GEO is a bad name for it. It won anyway.

The practice of getting a brand mentioned by large language models (LLMs) inside AI answers has a name now. It is GEO, for generative engine optimisation. I use it, my own service page uses it and I think it is a rubbish name. It's ambiguous, it's not really accurate and almost nobody in the industry seems genuinely attached to it. It won anyway. When it comes to naming, winning is the only thing that counts, so GEO it is.

What GEO is meant to mean

GEO is the work of optimising your content and your wider presence so that AI systems, the ones that write answers rather than list links, mention you, summarise you fairly and cite you. Think Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and current top dog Claude. The goal shifts from "rank this page" to "be the source the robots quote."

The term appears to have been first coined in a late-2023 research paper titled, plainly enough, "Generative Engine Optimization". That academic origin matters more than it should. Most marketing buzzwords are born in the blogs of digital agencies, SaaS companies and eager marketing consultants, and that's where they die too. GEO, by contrast, got a proper peer reviewed research paper to point at, and a citable origin turns out to be a powerful thing when an industry is deciding what to call itself (especially an industry that was already obsessed with citable origin stories).

Why it is a clumsy name

Two problems, said plainly.

First, the term is already taken. GEO means geography. It means geographic, geospatial, geotechnical and/or geology. Google has spent the better part of two decades wiring those three letters to location. Search "GEO" today and you will get the encyclopedia entry on geography long before you get anything generative. The industry picked, for a discipline that is entirely about being correctly understood and found, an acronym that collides head-on with one of Google's oldest and strongest associations. Even Google's own systems struggle to tell which GEO you mean without a sentence of context around it.

Second, it does not describe the work. Parse "generative engine optimisation" literally and it means optimising generative engines. That is not what anyone does. You cannot reach into a trained model and tune it. What you can change is the content those engines retrieve and how cleanly they can quote you without getting you wrong. So the name points at the wrong object. It describes acting on the engine, when the work is acting on yourself.

It's also pretty much the only context in which anyone is calling Chatty G and co "generative engines". To most people, these are AI assistant chatbots, and to the more attuned, they're LLMs specifically. Generative engine is not a term that would have any traction whatsoever if it didn't neatly plug in to an SEO soundalike term.

What SEO got right, and GEO is quietly borrowing

This is why I don't think the poorly chosen acronym is going anywhere. "Search engine optimisation" is a perfect description. You optimise, for search engines. Three words, no ambiguity, no slack between the label and the thing. SEO was never going to be called anything else, because the name and the practice are the same shape. The term did no work it did not earn.

GEO is trying to inherit that clarity by rubbing shoulders with it. The X-E-O pattern signals "this is the next SEO" before a single word of explanation. That is effective branding and poor description, and it is borrowed equity rather than earned. The name is riding on the reputation of a better name.

The names that didn't make it

GEO did not win unopposed. There was a really wide field of candidates.

The strongest rival was AEO, answer engine optimisation, and it is arguably the better name: you are optimising to be the answer, which is closer to what actually happens. It had a genuine run. It mostly lost. Then there was the plain-English version, "AI SEO," which I will come back to, because it is more interesting than it looks. And then the also-rans: LLM SEO, generative search optimisation (GSO) and a rotating cast of coinages including "LLM citation engineering" (which, to be fair, I quite like) and the occasional attempt at AIO. Each had a champion. None took.

That is a dozen labels for one practice, which is exactly what happens when an industry tries to name something before it has finished understanding it.

What the search data actually shows

This is where it gets awkward for GEO. I pulled Google Trends data for the main contenders, worldwide, from 2022 to now. The numbers are relative interest on a 0 to 100 scale, not absolute volume, but the shape is unambiguous.

"AI SEO" is not just ahead. It is not close. It outdraws "generative engine optimisation" by something like seven to one, and it has done for the entire period it has been around. Meanwhile GEO barely registered in search until early 2025, well over a year after the paper that named it. It is climbing now, but from a low base, and it is still easily discountable next to the plain-English term.

So the term the industry canonised is not the term the public searches. GEO won the conferences, the vendor decks, the job titles and the LinkedIn bios. "AI SEO" won the search box, where actual people type what they actually want. Both things are true at the same time, and the gap between them is the whole story.

Why GEO won anyway

Naming is a coordination game, not a correctness contest. GEO won the industry for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it is accurate. It sounds like SEO, so it inherited an entire category for free. It had an academic paper to cite, which gave vendors and journalists a respectable origin to gesture at. It is short and sayable, where "LLM citation engineering" is a mouthful that dies in conversation. And enough loud voices repeated it early that it quietly became the safe choice. In naming, the safe choice compounds. Once a term is "what everyone says," accuracy stops mattering and being understood takes over, no matter how many times I've seen speakers at Brighton SEO claim "we're not calling it that". Sorry mate, we are.

That is the uncomfortable bit. The best name didn't win. The most repeatable one did.

So what should you call it

I'm going to reluctantly call it GEO, because that's what the room calls it, and being understood beats being right about a label every time. My service page says GEO and AEO both, which tells you I hedged, and I would do it again.

But do not mistake the name for the work. The label has changed three times in two years and it may even change again. The work however has barely moved. Be the clearest, most trustworthy, best-structured source on your subject. Make it easy for a machine to quote you without misrepresenting you. Earn mentions in the places these systems actually read. That was sound advice under the name SEO, it is sound advice under the name GEO, and it will hold under whatever the next acronym turns out to be.

Names are a fashion. The work is not. If that's what people are calling it, that's what it is.