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

Is this just another made-up acronym for marketing?

There is no shortage of them at the moment. SEO, AEO, GEO, LLMO. New letters keep arriving, and each one is sold as the next big thing you have apparently already fallen behind on. So let me try to explain this without turning it into another framework you need to remember.

Imagine it is five years into the future and you are explaining to your now 10-year-old son or daughter what Google was. You used to type a search into a little box. Google would give you a million little blue links, divided into pages of 10. You would click through them one at a time, visit different websites and companies, and try to work out which one was right for you.

You had to do that manually. Often multiple times a day, whenever you wanted to find a product or service. Those days are not too far away from becoming something we laugh at ourselves for having lived through.

Now, people ask AI for those answers. The information gets distilled into a very short list. That list might be compared, rated or turned into a matrix or comparison table. You might even give the AI scoring criteria and ask it for the best option for your purpose.

Give me the cheapest. Give me the best. Give me the one somewhere in the middle.

Now that people are doing this in AI, it is up to you to be found there. That is what GEO is.

GEO stands for generative engine optimisation. It is the work of creating content and structuring your website so AI can understand what you are about, answer the questions associated with your business and include you in the shortlist.

The alphabet soup, decoded

You will hear this work called a few different things. They are all related, but they put the emphasis in slightly different places.

They are all pointing at the same basic job: being the business that gets found when somebody goes looking. I mostly just call the whole thing AI search visibility, because that is what it is.

Where SEO and GEO differ

SEO was basically about getting a place on the page. You rank, the buyer sees a list, they click and you get a visit to your website. From there, you have a chance to win them.

GEO changes the shape of that moment. An AI does not normally hand back 10 links for you to work through. It hands back an answer, with a short list of names it trusts.

If you are on that list, you are in the conversation. If you are not, the buyer might never see you. There is no second page to scroll through. There is just the answer they were given.

Two things follow from that.

First, size matters less than it used to. On Google, a big brand with a big backlink profile has a real head start. In an AI answer, what can win is the page that answers the exact question most clearly. A sharp local business can genuinely compete with a much larger one if its content is the better answer for the question being asked.

Second, you often will not see the click. Somebody might see your name in an AI answer, then search for your business in Google or go directly to your website to check you out. The payoff might show up as more branded searches, more direct visits or more people mentioning that they found you through an AI recommendation. It will not always appear as a neat AI referral line in your analytics.

SEO is not dead

God forbid we say it, but the question keeps coming back. Is SEO dead?

No.

GEO does not replace SEO. We are currently straddling two major ways of searching, and those are Google and AI. When an AI cannot answer a question directly from memory, it searches the web. It pulls back pages and uses the information it finds to build an answer.

So all the work you have done for SEO reasons is still valuable. The credibility you built through third-party resources, public relations and backlinks is still valuable too.

The difference is that the type of content you focus on now needs to be easily digestible for humans and AI. Your website needs to speak two languages. It needs to make sense to a person reading it and to a machine trying to understand it. That is where the marketing needs to adapt.

The content you should be creating right now is content that answers the real questions people ask about your business. Not just a page called "Our services", but the questions people are typing into Google or asking an AI before they decide who to contact.

Why I am telling you this now

I run PROACTIVE Co out of Burleigh Heads, and I have watched search split like this before. Google owned it, then social and YouTube took a slice, and now AI is the newest place the ground has moved to.

Every time it shifts, the businesses that move first get the biggest head start. The ones that wait often spend the next year explaining to themselves why a competitor got there first.

Thirty years of marketing has taught me to back the courageous first move over the comfortable wait.

I learnt this lesson hard recently. Our own business was disrupted, and I do not want this to happen to anybody I have come into contact with, recently or in the past.

The window is open right now. It will not stay that way for long. You know how quickly this stuff is shifting, especially if you are confused about what you should be doing.

One thing I have learnt about decision-making is that when you have too many decisions to make, or too many options on your plate, you have to choose the least shit one.

For some of you, that might mean doing nothing. That is probably because your marketing spend is already being exhausted, or you are in a contract for your marketing. That is a real constraint, and pretending otherwise does not help you.

But if you have the opportunity to change tack on your marketing now and augment your existing SEO with AI visibility-style content, then I would absolutely be doing that. That is my recommendation.

What should you do with your content?

Start by answering the real questions your buyers are asking.

If somebody is asking an AI for the best accountant for a construction business in Brisbane, the answer is not a vague page about how you provide "tailored solutions". The answer is a clear explanation of what you do, who you do it for, how you work and why somebody should trust you.

Then make sure your website is structured so the AI can understand it. Clear headings help. Straightforward language helps. Useful detail helps. Structured data can help machines understand what your business does and how the different parts of your website relate to each other.

You also need to find out where you stand right now. Is ChatGPT naming you or your competitors? Is Gemini naming you or somebody else? Which questions produce an answer that includes your business, and which ones do not?

You cannot fix what you cannot see.

Do your best to have humans write the content. Or, at the very least, transcribe your own words and use AI to help you edit it. That way, you do not have to be a perfect copywriter, and you can use AI for what it is really good at. It can help you structure, edit and improve what you are saying without replacing the experience and point of view that make the content worth reading in the first place.

SEO is about the page of links. GEO is about the answer itself. You want to be findable in both places.

Common questions