The short version
- Most of GEO is SEO. Crawlable pages, clear structure, valid markup and genuine subject authority serve both. Anyone telling you to start over is selling a course.
- What genuinely changes: the unit of success moves from a ranked link to a cited sentence, which rewards pages that answer directly rather than pages that rank well.
- Assistants need to extract a claim, attribute it, and be confident it is about you. That puts unusual weight on unambiguous entity description and structured data.
- Nobody has reliable public data on how assistants weight sources. Be sceptical of any specific percentage you read, including in articles that look like this one.
Generative engine optimisation is the term that stuck for making your content show up inside AI-generated answers rather than in a list of blue links. Whether it deserves to be its own discipline is a fair question, and the honest answer is: partly. Roughly three quarters of the work is indistinguishable from competent SEO. The remaining quarter is genuinely different, and that quarter is worth understanding properly.
This page tries to separate the two without either dismissing the shift or inflating it into a reason to rebuild everything.
The short answer
Fit for your workflow
GEO is a shift in emphasis inside SEO, not a replacement for it.
If your site is genuinely crawlable, genuinely authoritative on a topic and genuinely clear about what it is, you are already most of the way there. The specific additions worth making are structural: describe your entities unambiguously, answer questions directly near the top of the page, keep your structured data valid, and make sure the claims you want quoted are stated in extractable sentences rather than implied across three paragraphs.
- If your SEO fundamentals are weak
- Fix those first. GEO on an uncrawlable site is decoration.
- If your SEO is solid
- Add entity clarity and direct answers. That is most of the delta.
- If you sell to a technical audience
- This matters sooner — technical buyers moved to assistants earliest.
Where they overlap — which is most of it
Every row here is standard SEO practice that predates generative search by many years. This is the part of GEO that is not new.
Where they genuinely differ
The most important row there is the third one. In classic SEO, a result that does not get clicked is a failure. In generative search, being named in an answer the user never clicks may be the entire value — the same way a mention in a magazine article has value without a hyperlink. That breaks the measurement model most SEO teams have built their reporting on, which is the real reason this feels disruptive. We cover that in ranking vs being cited.
What actually helps, concretely
- Say what you are, in one unambiguous sentence, on your own site. An assistant describing your category needs a clean statement to draw on. If your homepage says "we reimagine possibility", you have handed it nothing.
- Answer the question directly, early. A page that buries the answer under 400 words of preamble is harder to extract from than one that states it and then elaborates.
- Keep structured data valid, not just present. Check in the Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator. Invalid markup is functionally absent.
- Make claims checkable. Attributed figures with dates and sources are more quotable than unsourced assertions — which is the whole reason this blog cites everything.
- Be consistent across the web. Your description of yourself on your site, your profiles and your documentation should agree. Contradiction lowers confidence.
- Do not block the crawlers unless you mean to. Check your robots.txt actually permits the agents you want citing you.
Be sceptical of GEO statistics, including flattering ones
The category is young and the vendors selling into it have obvious incentives. Claims like "AI search drives X% more qualified traffic" or "citations increased Y% after Z" are rarely accompanied by a method you can inspect. We have deliberately not quoted a single such figure on this page, because we could not verify one. If a number matters to your decision, ask what the sample was and who paid for the study.
What the tools in this category actually do
A growing set of products — Peec AI, Profound, and the AI-visibility modules inside Semrush and Surfer — will track how often assistants mention you and for which prompts. That is genuinely useful reporting and worth having if AI visibility is a channel you are accountable for.
Be clear about what it is, though: measurement. None of these tools changes the pages that determine whether you get mentioned. The work of making your entity description unambiguous, your answers extractable and your markup valid happens in your content and your code. Compared in the AI visibility tools comparison.
Our position, and our stake in it
We build a tool that does the implementation half of this, so we plainly benefit from you believing implementation matters. The check on that: everything in the concrete list above can be done by hand, free, by anyone with access to their own site. Nothing on this page requires buying anything from us or from anyone else.