The SEO industry is already wrought with acronym chaos: SEO, AEO, AIO, GEO, SXO, E-E-A-T. And yet… here I go. Introducing, HEO: Human Engine Optimization. Go ahead. Scream. Rant. Fire up the comments. I’ll wait.
It sounds like madness, right up until it makes sense.
What started as a way to think about answer-driven visibility, AEO quickly became shorthand for “optimize for AI.” Somewhere along the way, AEO blurred into GEO, which now loosely translates to: “please mention our brand in whatever synthetic paragraph the machine decides to generate today.”
Here’s the Confusion
Optimizing for AI systems and engaging with real people are not the same discipline. To say that none of your tactics are shaped to gain favor with the machines is just lying to yourself. They overlap, but they are not twins. They’re barely cousins who see each other at holidays and pretend to get along.
Humans are busy having opinions, sharing experiences, and arguing about them loudly. They debate on Reddit. They gatekeep on forums. They downvote tone-deaf brand replies with genuine enthusiasm. They reward firsthand experience, punish jargon, and can smell marketing from three scrolls away.
Reddit threads. Quora answers. Niche forums. Discords. Comments. Social platforms. These are not answer engines. They are messy, emotional, ego-driven, credibility-sensitive, inside-joke-infested human engines.
The approach needed doesn’t fit neatly into AEO or GEO. And calling it SEO feels… lazy.
Pull Out a Chair
This is where HEO earns its seat at the overcrowded acronym table.
HEO isn’t about ranking. It’s about resonance. It’s the practice of showing up in human-driven spaces with credibility, context, and restraint. Knowing when to speak, when to listen, and when to absolutely not drop a link. You read the room. You don’t sell. You earn trust.
HEO values lived experience over polished copy and understands a hard truth: the fastest way to lose trust is to sound like you’re optimizing anything at all.
Calling this work “AEO” undervalues it. Calling it “SEO or GEO” confuses it. Calling it “community” makes it sound like a Slack channel with three messages and a gif bot.
Beneath the satire is a serious point. We need better language to explain what we actually do.
Call it HEO. Call it human optimization. Call it “not being weird on Reddit.” Just don’t pretend it’s the same thing as optimizing a page for a machine.
HEO Pillars
- Authority comes from participation, not publication.
- Tone is a ranking factor, even if no tool tracks it.
- Firsthand experience beats polished messaging every time.
- The wrong comment can undo a year of brand building in 30 seconds.
We Don’t Sell SEO
At Arc Intermedia, we build custom organic visibility programs that work together for how discovery actually behaves today. It is the collective (can I say Borg?) of what the acronyms should uniquely represent:
- SEO that helps machines understand website relevance.
- GEO that feeds AI models to surface brands in synthesized responses.
- HEO that participates like a human… for other humans.
Different playbooks. Different tactics. Different touches.
Same goal: being visible where decisions are being formed.
The acronyms thrown around should be used as subset markers but with better definition. So, welcome, HEO! AEO, please meet me behind the barn.
