AI Visibility Basics

• AEO, GEO, LLMO, AI SEO: what the acronyms mean and which ones matter

  Five names, one job. Every acronym describes the same work of getting named in AI answers. Here is what each one means and how much attention each deserves.

• Why AI answers are different from Google rankings

  A ranking is a position on a list of links. An AI answer is a short written recommendation that names a few businesses and skips the rest. The difference changes what you should work on.

• The difference between being cited and being mentioned by AI

  Mentioned means the AI named your business. Cited means it linked a source. Linked means the reader can click through to you. Three outcomes, three different wins.

• Do AI recommendations actually send customers? What the data shows

  Usage is measurable and large. Attribution is genuinely hard. Here is what the numbers support, what they don't, and how to think about the gap honestly.

• How AI assistants decide which local businesses to recommend

  In the seconds after someone asks, the assistant interprets the question, looks up live sources, weighs what they agree on, and names a few businesses. Every step is influenceable.

• How AI models get their information about your business

  Two pipelines feed every AI answer about you. One was locked months ago during training. The other gets read live, while the customer waits. You can influence the second one now.

• Retrieval vs memory: the two ways AI knows about your business

  Memory answers come from what the model learned months ago. Lookup answers get assembled live from sources you can improve. Telling them apart tells you what's winnable.

• What training data means and why your business probably is not in it

  Training data is the frozen library an AI learned from. Your business is probably a footnote in it at best, and that matters less than you'd think.

• Why AI sometimes gets your business information wrong

  Three failure modes cover nearly every wrong AI answer about a business. Stale data, conflicting data, and invented data. Each has a different fix, and one has no fix at all.

• What is AI visibility for local businesses?

  AI visibility is whether AI assistants name your business when customers ask them who to hire. Here is how it works and why it matters.

• Is AI visibility the same as SEO?

  No. SEO is about ranking on a page of links. AI visibility is about being the business an AI assistant names in its answer. They overlap, but the goal is different.