The most common question we hear from business owners is: "I've been doing SEO for years — do I really need to think about GEO too?" The short answer is yes. But the longer answer is more nuanced — and understanding why will help you prioritise both more effectively.
What SEO does
Search Engine Optimization is the practice of improving your website's visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). When someone searches on Google, SEO determines whether your site appears on page one or page ten, and in which position.
SEO works through a combination of technical health (site speed, crawlability, mobile-friendliness), on-page signals (keyword relevance, content quality, meta tags), and off-page authority (backlinks, brand mentions, domain authority). Google's algorithm weighs hundreds of these signals to rank pages.
What GEO does
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of making your website visible inside AI-generated answers. Rather than ranking in a list of links, GEO gets your brand cited as a source within the AI's response itself.
GEO works through entity signals (is your brand clearly established as a named entity?), structured data (do you use schema markup that AI engines can parse?), E-E-A-T (do you demonstrate real expertise and authority?), and answer-ready content (is your content structured to directly answer questions?).
Where they overlap
Strong SEO and strong GEO share many foundations. High-quality content, technical health, and genuine authority help both. If your SEO is strong, you're already partway to GEO readiness. But there are meaningful differences in what each requires.
Where they diverge
Keywords vs entities: SEO is fundamentally keyword-driven. GEO is entity-driven. LLMs don't search for keyword matches — they look for sources that are clearly established as authoritative entities on a topic.
Links vs structure: Backlinks are central to SEO authority. GEO cares less about the quantity of links and more about content structure — specifically, whether content is formatted in a way that LLMs can cleanly extract and cite.
Ranking vs citation: SEO gets you a position in a ranked list. GEO gets you cited within an answer. The intent and behaviour are completely different — and the conversion dynamics are too.
Why you need both
Blue-link search hasn't gone away. Google still processes over 8 billion searches per day. SEO remains one of the highest-ROI marketing channels for most businesses. Abandoning it in favour of GEO would be a mistake.
But AI search is growing at extraordinary speed. ChatGPT has over 300 million weekly active users. Perplexity is growing fastest among professionals. Google AI Overviews now appear for a significant portion of all searches. Businesses that ignore GEO are ceding territory to competitors who don't.
The smart strategy is to treat GEO as a layer on top of SEO — not a replacement. Strong technical SEO, quality content, and genuine authority form the foundation. GEO-specific optimisations — schema markup, entity establishment, answer-ready structure — extend that foundation into the AI search landscape.
Where to start
Run a baseline audit that covers both SEO and GEO signals. Understand where you currently stand across technical health, content depth, entity clarity, and schema markup. Then prioritise fixes by impact — many GEO improvements (like adding FAQ schema) are fast, low-effort, and high-impact. Others (like building content depth and authority) are longer-term investments that compound over time.
The businesses that treat SEO and GEO as a unified, integrated strategy rather than competing priorities will be the ones that own search visibility — in both the traditional and AI eras of the web.