Glossary · Core disciplines
AI SEO
Also called: AI-powered SEO, AI search engine optimization, LLM SEO
AI SEO is the umbrella term for optimising a website to be found, understood and cited by AI-powered search — combining answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization and the classical technical SEO foundations they both depend on.
AI SEO is used two ways in the market. The looser meaning is "using AI tools to do ordinary SEO faster". The meaning that matters here is the stricter one: optimising for AI search engines as the destination, not the tool — making a page eligible to be quoted by an LLM.
In practice AI SEO is the parent bucket: the technical layer (crawlability, schema, llms.txt, AI-crawler access) plus AEO plus GEO. A team doing AI SEO well ships one content programme scored against citation rate, share-of-voice and classical rankings at the same time.
AI SEO is the umbrella; AEO (answer surfaces) and GEO (generative engines) are the two disciplines inside it, and classical SEO is the shared technical base.
An AI SEO engagement for a B2B SaaS covers all three layers at once: fixing robots.txt so GPTBot is allowed, deploying FAQPage and Person schema, and rewriting the top ten pages with direct-answer-first structure — one programme, measured against AI citations and Google rankings together.