Why two acronyms for one thing.
AIO and GEO emerged at roughly the same time from different corners of the industry, and they describe the same activity: optimizing to be cited inside a generated answer rather than to appear in a list of links. Anyone selling them as separate disciplines with separate retainers is selling packaging.
Treat the terminology as unsettled. The underlying work is not.
What actually influences whether you get cited.
Entity clarity. A model has to be able to resolve what your company is, what it does, who it serves and where. If that requires inference from scattered fragments, you will lose to a competitor who states it plainly on one page.
Directly answerable content. A question with a direct answer in the first two sentences is quotable. The same information buried in the fourth paragraph after a story about the founder is not.
Crawlable text. Answer engines are less generous than Google about executing JavaScript. Anything meaningful that lives only inside an animation, a canvas, an image or a client-rendered component may as well not exist.
Consistency across sources. When your website, your business profile and three directories disagree about your name, address or what you do, none of them is trusted.
What does not work.
There is no submission endpoint, no paid inclusion, and no file you can add that makes a model prefer you. Be skeptical of anyone offering to get you "ranked inside ChatGPT" — ask exactly how, and listen for whether the answer is a mechanism or a vibe.
llms.txt is a proposed convention with partial and unconfirmed support. It costs nothing to publish and may help later; it is not a ranking trick and nobody should charge you much for it.
The measurement problem, and the first thing to do.
You cannot see your citation rate the way you can see rankings. What you can do is ask the assistants directly and systematically — the questions a customer would ask, recorded and repeated over time.
That baseline is usually the moment a business discovers something uncomfortable: an assistant confidently describing them with an old address, a service they dropped two years ago, or a competitor’s specialty. Fixing that is entity work, and it is the highest-value thing on this list.