AVO vs SEO, GEO, AEO, ACO and AXO

What separates AVO from the other five?

What the machine reads, and what counts as success. The other five are judged by whether a store is ranked, quoted, chosen or understood. AVO is judged by what an agent does once it is on the store: whether its visit reaches checkout.

Are GEO and AEO the same thing?

They overlap, and they are often used for the same practice. GEO was named in a research paper about generative engines. AEO is the industry label for answer engines. Both are about content being used inside an answer a machine writes.

The GEO paper defines generative engines as systems that retrieve sources and write a response from them. It measures how visible a source is inside that response.

SEO reference guides describe AEO as content that answer engines can find and use directly. The same guides note that GEO and other labels are sometimes used for the same practice.

How is AVO different from agentic commerce optimization?

ACO, as industry guides use the term, works on what an agent reads before it visits: product feeds, structured data and commerce protocols such as UCP. AVO works on the visit itself. The two meet when an agent that chose the store then opens its pages.

An agent can reach a store's products through a protocol, without loading a page. Some agents may do that.

The two real agents observed by Cromanion did not. On 2026-09-21, Meta's Muse did not use a Shopify store's commerce endpoint or its llms.txt, and navigated the storefront. On 2026-09-24 and 2026-09-25, xAI's Grok shopping agent loaded the storefront pages and filled the checkout form. That is a handful of runs by two agents. It shows that the visit happens, not how often.

How is AVO different from AXO?

AXO, agent experience optimization, is used for making a site's information easy for AI agents to discover, understand, evaluate and use. AVO is narrower. It covers one agent's visit to one store, and it is judged by one outcome: whether the visit reaches checkout.

The difference that matters is the unit. AXO describes a site's readiness for agents in general. AVO describes a visit, which can be counted: how many agent visits there were, and how many reached checkout.

Does AVO replace SEO or GEO?

No. The labels describe steps in the same journey. An agent has to find the store before it can visit it, and SEO, GEO, AEO and ACO concern that part. AVO concerns what happens next, so it depends on the earlier steps rather than replacing them.

What can AVO measure that the others cannot?

The outcome of the visit. Rankings, citations and selections happen before the agent arrives. A visit ends at a known point: the agent reached checkout, or it did not. That makes it countable per visit, and comparable against a randomly held-back control group.

The measure is the Agent Checkout Rate: the share of AI-agent visits that reach checkout. Checkout rather than purchase, because payment is often handed back to the agent's person.