What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO?
Generative Engine Optimisation is the work of being cited inside an AI answer — not ranking in a list of links. Here's how GEO differs from SEO, and what actually moves it.
Search is splitting in two. Half your future customers will keep typing queries into Google. The other half will ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude — and read the answer those tools synthesise, often without clicking anything. If you only optimise for the first half, you slowly go missing from the second.
That second half is what GEO is for.
SEO, in one line
Search Engine Optimisation is the work of ranking in a list of links. You earn a position, the searcher clicks, they land on your page. The levers are familiar: crawlable markup, fast pages, relevant content, internal links, backlinks.
GEO, in one line
Generative Engine Optimisation is the work of being cited inside a generated answer. There’s no list of ten blue links — there’s one paragraph, assembled from sources the model trusts, sometimes with footnotes. Your goal shifts from “rank #1” to “be the sentence the model quotes.”
Why they’re not the same job
A page can rank beautifully on Google and never get quoted by an LLM, because the two reward different things:
- Search rewards relevance and authority — keywords, links, freshness.
- Answer engines reward extractability and trust — clear claims, clean structure, sources, and consistency across the web. A model needs to lift a self-contained, accurate statement out of your page and attribute it.
So a wall of clever marketing prose can rank yet be useless to an LLM, while a plainly-worded, well-structured FAQ can get quoted constantly.
What actually moves GEO
We build every page to be crawled and cited from the first commit:
- Answer the question in the first sentence. Models lift the cleanest, most direct statement. Bury the lede and you lose the quote.
- Structure for extraction. Real headings, short paragraphs, lists, and FAQ blocks — one idea per chunk.
- Add machine-readable context. Schema.org structured data, and an
llms.txtthat tells answer engines what you do, in plain language. - Be consistent everywhere. Same name, same description, same facts across your site, LinkedIn and directories. Models build a picture of an entity from many sources; contradictions cost you trust.
- Make cite-worthy claims. Specific, accurate, attributable. Vague superlatives don’t get quoted; concrete facts do.
The honest part
GEO doesn’t replace SEO — it compounds on it. The same clean structure, fast pages and clear writing that help you rank also make you easy to quote. Do the foundational work once and both engines benefit. Skip it, and you’re invisible in the half of search that’s growing fastest.
That’s why we don’t sell “SEO” and “GEO” as two line items. They’re one discipline: built to be crawled, written to be cited.