What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO?

Search engine optimisation is the long-established practice of getting a page to rank in a list of results. The prize is a position, the measure is where you sit in that list, and the payoff is a click.

Generative engine optimisation — GEO, also called AI visibility or answer engine optimisation — is about a different moment. Somebody asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews which product to buy, and the assistant writes them a paragraph naming two or three brands. That paragraph is the whole shortlist. Everyone not in it has been eliminated before the buyer has seen a single website.

Three things change

• There is no ranking, only presence. Being fourth in a list still puts you on the page. Being fourth in an assistant's opinion usually means being left out of the answer entirely. This is why we measure how often you appear across many questions, rather than a position on one.
• The click may never happen. An assistant can answer a buyer completely without sending them anywhere. Analytics will show you nothing, and the absence of traffic is not evidence of absence of influence — it is just an absence of measurement.
• Your own website is no longer the main lever. An assistant assembles its answer largely from what other people have written about you: reviews, forum threads, comparison articles, retailer listings, press. Your product page is one voice among them, and rarely the loudest.

What carries over from SEO, and what does not

Still useful: being crawlable, stating your product facts plainly and unambiguously, and being covered by sites that assistants retrieve from. Much less useful: keyword density, ranking for terms nobody phrases to an assistant, and link volume for its own sake.

The practical difference is that SEO work is judged by rankings, and GEO work has to be judged by whether the assistants changed what they say. That is a measurement problem before it is a content problem, which is why this company starts there.