Author: Ryan Walsh

Date: 30/05/2025

 

What does LLMO, AEO and GEO even mean?

Introduction

There are many ways a business can promote and advertise its cause.

Your thinking, well, that’s a no-brainer; that’s always been the case- tell me something new!

Take a premiership football match, there are so many ways a business can promote itself and gain more brand awareness during an important game.

Shirt sponsorship, banner advertising at the stadium, or being the official partner that’s shown during every ad break, whilst you crack open another can, this list is endless.

Well, this is the type of mindset and thinking that SEO consultants must adopt now there’s been an explosion of new ways a shopper can find your business.

The reason is that AI, or artificial intelligence, is dissecting and adding new ways for people to find businesses locally or nationally or globally.

Whether it’s via a Google AI Overview answer or suggestions made by a large language model, such as ChatGPT, the advertising landscape is changing rapidly in 2025.

Until fairly recently, marketing agencies funnelled your money into ad spend in one of three ways: social, SEO or PPC (Google AdWords).

However, AI is disrupting this; businesses must adapt.

Just like promoting a football match, SEO experts must adapt to this new playing field.

Because, well if a business doesn’t, then a competitor may grab the lime-light as a Google AI Overview answer. This could mean that sure, sometimes this will result in a zero-click search, as you have satisfied the question in the SERP’s, so no win there.

However, some shoppers will want a deeper explanation, therefore, that single Google AI Overview answer, that could be the ticket to well

millions of extra views per month.

Same as Chat GPT, if your business has invested in top quality conversational content marketing, well you could be the local business that gets recommended.

“Hey Chat GPT, where’s best restaurant in Cardiff, selling craft beer, we need a wide selection of brews from around the world”.

Then if your business is a standout in Cardiff, in the world of the best of the best of world beers, well you may be recommended. That’s because the large language models, LLM’s for short will have read your stellar (seen what we done there) content marketing say about the best Belgium ales of 2025.

 

Table of contents:

• How can our business improve our LLM visibility?
• Does GEO have similarities with organic SEO?
• Brand mentions and the semantic web.
• How LLMs work

 

As a highly experienced digital marketer (Ryan Walsh LinkedIn), I get a sense of what works and what doesn’t in terms of how Google’s algorithm ranks websites in different business sectors.

This knowledge, of what I call the “The Matrix” in terms of how Google’s rank websites, I have accumulated that knowledge over the last 10 years in this game. Ever since the early days of Google’s PageRank, well, links and good quality content marketing are what thrust businesses up Google’s ranks.

Nothing much really changed for a long time.

Sure, some websites got shot down for using spam tactics, some just, well, disappeared due them stagnating or just not being optimised the right way.
This formula has been perfected and tweaked by Google; yet, how search works, well, it has remained pretty much constant- (until now, have you seen Google AI Mode?).

Quality content wins, and links must be used to prove you’re a voice that should be listened to.
That’s the dogma, to a certain extent is still true, however, now you have to consider AI and the semantic web even more so.

However, in my 10 years of experience, we have never seen a pace of change so quick.

New terms such as GEO and LLMs are now being used so frequently that businesses that were getting to grips with how organic search engine optimisation works will now be lost in the wilderness of these new terms.

However, here at Walsh & Partners, we are here to help guide you through what these changes mean. Businesses must now adapt; we shall explain how.

 

Some overlaps

Before you shout out at the top of your voice, standing on your office desk, that you can’t stand the rate of change. Well, sit down, have a green tea and let us explain what these changes mean in good old plain English.

LLMs and optimising for good visibility in platforms like ChatGPT do have some overlaps with good organic search engine optimisation practices. So, don’t think it’s all change, no continuity, as well; there are huge overlaps between the two types of marketing.

Organic SEO and good optimisation techniques, such as Google E-E-A-T, mean your business is more likely to be cited as a Google AI Overview, for example.

The internet needs good quality content marketing, whether you’re writing about running trainers or the best electric hyper cars. The work that stands out, that gets cited all comes back to one thing: is your business supplying a quality answer to the question?

Can it get read (indexed)?

Are you offering a good UX?

This is the good part: LLMs, or “large language models” that Chat GPT is trained on, read the content marketing that your business has already published.

So, you guessed it, writing all of those blog posts to improve your company’s search engine optimisation, that hasn’t been a waste of time in the era of AI.

That’s because good quality content marketing improves your chances of appearing in LLMs such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

 

Have to be in it to win it.

Large language models, as we earlier mentioned, are quite literally trained on truly massive data sets. Your brand name and your content marketing are, therefore, scraped or indexed, depending on how you want to phrase it.

Then, just like how the semantic web works, by “entity building”, well, if you’re the brightest light shining about that topic, you’re likely to be mentioned more often. If your name appears and you are recognised as an expert in your respective field, you are more likely to be cited in a Google AI Overview answers and on LLM’s.

 

SEO and LLMs: the overlaps

So, Google has made it clear, let’s rephrase that: Google has made it crystal clear that it wants high-quality, original, well-written content marketing in its index (Google Knowledge Vault). So, if you’re optimising for SEO, which most businesses have been doing, then you stand a much better chance of also appearing in the AI Overviews and the LLM answers as well.

Helping to understand your brand, less focus on links?

There is a lot of conversation about LLMs analysing brand mentions, as well as the quality of content marketing, to understand your company.

It is said that there is less of a focus on links, which, as all good SEO agencies know, was one of the primary focuses of any good marketing company in the past. So, could we see backlinks becoming, well, less important? We will have to wait and see.

 

Semantic web, entity and brand building

In a sense, this is not different to how businesses have optimised websites for SEO.

However, it’s worth noting that brand building and getting unstructured citations, such as brand mentions, is likely to become more critical.
As we said, this is nothing new. Google’s Knowledge Graph and the semantic web are concepts that SEOs have known about, at least for the past 10 years. Yet there’s more conversation about this now, as marketing companies get their heads around how LLMs are trained.

 

Content marketing and on-page SEO

This may sound like super basic advice, yet it’s crucially important that we take it to heart.

On-page SEO, which has always mattered, is important, as it gives Googlebot and the algorithms a good grasp of what that page is about.

This is even more important now, given the rise of LLMs.

Therefore, the pages that stand out as offering crystal clear advice are likely to be considered more authoritative if they are mentioned on other websites.

It’s, therefore, in a way, back to basics, in that the content marketing must make it crystal clear what you’re talking about.
Good on-page SEO, you know the drill by now, H1-H3 tags, well-written meta descriptions, alt text, all that stuff.

 

We are more focused on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). What should our company focus on improving?

SEO is simply the art of getting a company to rank higher in the search engines. Examples of popular search engines are Bing and Google.
If you want your business to rank higher on these search engines, then you must focus on strengthening and improving your company’s ranking factors.

Pivotal to all of this is content quality; therefore, if your business is using SEO as the main driver to generating more sales, make sure you focus on learning more about Google E-E-A-T.

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust.

This must be woven into the business’s content marketing if you want that page to rank higher in the search engine results pages.

 

Technical performance

To improve its organic search engine optimisation (SEO) ranking, a business must focus on enhancing the mobile user experience. Site speed is also critical; therefore, purchase the fastest website hosting you can afford for your business. Then there’s “Core Web Vitals”, so work with your web developers to see if you can shave a few milliseconds off the load time of your website, without sacrificing on the U.X and without reducing the word count, which may dilute how helpful the website is.

 

Schema markup and structured data

Schema markup and structured data are essential; for example, your web developers can use it to mark up the business’s NAP information. This will help Googlebot identify your company’s location, name, and phone number.

We want to focus on AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation). How can we better optimise our website for AI Answers?

People are short on time; therefore, they often don’t want to read a thousand-word article like this, unless they have a strong interest in the product or service.

Sometimes they are on the move; they want a brief answer to a query. This is where AI-powered answers are beneficial, and they are becoming increasingly common.

AEO answers can be offered on Bing Copilot and Google’s SGE.

 

AEO generates an answer and can do this audibly.

This is our best advice for optimising your website for AEO answers.

When you’re creating content marketing, think about writing it using an “FAQ style formatting”.

This allows ChatGPT and Googlebot to index the content and understand its meaning (Google Hummingbird). Instead of writing a 3,000-

block massive text, it should be written in manageable sections.

This enables ChatGPT and Google to understand better the questions you have answered.

Therefore, a piece of content marketing that covers a broad topic should have multiple questions and answer-style formatting.

This also allows users to jump directly to the section they want to read more about, which can increase dwell time, reduce bounce rates, and thereby improve the overall user experience of the page.

 

Authority and trust signals and AEO

AEO and SEO overlap strongly here; that is, if a page or website has good authority, such as through backlinks, it will rank higher organically.
If the page also has a lot of backlinks, giving it more authority, then it’s more likely to be cited as an AEO answer as well.

 

Semantic web, entity-based SEO, thought leadership.

The semantic web, Google Knowledge Graph and being a thought leader are all interconnected.
Therefore, what we mean by that is that often when you’re interested in a subject, such as e-bikes and mountain biking, a bike journalist and reviewer may crop up time and time again. That is because they are recognised as being a thought leader, or someone in the industry who is simply an expert.

Now, as this name is cited repeatedly, it is more likely that their opinion and what they have to say will be mentioned in an AEO answer. For example, if you were to ask, ‘What’s the best e-bike for less than a thousand pounds?’ that person and their website might get cited, along with a link to the article they have just written.

For example, if ask Google, and AEO answer may well be offered and read out stating “according to Mike Jones and ABC mountain biking, the best bike is a X-falcon”- that’s just an example of course.

 

GEO and geographic optimisation (a bit like local SEO)

GEO is simply having an SEO plan, and sometimes paying for ads as well, which will promote your business in specific locations.
What areas of marketing should we be focused on if we want to improve our GEO?

 

Google Business Profile optimisation

This advice may seem dated; however, it remains essential in 2025. A Google Business profile that’s received a lot of positive reviews, especially over a long-time frame, will serve your business well. It’s more likely to pop up and be suggested when shoppers want to find a local company.

 

Location-specific schema markup

Adding schema mark-up, and there are different languages you can use, yet mark up your company’s NAP information using schema. That is the name of your business, the address and phone number.

In 2025, you need to adopt a more comprehensive marketing approach to enhance the business’s visibility.

 

Use SEO as their foundation.

We would recommend optimising for both organic and local SEO. The reason is that by focusing on improving your company’s Google E-E-A-T score and improving your SEO, it can also help increase your business’s chances of appearing as an AEO answer, for example.
Also, the AI that Google uses to generate Google AI Overviews is more likely to cite your business if the pages have a high Google E-E-A-T score.

 

Add GEO if you serve specific locations.

If you want to sell products and services in specific locations, rather than the whole of the UK, then you should focus on GEO as well. This does seem like a term that’s very closely aligned to local SEO. Yet GEO is about placing your ad spend / Seo efforts in specific geographic locations, rather than a national level, for example.

 

About the author:

This article has been written by Ryan Walsh.

Ryan has over 10 years’ experience working with businesses in Great Britain to help them secure more business.

Whether it be local, organic SEO, AEO or interested in getting more visitors from AI, such as Chat GPT we can help.