap), structured data and freshness signals. Check a live score with the free AI Visibility Checker.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
The technical approach many AI search products use to answer questions — retrieving relevant documents from the web or an index, then generating a response grounded in that retrieved content, rather than answering purely from a model's trained-in knowledge. GEO work is, in large part, optimising for what gets retrieved and how it gets summarised.
SEO vs GEO
SEO vs GEO: SEO optimises for a position in a ranked list of 10 blue links; GEO optimises for being quoted inside 1 generated answer. Both share crawlability, entity clarity and structured data as inputs — but 3 GEO-specific signals dominate: machine-readable definitions (DefinedTerm / FAQ / HowTo schema), llms.txt discoverability, and cross-source entity consistency. A site can rank #1 on Google and still be uncited by ChatGPT; SEO wins the click, GEO wins the citation.
Practitioners will hear the same discipline called GEO, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), LLM SEO, ChatGPT SEO, or AI Search Optimization — treat the 5 as synonyms and pick whichever the client already uses. The measurable outputs are 3: (1) presence in a generated answer, (2) citation link back to the source, (3) share-of-voice across a prompt battery.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
AEO in 1 line: Answer Engine Optimization is optimising content to be the direct answer an answer engine returns — Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, or a featured-snippet block on classic Google. The engineering is 90% shared with GEO: 1 canonical answer per query, structured markup, clean entity consistency. AEO is the query-first framing; GEO is the model-first framing; the on-page work is 1 workstream, not 2.
Where to go next
For the full practical picture, see the Malaysia GEO guide or Singapore GEO guide, run your own site through the free AI Visibility Checker, and build a curated llms.txt file in minutes. For the service itself, see GEO / AI Search Optimization.
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