They're four names for one goal: when an AI answers a buyer's question, your business is in the answer. The industry hasn't settled on a term, which makes a simple idea sound like a discipline you need a consultant to translate. You don't. Here's each term in a sentence, then the part the jargon usually hides — what the work costs.
The jargon, decoded
- AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation. Structuring your site so machines that answer questions (rather than list links) can extract and repeat you. The oldest term, popular with B2B software people.
- GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation. The same idea, named for engines that generate answers: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity. The term agencies have largely adopted in the UK.
- AI SEO. The plain compound people reach for when the others feel like alphabet soup. Ambiguous — sometimes means “SEO done with AI tools” — but everyone understands the intent.
- AI visibility. The measurement side: can AI models see, read and cite you? This is the term we use, because it names the outcome a business owner actually cares about.
Google's own position, for what it's worth, is that this is all “still SEO” — and the underlying work does overlap: readable structure, clear entities, content that answers. What's genuinely new is where the contest happens (inside the answer, not on a results page) and how you measure winning (citations, not rankings).
What it actually costs in the UK
- £0 — checking where you stand. Manual spot-checks in ChatGPT, and free technical scanners like ours (60 seconds, 40+ signals, no signup).
- £5–£45 — self-serve measurement and fix-lists. Our £5 technical report is the full prioritised fix-list your developer works through; the £19 citation audit runs 60 live AI answers and names who wins instead of you; £45 buys three runs — measure, fix, prove it moved.
- £500–£3,000 one-off — having the fixes done for you: schema, llms.txt, answer-first rewrites of key pages. Standard web-development work priced as such — Dyfyn Studios quotes fixed-price from your report.
- £800–£1,500+ per month — agency GEO retainers: ongoing content, authority building and monitoring. Right for brands with budgets and estates; overkill for a single local business that first needs its foundations fixed.
The pattern to avoid: paying retainer prices for foundation work. The foundations are a one-off cost and a fortnight of work. Continuous spend only earns its keep once the foundations exist — and only if someone is measuring citations monthly rather than sending you a rankings PDF.
One honest warning
Whatever the label, nobody controls the models. Citations follow good structural work by two to four months, because the engines re-crawl on their own schedules. A provider promising guaranteed or instant citations — under any acronym — is selling weather forecasts as weather control. Ask instead: how will you measure it? If the answer isn't live queries against the real models, keep your money. That measurement is exactly what our audit does.