Two jobs your page is doing. You're only managing one.
When someone looks for a business like yours, two things now decide whether they find you. Google ranks you in its list of links, the work behind that is SEO. AI assistants like ChatGPT answer the question directly and name whoever they trust, the work behind that is GEO. Most businesses have poured years into the first and never touched the second. Here is what each one is, in plain terms, and why you need both.
Start with the half you can't see. The AI Visibility Report is free.
GEO is one idea, and you already understand it.
You already do this for Google. SEO, search engine optimisation, is the work of getting your business to show up when someone searches. Two decades of effort have gone into it, and most businesses know roughly how it works.
GEO is the same instinct, pointed at AI. It stands for generative engine optimisation. A generative engine is any AI that writes an answer instead of handing back a list of links: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews. GEO is the work of making sure those answers describe your business accurately, and put you forward when someone asks for a recommendation.
One picture says it. Ask ChatGPT "who's a good accountant for a startup?" and read the answer. Whether it names your firm, and whether it gets you right, is what GEO works on. Everything below is how, and why it matters now.
Search didn't die. It stopped being the first thing people do.
People still search. But more and more they ask first, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI, and act on the answer before a link ever loads. That answer is a new place to be found, or missed. SEO decides where you sit in the list. GEO decides whether you are in the answer that now comes before it.
SEO works on where you rank. Not on what's said about you.
SEO tunes your site for an algorithm that orders links. Do it well and you climb the results for the terms your buyers type, through clean content and structure, sound technical health, and the authority that earns links from other sites. It is a mature craft with twenty years of playbook behind it.
But ranking only decides whether you are shown. When someone reads the results and chooses, that part is still theirs. SEO gets you into the room. It does not script what the room is told about you.
GEO works on the answer itself. What AI says, and who it names.
Under the hood, it works nothing like search. The AI reads the web, picks what it trusts, and writes one answer with a handful of sources named inside it. There is no list to climb. There is one reply, and either you are in it, cited and described accurately, or you are not.
The work is giving AI something clean to read and reasons to trust it: structured pages built for machines, real schema, consistent facts about your business wherever they appear, and a presence on the sources AI leans on. And the rivals you fight here are often not the ones you fight in search. The site that outranks you may be invisible to AI, and the one AI keeps naming may be nowhere near the top of Google.
AI doesn't look you up. It assembles you.
When AI answers a question about your business, it does not read one page and report back. It builds a picture from everything it can find, your own site, old news and articles, what people say on Reddit and review sites, and third-party references like Wikipedia and directories. Then it states that picture with total confidence, whether or not it is right. Two things decide how current that picture is.
Most of what ChatGPT knows was scraped into its training long ago and only updates when the model is next retrained, on its own schedule. Change your site today and it may not notice for a while.
Perplexity, and AI answers with live retrieval, visit the web while answering. Once your pages are in place a change can show up almost straight away. Google's AI Overviews lean on where you already rank.
This is why the same fix lands at different speeds on different platforms, and why being read accurately everywhere, on your own site and the sources AI trusts, is the whole game.
Same goal, different game. Found either way.
Both want you discovered. They just play out on different surfaces, with different rules, different scoreboards, and often different competitors. Here is the whole picture at a glance.
| Dimension | SEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|
| Works on | Where you rank | What AI says |
| The surface | The search results page | ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI |
| You're after | A position in the list | A mention in the answer |
| Measured by | Rankings, clicks, SERP visibility, backlinks | AI Alignment Score, citations, accuracy |
| The work | 26 rules across 7 categories | 33 rules across 9 categories, plus AI infrastructure |
| You compete with | Whoever ranks | Whoever AI names, often a different set |
| A change shows up | After the next recrawl | Live, or at the next retrain |
Picture one buyer. Two ways to be found, or not.
Say you run an accountancy firm that specialises in R&D tax claims. A founder needs help. Watch the two paths, because they do not always end the same way.
She types "R&D tax accountant" into Google. Your SEO is strong, so you are the top result. She sees you, clicks through, and decides for herself. That is SEO doing its job.
Or she asks ChatGPT, "who can help a startup claim R&D tax relief?" It writes a short answer naming three firms. If your pages, citations and mentions do not add up, you are not one of them, and she never knew you existed.
Same firm, same week, same buyer. You can rank first and still be the name AI leaves out, because the two are scored on entirely different things. Winning once is no longer winning.
You don't choose between them. You do the work once.
Here is the part that makes this manageable. The things that make a page rank, clean structure, real schema, sound links, honest markup, are the same things that make AI read you right. Fix the page properly and both readers benefit from the one change. SEO is not being replaced. GEO is the layer on top of it.
The businesses pulling ahead are not picking a side. They are covering the whole page while everyone else still writes for one reader. One source of truth, both surfaces handled. That is the complete job, not half of it.
Call it what you want. The work is the same.
You'll see this called a few things. GEO, for generative engine optimisation. AEO, for answer engine optimisation. AIO. AI SEO. They all point at the same shift: AI now answers for your business, and someone has to manage what it says.
We call it AI Visibility Management. Optimisation assumes the picture is roughly right and could be a little better. Often it is not right, AI invents prices, names the wrong competitor, describes a service you dropped a year ago. You don't optimise that. You manage it.
What people ask before they pick a side.
What's the difference between SEO and GEO?
SEO decides where you rank when someone searches. GEO decides what AI says when someone asks. Search returns a list of links; AI returns one written answer with sources named inside it. SEO drives traffic; GEO controls the answer. You need both.
Is GEO the same as AEO or AIO?
Different names, same shift. GEO, AEO (answer engine optimisation) and AIO all describe making AI represent your business accurately. We call the wider discipline AI Visibility Management, because the job is managing how AI describes you, not just optimising for it.
Does GEO replace SEO?
No. GEO is the next layer, not a replacement. SEO still decides whether you rank; GEO decides whether you are in the AI answer that increasingly comes first. The same clean structure, schema and links improve both, so one set of changes moves them together.
Can I do one without the other?
You can, and plenty do without meaning to, usually all SEO and no GEO. But ranking first and being absent from the AI answer is a real and common gap. The point of covering both is that you stop losing the buyers who ask before they search.
How is AI visibility even measured?
On our side, an AI Alignment Score from 0 to 100, plus how often you are cited, how accurately you are described, and where AI prefers a competitor, tracked across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
Do I need to understand any of this to act on it?
No. You see what AI says about you in plain language, and a prioritised list of what to change next. The understanding is ours to hold; the result is yours.
See what AI says about you. Today.
You already know where you rank. What you can't see is the other half, the answer AI gives when someone asks about you. The free AI Visibility Report shows you exactly that, what ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity say about your business right now. That is where this starts.