Short answer
- AIGEO is a term used mainly in China's marketing industry for generative engine optimization (GEO).
- It means the same as GEO, AEO and LLM SEO: getting AI answer engines to find, verify and cite you.
- The "AI" prefix avoids confusion with GEO as in geography or geolocation.
- For beauty suppliers, AIGEO usually covers both Western AI engines (for export buyers) and Chinese ones (for domestic brands).
Where the term comes from
"Generative engine optimization" was named in a 2024 research paper (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024). In China the practice spread quickly among export-marketing agencies, where it is often written AIGEO or "AI GEO" — partly to separate it from GEO in the sense of geography and geolocation, which is also a common search term.
AIGEO, GEO, AEO and LLM SEO
| Term | Common in | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| GEO | Research, Western agencies | Optimising to be found and cited by generative AI engines |
| AIGEO | Chinese agencies and suppliers | Same as GEO |
| AEO | SEO industry | Answer engine optimisation — same goal, older term |
| LLM SEO | Informal | Same practice, named after large language models |
What AIGEO means for a beauty supplier
For a cosmetics factory, packaging maker or ingredient supplier, AIGEO usually has two halves:
- Export: being named by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Grok when international brands source suppliers.
- Domestic: being named by Doubao, DeepSeek, Tencent Yuanbao, Kimi, ERNIE Bot and Qwen when brands in China look for manufacturers.
The foundations are the same — unambiguous company facts, pages that answer buyer questions, verifiable evidence and third-party confirmation — but the places each engine looks differ. See our guide to the six Western engines.