Tom

The new trend: GEO, AEO, AIO… What do they all mean?

If you hang around in marketing or tech Twitter (or LinkedIn, if you like your hot takes with fewer memes), you’ll notice a flood of shiny new acronyms popping up: GEO, AIEO, AIO… all promising to be the next big thing in SEO for the AI era. It feels a bit like a branding arms race, slap a catchy acronym on the table, and suddenly you’re an expert in “future search.”

But what actually matters? And more importantly: how can brands, designers, and businesses really prepare for search in a world where large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are changing how people discover information?

Let’s cut through the noise.

SEO Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Growing Up

First, a quick reassurance: SEO is still very much alive. Keywords, metadata, and backlinks still matter. But the way people find your content is evolving. Traditional SEO was about making your website visible to Google’s crawlers. Now, we’re entering a world where your content also needs to be legible to AI systems that don’t just rank links, but generate answers.

That’s where concepts like Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) come in. Instead of optimizing purely for Google’s blue links, you’re also structuring and framing content so that LLMs understand it, trust it, and surface it inside their answers.

“The future of SEO isn’t about tricking algorithms — it’s about becoming genuinely useful.”

What GEO, AIEO, and Friends Really Mean

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) → The buzzword of the moment. The idea is simple: optimize your content so AI assistants and chatbots actually use it in their responses. This isn’t about keyword stuffing; it’s about clear structure, semantic context, and credible signals.
AEO (AI Engine Optimization) → A slightly broader take on the same theme. How do you ensure your content is recognized as authoritative by AI systems, not just search engines?
AIO (AI Optimization) → More of a catch-all. Sometimes used for optimizing workflows with AI, sometimes for content, which shows how messy these terms still are.

The bottom line: everyone is scrambling to coin their acronym, but they’re all circling the same core truth = search is shifting from links to answers, and content has to evolve with it.

What Actually Works (Beyond Acronyms)

Here’s the good news: you don’t need to chase every new acronym to win in this space. The fundamentals of good content and digital visibility are still the same, just with new layers:

Create real value, not filler.
AI models are trained to filter out fluff. They reward structured, insightful, original content that actually answers questions. Think case studies, expert insights, industry data.
Structured data is your friend.
Schema markup, semantic HTML, logical headings, these aren’t glamorous, but they make your content machine-readable. If a bot can’t parse it, it won’t use it.
Be present beyond your site.
AI doesn’t just scrape your blog. It looks at forums, ratings, citations, and mentions across the web. If your expertise shows up consistently in multiple places, you become a trusted signal.
Authority > quantity.
It’s no longer about pumping out 50 blog posts a month. A handful of well-researched, authoritative pieces will go further than a content farm.
Think in prompts, not just keywords.
People don’t ask AI the way they ask Google. Instead of typing “best branding agency Brussels,” they’ll ask: “What’s a good studio for UI/UX and branding in Belgium?” Make sure your content naturally answers those conversational queries.

“Think in prompts, not just keywords: AI surfaces answers, not blue links.”

Where This Leaves Businesses and Designers

For brands and agencies like ours, this shift is actually refreshing. It rewards the very things we’ve always championed: clarity, storytelling, and structured value. Instead of fighting for scraps of keyword traffic, the focus is on building content ecosystems that AI can’t ignore.

It also means design and development matter more than ever. A slow, messy website with confusing structure won’t just annoy users; it makes it harder for AI to extract and trust your content.

That’s why we obsess over performance, structure, and clarity, because they’re no longer “nice-to-haves,” they’re survival tactics.

The Flip Side

Of course, there are risks. As AI tools consolidate how people discover answers, visibility may become concentrated in fewer places. If your brand doesn’t show up, you risk invisibility. There’s also less transparency: unlike Google’s rankings, AI systems don’t always reveal why they chose certain sources. That means the competition for credibility is fiercer, and the margin for error smaller.

The Bottom Line

Forget the acronym soup. Call it GEO, AEO, or just common sense … the principles are the same:

Create content with genuine value.
Structure it so both humans and machines can understand it.
Build trust by showing up consistently across platforms.

SEO isn’t dying. It’s evolving into something broader: a game of being useful, being structured, and being trusted. And not just by Google, but by AI itself.