What is GEO and how is it different from SEO?

GEO (generative engine optimisation) is the work of making your content understood, selected and cited by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. SEO aims to rank your page in search results; GEO aims to get your brand and information into the generated answer itself. They are not competitors: good GEO is built on a solid technical SEO foundation.

The core difference between SEO and GEO

In classic search, the user sees a list of results and chooses which page to open. In generative search, the system reads several sources, synthesises them and writes a single answer, usually showing sources as links or footnotes. The success question changes accordingly:

• SEO asks: does my page rank for the query, and does it get clicked?
• GEO asks: does the assistant use my information, describe my brand correctly and cite me as a source?

In practice both rest on the same foundation: crawlable pages, clear information and a credible source profile.

How AI assistants choose their sources

Every provider works differently and not all details are public. The broad picture is clear, though. Search-enabled assistants run searches on the web or in their own index, retrieve relevant passages and compose the answer from them. Google's AI features rely on the Google Search index and its existing ranking systems, so the precondition for appearing there is that a page is indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. What models learned during training also shapes what they "know" about your brand.

Pages that make this job easy are more likely to be cited: content that answers the question directly, uses self-contained paragraphs and makes clear who wrote it and what it is based on.

What makes content citable

1. A clear entity: who your organisation is, what it does, where it operates and how long it has existed should be stated consistently across the site. Different addresses, founding years or service names on different pages weaken trust.
2. Answer-first structure: each section opens with the short answer, then adds detail. Meaningful H2/H3 headings, lists and definitions keep passages understandable when lifted out of context.
3. Verifiable information: concrete, checkable statements rather than invented figures or inflated claims. Content that cites sources, is dated and kept up to date earns more trust.
4. Structured data: schema.org markup such as Organization, Service, Article, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList summarises visible content in a machine-readable way. It must only describe what is actually on the page.
5. Crawlability: important text should arrive as server-rendered HTML; content loaded only via JavaScript may never be seen by some crawlers. Check that robots.txt does not block legitimate search and AI crawlers by accident.
6. Evidence and internal links: linking service pages to related projects and articles shows that your expertise is backed by real examples.

What not to do: cloaking and shortcuts

Serving AI crawlers different content from users (cloaking), adding hidden text or planting instructions aimed at assistants breaks search engine guidelines and damages trust for good. What crawlers receive should be substantively the same as what visitors see.

Proposals such as llms.txt offer an extra file that summarises your site for language models. At the time of writing it is not an established standard and cannot be assumed to be used by every provider. Add it as a supplement if you like; never treat it as the strategy.

How to monitor GEO

There is no measurement method as mature as classic rank tracking yet. A practical approach combines:

• asking your target questions to different assistants at regular intervals and recording whether your brand is mentioned and described correctly,
• tracking referral traffic from AI assistants as a separate segment in analytics,
• following page- and query-level changes in Search Console.

None of this gives a precise ranking, but it shows which content works and which facts are being passed on incorrectly.

How Grafikare approaches it

We start by auditing the site's technical foundation, the consistency of its entity information and its content structure. We then prioritise the questions that matter, rework content into an answer-first format and add structured data that matches what is visible. After that we review visibility at regular intervals and keep the content current.