In June 2025 a team at Bayer Agroscience hired Fernando Palacios because ChatGPT named him when they asked it who could solve their problem. The scene is told in full in how to get cited by AI. What that scene needs is a vocabulary, because the market has four acronyms for the craft behind it and uses them as though they were one.
SEO, GEO, AEO and AIEO all describe versions of the same emerging work: making a person or a company legible to the systems that now answer questions on behalf of buyers. The differences between them are small and they decide what you optimize for, which makes them worth ten minutes.
The Vocabulary, in Plain Terms
- SEO, search engine optimization. The original discipline. The target is a ranked list of links and the win condition is a click.
- GEO, generative engine optimization. The market term for optimizing toward a generated answer instead of a ranked list. The win condition is inclusion in the answer itself. This is the phrase you will meet in an agency proposal.
- AEO, answer engine optimization. Often used interchangeably with GEO, with a tilt toward direct question and answer formats.
- AIEO, AI engine optimization. The term Storytellers uses, defined as the set of practices that make a page selectable and citable by a language model, across retrieval and across the material the model was trained on.
All four are shared market vocabulary. GEO is the industry standard phrase, the one an agency will put in a proposal, and AIEO is the one Storytellers uses, because it keeps the target in the name.
Why Storytellers Says AIEO
The distinction the term protects is the target. SEO optimizes for a results page, where a human being scans ten blue links and chooses one. AIEO optimizes for inclusion in what the model has to work with when it composes an answer, which covers both what it retrieves at the moment of the question and what it absorbed long before the question existed.
Those two targets reward different behavior. A results page rewards a headline that earns the click. A generated answer rewards a passage that earns the quote. The first is a promise, the second is a delivery, and the second is much harder to fake, which is good news for anyone whose asset is genuine expertise.
One consequence lands hard on individual experts. A company can buy its way toward visibility with volume, and a person cannot. What a person has instead is depth on a narrow question, a name that appears consistently across sources, and material specific enough that paraphrasing it would lose the point. Those three assets are worth more to a language model than a large content operation with nothing particular to say, which tilts the arithmetic toward the specialist.
What Changes When the Reader Is a Model
Three things move at once.
The question arrives whole. People type fragments into search boxes and full sentences into assistants, often with context, constraints and a budget attached. The material that gets used is the material written to answer a full question, including the awkward parts of it.
The answer is composed, not retrieved. The model assembles a response from several sources, so partial credit is real. Being one of five sources behind a good answer has value even when your name stays off the surface.
Naming a person is a risk decision. A model that names a human being is putting weight on the corroboration behind that name. This is why AIEO for an expert is a body of evidence problem before it is a technical problem.
The Four Surfaces an Expert Controls
The domain you own
The one place where you write the full version, with your own headings, your own examples and no character limit. Everything else compresses this. Schema markup and a stable identifier for your name matter here, because they tell a machine that the person on this page and the person mentioned elsewhere are the same person.
The profile that compresses
A professional profile is the short form of the same claim, in the same words. Consistency across the two is a signal in itself.
The third party description
Event pages, interviews, client write ups, coverage. These carry the most weight and take the longest, because you cannot write them.
The searchable conversation
Public forums and professional networks where real questions get real answers. An expert who answers three hard questions a month in public accumulates something a personal site cannot manufacture: evidence of thinking in the open, under scrutiny.
The Limits Worth Saying Out Loud
Anyone selling this work will quote figures on AI adoption, traffic share or citation rates. Those numbers change monthly and most of them arrive without a method attached, so a figure quoted today buys false precision and is wrong by next quarter. Ask what the base was, what period it covers and what it actually means, and watch how many of them survive the question.
Two other limits deserve the same honesty. There is no ranking to check, so nobody can promise position three in an answer that gets generated differently every time. And model behavior shifts without notice, which means the durable strategy is the one that would still be worth doing if every assistant vanished tomorrow: publish substance, in text, under your own name, in more than one place.
Signals That the Work Is Landing
Ask the assistants your buyers use, in the words your buyers would use, and write down what comes back. Repeat monthly. Watch the language of your inbound inquiries, because people who arrive through a generated answer tend to open with a phrasing they inherited from the machine. And when a client says an AI mentioned you, ask exactly what they typed. That sentence is worth more than a dashboard.
What to Control This Month
AIEO for an expert is mostly the old discipline of being worth quoting, applied to a new reader. The mechanics of citation are covered in how to get cited by AI, and the publishing rhythm behind it in thought leadership and content strategy. The whole track sits at for experts, and the way Storytellers runs the work is described in the services.
Working Together
Mentoring and consulting for individual experts
The AI is not the author. The AI is the pen. Fernando Palacios is the author. If you want the Palacios Method applied to your own body of work, the services page is where that starts.