Wikimotive sat down with co-founder and CEO Zach Billings to ask him over 50 questions about automotive search marketing that are relevant to dealers everywhere. In the second installment of this 7-part series, we take a look at SEO, GEO, AEO, and LLMO—what these acronyms mean, where their practices overlap, and what dealers should prioritize before paying for another “AI optimization” service.
Zach, every month there’s a new acronym. Are these actually different strategies or just different labels?
So acronyms and AI search, right? You’ve got traditional SEO, you’ve got GEO, LLMO, AEO, those are the primary ones that are in use. There are some other ancillary ones. GEO is what most people say, AEO usually means a slightly different thing. So I would think about this as “thumbs and fingers”. A thumb is a finger, but a finger is not necessarily a thumb. SEO serves GEO, AEO, LLMO.
The GEO acronym generally is aimed at showing a better in CHATCH EPT, Gemini, Claude. LLMO is generally the same thing although if you were to differentiate it would be more technical in nature. And then AEO, answer engine optimization, is generally considered to be how do you show up better in Google’s AI overview feature or their AI features in general.
And that again is going to be squarely you do SEO to impact that. The thing is all of the unique ways that you can do GEO, LLMO, AEO are generally either not established to be effective or are just redundant to what SEO already is. If you’re already doing SEO and now you want to start doing GEO, the truth is that, and this is true, the more and more we study it looks like nothing material actually changes.
Dealer Takeaway: Ask vendors to explain the actual work behind each acronym. If a proposed GEO, AEO, or LLMO service repeats your existing SEO work, require a clear explanation of what additional value you are buying.
If a dealer is already investing in SEO, what actually changes when someone starts talking about GEO or LLM optimization?
There are certainly things like improving your star rating and your reviews, the content of your reviews that will definitely help your GEO, but that’s truly already something you should be doing. That is in the best interest of your business.
And the reality is that Google, just in May, released a new page describing all of the ways that you can impact AI visibility.
And if you just read the page and remove AI throughout the entirety of the page, it’s a descriptor for SEO. It’s literally explaining to us, Google is literally explaining to us that GEO is SEO, just with a sprinkle of consensus and reviews on top.
Dealer Takeaway: Review your existing SEO and reputation efforts before adding another service. Useful website content and strong customer reviews already support search visibility, including how AI platforms present your dealership.
Why do these new terms seem to gain traction so quickly?
New acronyms like GEO, like many things that have been new to automotive marketing in the past, think CDPs, okay? They get traction so fast for good reasons and bad reasons. The good reason is certainly that dealerships rightly want to be the early bird that gets the worm. The flaw with that premise is that we’re assuming there is a worm to get.
The negative side of all of this is that it comes from an echo chamber fed by the vendor community. And, as a member of the vendor community, I’m not really looking to lot myself into this. I’m trying to illuminate this space, but what happens is everyone wants to sell something.
And many repeat these acronyms again and again and again and again and again as something unique. It’s a unique new product. It’s something you can sign up for, and it reinforces this fear of missing out, this need to be the early bird that gets the worm. And so ultimately what ends up happening here is the acronyms sort of breed themselves into life when they didn’t really deserve a unique moniker.
Dealer Takeaway: Treat urgency as a reason to ask better questions. Before buying an emerging service, request evidence of its effectiveness, specific deliverables, and an explanation of the opportunity your dealership would otherwise miss.
What fundamentals are still driving visibility regardless of the acronym?
They just needed to be an outgrowth of something existing like SEO. So regardless of what acronym you use, whether it’s SEO or GEO or something else, the thing that is the common thread through all of it that drives performance very clearly is content. We just completed round one of our own case study and a fascinating early finding, this is we’re looking at the top ranking positions for chat GPT responses looking at dealership and inventory discovery queries that consumers would put into ChatGPT. And the fascinating discovery is that for inventory discovery, so think like find me F-one 100 fifty’s for sale near me under 60 k.
The number one predictor of being a ranking result in the citations ChatGPT gives was content 90% of the time versus inventory only 70% of the time. Content is still king no matter what the acronym.
Dealer Takeaway: Review inventory-focused pages for useful, specific content that answers shopper questions. Inventory availability matters, but your pages should also help shoppers understand the vehicles and options you offer.
Are there any genuinely new tactics dealers should be considering?
Genuinely new tactics that dealerships should be considering in the AI search space would be clarity in pricing.
So there’s a lot of buzz around structured markup, schema data, and as it turns out, that is not being demonstrated in actual studies to be significantly impactful.
The number one thing that we are seeing is that when a consumer does a prompt that is around inventory discovery, it usually will have some kind of price or offer question baked into that prompt. And if your price box on your website, on your VDP, is buried behind a layer of code and therefore difficult for an LLM like ChatGPT or Gemini to understand, then what ends up happening is it doesn’t understand it and it defaults to a website that it does.
So the best way that you can get your inventory to show up beyond content is to have a clear, basic HTML coded price box where any kind of LLM could very easily understand what is the price, what are the discounts, what is the discounted price, and be able to pull that into the response. That’s your number one trick to be able to show up in LLM Answers.
Dealer Takeaway: Ask your website provider whether vehicle prices, discounts, and final advertised prices appear in accessible HTML. Clear pricing helps AI platforms interpret your inventory when shoppers search within a specific budget.
What’s your reaction when a vendor promises “AI optimization”?
When a vendor promises AI optimization, my number one reaction is that they’re selling sizzle, not steak. We don’t need to be worrying about whether we got cited or whether we don’t.
We don’t need to, even in SEO terms, be worried about what position showed up versus what we didn’t or which keywords it was or was not for. That’s all diagnostics. That is what the vendor should be doing to figure out, “did my efforts work and have the intended effect?” But to the dealer, when I hear promises about AI optimization, it shouldn’t be all about AI optimization, it should be about outcomes.
“Did I get more forms?”
“Did I get more calls, more chats, more trade leads, more scheduled service appointments?”
At the end of the day, most of the pitches are about visibility and citations when they should be about leads.
Dealer Takeaway: Require reporting that connects visibility efforts to forms, calls, chats, trade leads, and service appointments. Use rankings and citations to diagnose performance; judge the investment by meaningful customer opportunities.
If dealers forget every acronym and focus on one principle, what should it be?
One principle that works in all of digital marketing, regardless of acronym, is content, but not just content, human generated authentic demonstration of expertise conveying information to an intended consumer who actually would find it useful.
If you can convey real product information, real price information, real lease versus buy information, real why buys oriented around both the product and specific to your market and your demographic, you have provided value and value translates well both to conversion when you have the consumer on your website, but also to the impression of your knowledge, which Google responds to and ChatGPT responds to this is how you show up in LLMs. This is how you show up in SEO. It is to have humans generate the content that provides value to the humans that you’re trying to serve.
Dealer Takeaway: Build content around real expertise and the needs of your customers. Give your content team accurate product details, pricing, financing options, and specific reasons to choose your store so each page provides practical value.
