If you’ve spent any time on LinkedIn lately, you’ll have seen someone announce that SEO is dead and GEO is the future. Scroll a bit further and someone else is insisting GEO is just SEO in a new hat. Neither is much use if you run a business and just want to know where your marketing budget should go.
So here’s our take in plain English…
What GEO actually means
GEO stands for generative engine optimisation and it often gets mentioned alongside AEO, which is answer engine optimisation. They’re liked together closely enough that we’ll treat them as one thing here. It’s the work of making your business easy for AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews to find, understand and mention when somebody asks them a question.
SEO is about getting your pages to rank in a list of results so people click through to your site. GEO is about being part of the answer itself; if someone asks an AI tool who they should use for a website rebuild in Leeds, instead of ten blue links they get a short written reply with a few names in it. GEO and AEO together helps you become one of those names.
Where the two really differ
With SEO you’re chasing clicks an with GEO you’re chasing mentions, and a mention doesn’t always come with a click attached. Someone might read your name in an answer, remember it, and search for you directly a week later. That’s still a win, it’s just harder to spot in your analytics.
Measuring it is different too, as a keyword either sits in position four or it doesn’t. AI answers can vary and you can ask the same question twice and you can get two different lists, so you’re looking at patterns over time rather than a single number.
Then there’s where the signals come from, as SEO leans heavily on your own site; the technical health, the content, the links pointing at it. GEO cares about all that as well, but it also listens to what the rest of the internet says about you. Reviews, directory listings, mentions on other people’s sites etc… If your business is only ever described on your own website, you’re a quieter voice than the competitor who turns up everywhere.
Format is also important, as AI tools tend to lift clear, self-contained answers out of a page. A paragraph that answers a question straight away is more use to them than sieving through for the answer buried in paragraph nine. (It’s more use to humans as well, funnily enough).
Where they overlap, which is most of it
Here’s the bit the “SEO is dead” crowd skips, an AI tool can only mention what it can find and make sense of. If your site is slow, thin, or vague about what you do and where you do it, nobody is getting much from it. Crawlable pages, sensible structure, content that answers real questions; that’s SEO groundwork, and it’s also what gives GEO something to work with.
So GEO isn’t replacing SEO, it’s sitting on top of it, skip the foundations and the clever AI tactics won’t have anything to hold onto.
What we’d actually do about it
Start with the basics, make sure your site loads quickly, can be crawled properly, and says plainly what you do and who you do it for. It sounds obvious, but is often the thing that’s been missed.
Update content structure and write for the questions your customers are actually asking. If you’ve got a service page that only talks about how passionate you are, have a gander at whether it ever says what the service actually is and what it costs.
Then a push to try get your name about, a properly filled in Google Business Profile, reviews from real customers, listings in the directories that matter for your industry, and a consistent description of your business everywhere. The more places that tell the same story, the more confident an AI tool is likely to be in repeating it.
Structured data is worth doing too, Google stopped showing FAQ dropdowns in its results earlier this year, so it doesn’t earn you the extra space it used to, but the markup still helps to make it easier for AI models to understand a page. On top of this, schema is important, as it helps to present the information in a clear way.
Next would be to run our software to ask the AI tools the questions your customers would ask and see where you and your competitors appear. If you’d like a quick first look at your GEO optimisation currently sits, we’ve built an AI readiness audit at geo.our-agency.co.uk that scores a site on how ready it is.
A word on the hype
Nobody can promise you a top spot in ChatGPT, as the tools change how they answer from one month to the next, so anyone offering guarantees is guessing or selling.
If you’d like an honest view of where your site stands on both, give us a shout.
