AI Search Optimization (AISO / GAIO / SXO)

If you have seen AISO, GAIO, SXO, GAEO, and a few others and assumed they were distinct disciplines, you are not alone, and they mostly are not. Each is a vendor- or practitioner-coined umbrella for "the work of being visible in AI search," and they overlap almost entirely with the GEO-plus-AEO whole this site documents. The acronym proliferation is a sign of a young category still naming itself, not of meaningfully different practices.

The rough map: AISO (AI Search Optimization) and GAIO (Generative AI Optimization) are the broadest, used as catch-alls for optimizing across all AI surfaces. SXO (Search Experience Optimization) predates the AI wave and centers the user-experience-plus-search blend, now stretched to include AI answers. AIO has its own entry because it more often means Google AI Overviews specifically. LLMO has its own framing around the underlying models. The honest summary: the tactics are the same across all of them (clean structured data, citable sentences, entity authority, methodology and dating discipline).

The practical advice is to pick the term your stakeholders already use and not litigate the vocabulary. What matters is the work, not the acronym, and the work is well-covered under GEO and AEO. The full disambiguation guide walks through where the established terms genuinely diverge; everything past those is mostly rebranding.