GEO: the new SEO?

No, not Nat Geo. Also nice, those Sumatran tigers 🐯. And not geofencing to keep suspicious countries off your network either (also important).

But GEO: Generative Engine Optimization.

The question is: how do you end up inside an AI’s answer?

What SEO was

SEO is about one goal: appearing as high as possible in Google’s results. You optimise your website, you write content, and hopefully you turn up on page one.

That has worked for years, and it is not going away. It is just no longer enough.

What GEO is

GEO is about a fundamentally different question: are you named in the answer an AI system gives?

Not found. Not ranked. Cited.

Ask an AI “what is the best VoIP solution for a mid-sized business?” and you do not get a list of links to click through. You get a shortlist. Three names. Take your pick.

If your organisation is not in that answer, you do not exist at that stage. Full stop.

Why this is a big shift

The customer journey has changed drastically, and faster than most marketing departments have kept up with.

The research process used to take weeks. Visiting several sites, comparing, weighing up, looking again. Now somebody asks one question, gets a concrete answer with recommendations included, and makes a decision within hours.

That means something uncomfortable. For part of your market, the phase in which you could still win somebody over with a good website no longer exists. The choice was made before you knew about it.

What AI systems look at

Not the same things Google looks at. The points below are what I understand of it and what I see back in practice; this is not official documentation and it changes fast.

✅ Descriptive, semantic URLs

✅ Clear page titles and meta descriptions that answer directly

✅ Short, self-contained passages that can be quoted on their own

✅ Comparison content: X versus Y versus Z

✅ FAQ structures

✅ Current, recent content

And note this: recency beats authority. A well-structured new page can overtake an established party with years of domain authority. That is the exact opposite of what SEO taught us, and it is good news if you are small.

Technical note, and this is the one most often missed: many AI systems do not process JavaScript. If your essential content is loaded through scripts, that content simply does not exist as far as AI is concerned. You can have a beautiful site that is completely empty for this part of your market.

And communities matter too

Reddit gets used intensively. Why? Because those are real user experiences, not marketing copy.

AI increasingly prefers authentic discussion over polished corporate content. So your visibility is no longer built through your own website alone.

For most organisations that is the hardest sentence in this piece. There is no control over it, and no agency that can arrange it for you. What people who owe you nothing say about you is a marketing channel now.

Start with one page

The good news: organisations that start now can build a strong position in a short time. You can be scoring well within three weeks.

Not with a strategy. With one page.

Pick one concrete question your customer asks an AI. Not “what we do” but the question as they actually type it. Answer it directly and factually, in a way that still holds up when it gets quoted away from your website.

That is GEO.

And if you are wondering whether it works: ask an AI. About your own service, in your own market, and look at who is in that answer.

That takes five uncomfortable minutes. It is also the only benchmark that counts.