What GEO is and why it does not replace SEO

For years, finding a supplier started the same way: a Google search and ten blue links. Today some of those questions go to an assistant instead. Someone types “which company can migrate my shop without losing rankings” and gets a written answer, with three or four names and, sometimes, links to where the information came from.

Showing up in that answer is the goal of GEO. It is worth understanding what it is and what it is not, because the term comes with more noise than method.

What is GEO?

GEO stands for generative engine optimization. It is the work of making a website, a brand or a product easy to find, understand and cite for assistants that answer with generated text: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude and the AI answers Google shows above its results.

The term comes from an academic study by researchers at Princeton and other universities, which measured which changes to a page increased its presence in generated answers. In their tests, adding cited sources, concrete figures and expert quotations improved visibility by up to 40%.

You will see the same idea under other names: AEO (answer engine optimization), LLMO or simply “AI SEO”. They all point at the same thing.

How is it different from SEO?

The underlying change is in what the person receives. A search engine hands over a list and the user chooses. An assistant hands over an answer and, with luck, mentions where it came from.

	SEO	GEO
What you aim for	A good position in the results list	Being mentioned or cited inside the answer
What gets evaluated	The whole page	Specific passages that answer a question
How people ask	With a few keywords	With long sentences, context and follow-ups
How it is measured	Positions, impressions and clicks	Mentions, citations and referral visits, less precisely
What counts beyond your site	The links you receive	What other sites say about you, linked or not

There is one more difference: in a search engine, second place still brings visits. A generated answer has room for only a few names, and if you are not among them you do not exist for that query.

Why is SEO still the foundation?

Because assistants do not work in isolation from the web. When a question needs current information, most of them run a search, read the top results and write from those. A page a search engine cannot crawl, that loads badly or that ranks for nothing is unlikely to reach a generated answer.

Three reasons not to neglect it:

• They share foundations. Unobstructed crawling, clear content, good speed, structured data and reputation. What helps on one side helps on the other.
• Google says so explicitly. Its documentation states there are no special requirements to appear in its AI answers: the same long-standing best practices apply.
• Search still brings most of the visits. Assistants are growing fast, but for nearly any site traditional search remains the main source of organic traffic.

The useful way to see it is that GEO is built on top of SEO. If the base fails, the rest does not hold. If you have doubts about that base, the complete guide to search rankings is a good starting point.

How does an AI decide what to cite?

An assistant answers from two sources of knowledge:

1. What it learned in training. This is a snapshot of the web up to a certain date. If your brand was mentioned on many sites with a consistent description, the model “knows” who you are.
2. What it looks up on the spot. For current or specific questions it queries the web, pulls passages from several pages and composes the answer.

In both cases the winner is content that is easy to extract and easy to trust: a page that answers a specific question, with verifiable facts, and a brand that other sources talk about. Nearly every practical recommendation follows from that.

What can you do on your site?

Let the right crawlers in. Assistants use different crawlers for training models and for search. Blocking the search ones takes you out of the answers. In robots.txt and AI crawlers we explain which is which and what to decide.

Answer real questions, head on. A heading with the question and, right below it, the answer in two or three sentences. Detail comes after. A passage that stands on its own is easier to cite than an idea spread over five paragraphs.

Provide facts that can be checked. Figures with their source, dates, names, concrete comparisons. This is what the Princeton study found most effective, and also what makes a text useful to a person.

Look after the structure. Headings in order, lists, tables for comparisons and clean HTML. Add structured data to state unambiguously who you are, what you offer and where.

Be the same company everywhere. Consistent name, description, services and contact details on your site, your social profiles, your Google listing and industry directories. Contradictions turn into wrong answers.

Get others to talk about you. Reviews, press mentions, case studies published by clients, specialist directories. An assistant trusts what several sources say more than what a company says about itself.

Keep content current. A page with prices from three years ago or a service you no longer offer may end up cited as it stands.

On llms.txt, the file proposed for summarising a site to language models: it is cheap to publish and does no harm, but no major assistant has confirmed using it to decide what to cite. It works as a complement, not as a strategy.

How is it measured?

Less precisely than SEO, and it is better to know that from the start. There is not yet an equivalent to Search Console that tells you how many answers you appeared in. What you can do:

• Look at referral traffic. Your analytics shows visits arriving from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com or copilot.microsoft.com.
• Ask for yourself. A fixed list of fifteen or twenty questions a customer would ask, repeated every month across several assistants, noting whether you appear and how you are described.
• Watch brand searches. More searches for your name often mean someone met you somewhere else.

Answers vary from one person to the next and from one day to the next, so read trends rather than individual results.

What GEO is not

It is not a trick for sneaking into answers. Hidden text aimed at the AI, mass-generated pages or invented reviews work for a short while and cost reputation when they stop working.

It is not a guarantee either. Nobody controls what a model decides to answer, and anyone promising “first place in ChatGPT” is selling something that does not exist.

And it is not a replacement for SEO. It is the same discipline, being the best answer to a question, applied to a new place where people ask.

Update: assistants are starting to open their own channels

The field moves fast. OpenAI has launched Businesses in ChatGPT, which lets a company claim its profile, correct its information and see how often it is mentioned. It is an official channel for giving the assistant information, with its own figures for mentions and clicks. We cover it, step by step, in Businesses in ChatGPT: how to claim your business profile.

And to understand where ChatGPT gets the pages it cites, continue with how ChatGPT search works and why Bing matters.