GEO Is 80% SEO. The Other 20% Is Why I'm Writing This

The acronym showed up in my feed sometime last year, and within a month it had a certification, a conference track, and a handful of people promising it was nothing like the thing they’d sold me the decade before. Generative Engine Optimisation. GEO. I rolled my eyes, then felt a little bad about it, because underneath the packaging there is a real change, and dismissing it would be as lazy as overselling it.

So here’s my honest split. Most of what makes you visible to an AI answer is the same work I’ve been doing for years. A smaller part is new, and different enough that it deserves its own name. The trouble is the marketing volume gets those two proportions backwards.

The 80% that just transferred over

If a model is going to repeat you, it first has to be able to read you, find you credible, and pull a clean fact out of you. That is not a new brief.

Pages a machine can crawl and parse. A clear structure, so the thing you’re actually saying isn’t buried. Answers written in plain sentences instead of 800 words of throat-clearing. Being mentioned and corroborated on sites that aren’t yours. A real author, a real date, a track record. Consistency, so the same claim shows up the same way wherever a model looks.

Every one of those mattered in 2018. They matter now for exactly the same reason: they make you the obvious, trustworthy thing to quote. If a course promises a secret GEO technique and it isn’t downstream of “be genuinely good and legible,” I’d keep my money.

The 20% that’s actually new

Here’s what I can’t file under old SEO, and why I bothered writing this.

You’re no longer optimising to be visited. You’re optimising to be repeated. That sounds like wordplay until you sit with it, and then a lot of habits stop making sense. The answer gets assembled from several sources at once, so there often isn’t a single “position” you hold. You can’t open a tool and see yourself at number three, because there is no three. And the thing quoting you frequently strips your name off on the way out, so your best work can travel while you get no credit and no click.

That last part breaks measurement in a way I don’t have a tidy fix for. My dashboards were built to count visits. When the win is “a model told someone the right thing about my client, using my client’s words,” there’s no row for that yet.

I keep coming back to a boring conclusion that I’ve grown to like. The work barely changed. The scoreboard changed completely. Most of the noise I see is people selling a new game when what actually moved was how we keep score, and that, quietly, is the harder problem.