GEO, AEO, LLMO: the acronym carousel spins faster every quarter. Here's why it's mostly old wine in new bottles, and what actually stays constant.
Every few months the SEO world discovers a new three-letter god. GEO, AEO, LLMO, take your pick. Someone coins it on a stage, a thousand LinkedIn posts declare the old thing dead by Tuesday, and within a week there’s a fresh batch of courses ready to teach you the future before lunch, usually for €499 with a payment plan if you ask nicely.
I’ve been doing this long enough to recognise the sound. It’s the same record, remastered.
Same song, new pressing
Here’s a thing crate-diggers know that marketers keep forgetting: almost nothing is truly new. That breakbeat you love was sampled from some drummer in 1969 who never saw a cent for it, and the “revolutionary” track topping the charts today is really three older records in a trenchcoat. Which is fine, by the way. Taking something old and recontextualising it into something that hits now is the entire art form, not a cheat.
Search works the same way. Crack open any of these shiny new disciplines and underneath you’ll find the thing that was always there: a person with a need, looking for an answer, and your only real job is to be the answer they land on.
That’s the whole job, and it has barely moved. It was the job when the engine was ten blue links, it’s the job now that the engine writes you a paragraph instead, and it’ll still be the job when the engine is an agent quietly doing your shopping while you sleep. The platform keeps changing. The person on the other end of it doesn’t.
I might be wrong about plenty of things, and anyone who’s watched me try to keep a New Year’s gym streak past January will happily confirm it. I’m not wrong about this one, though, and here’s why.
Surface versus substance
The mistake almost everyone makes is confusing the surface with the substance.
The surface really is shifting fast, no argument there: generative results, AI overviews, assistants that hand you an answer and never bother showing you a link. That shift is real and you should absolutely build for it. I’m not telling you to stick your fingers in your ears and optimise meta titles like it’s still 2014.
But building for it has never meant throwing out everything you already knew. It means taking the same discipline you’ve always had, understanding the human and the intent behind the search and being the most legible answer in the room, and then pointing it at a wider set of places. More surfaces, same substance underneath.
So I don’t say SEO is dead. I say it’s Search Everywhere Optimization: be legible, be the best answer, wherever the searching happens to be taking place this year. The intent is the same as it ever was, the emotion behind the query is the same, and only the venue has actually moved.
So what do you actually do?
Less than the acronym-sellers would like you to believe, and a fair bit more than the “nothing ever changes” crowd will admit.
Start by knowing who’s actually asking and what they genuinely want, which means the human behind the query and not the keyword they happened to type. That was true on AltaVista and it’s still true inside an LLM, which should worry the people charging four figures to teach you otherwise. From there it’s the same old work: be the clearest, most trustworthy answer in your corner of the world, because engines have always rewarded that whether they ranked you or quoted you back to a stranger. The only thing that genuinely changed is where you have to show up, and these days that’s roughly everywhere at once. More places to be found, exactly the same reason to be findable.
The one thing I’d actually stop doing is chasing the acronym, because the letters will have changed again before you’ve finished the course you paid for. That, more than anything, is the whole point.
So no, I won’t be selling you a GEO course. Save your money for records instead; vinyl holds its value rather better than a framework that gets renamed every two quarters.
The fundamentals didn’t go anywhere. They just changed outfits. They do that every few years, and they’ll keep doing it.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.