Acronyms: Can’t live with them, can’t live in the marketing world without them.
If you’ve looked at LinkedIn, the news, or opened your phone in the past year, you’ve likely heard about AI and its many iterations. You may have also come across the latest combinations of letters pulled straight from your alphabet soup. The question is, “What do they all mean and why should I care?”
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Ah, yes, old reliable. At this point, Search Engine Optimization feels like the old man in the room. He’s been hanging around since the mid-90s and is the backbone of being found on the internet.
For the unfamiliar, SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to rank high in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), like Google.
The focus of SEO is traffic. Success is measured by organic ranking, click-through rates (CTR) and the ability to pull a user out of the search engine and onto your own website. It requires a balance of technical health, authoritative content, and a robust link profile.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
When you ask Siri a question or read the AI overview on Google, you’re interacting with AEO.
AEO is about brevity and structure, much like your (usually) helpful virtual assistants, “Hey Siri!” To win at AEO, your content must be formatted in a way that machines can easily parse. This often means using Schema Markup, creating comprehensive FAQ sections, and writing in clear, declarative sentences.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
With GEO, your goal shifts from "getting the click" to "being the citation."
GEO tactics involve including unique data, expert quotes, and "stat-heavy" content that AI models find valuable for their summaries. Not only are you trying to entice the extremely nerdy AI to use your content, but you are also trying to become the nerd yourself… A little nerd on nerd tomfoolery, if you will. If an AI writes a paragraph about your industry and includes your brand as a primary source, you have won the GEO battle.
Artificial Intelligence Engine Optimization (AiEO)
AiEO is the broad umbrella term used to describe optimizing websites for Artificial Intelligence. This encompasses both AEO, GEO, and any future acronym the AI community invents (or A.F.A.T.AI.C.I… just kidding). It’s based on the same fundamental principles of SEO, but with the specific goal of being served via AI.
AiEO involves ensuring your brand has a positive, authoritative presence across diverse platforms like Reddit, Wikipedia, news archives, and niche forums. For example, if an AI consistently sees your brand associated with "high-quality legal advice" across the web, it will naturally recommend you during conversational queries.
You might be asking, “So what really has changed?”, and the answer is… everything and not much at all. With the introduction of AiEO, you still need to focus on high-quality content and clear, concise information. What’s different now is that the days of keyword-word-vomit are long gone, and it is much harder to “game the system”. Organizations will need to focus on maintaining high-value content and earning consumer trust that can convert to positive mentions on external platforms (like Reddit mentioned above).
The good part? You have friends at TRIAD who are sitting at keyboards RIGHT NOW, hands poised to type, ready to enter the AiEO battle and fight for your honor... er... AI citation.