The exotic aromatic Butcher series were originally introduced for the calculation of order conditions for the high order numerical integration of ergodic stochastic differential equations in $$\mathbb {R} ^d$$
R
d
and on manifolds. We prove in this paper that exotic aromatic B-series satisfy a universal geometric property, namely that they are characterised by locality and equivariance with respect to orthogonal changes of coordinates. This characterisation confirms that exotic aromatic B-series are a fundamental geometric object that naturally generalises aromatic B-series and B-series, as they share similar equivariance properties. In addition, we provide a classification of the main subsets of the exotic aromatic B-series, in particular the exotic B-series, using different equivariance properties. Along the analysis, we present a generalised definition of exotic aromatic trees, dual vector fields, and we explore the impact of degeneracies on the classification.