GEO vs SEO: what actually changed when AI started answering questions

For about twenty years, the job was reasonably stable: help Google understand a page, earn enough trust to rank it, and turn that ranking into clicks. The tools changed, the algorithms changed, but the shape of the work did not.

Then people started asking ChatGPT instead of Google. And Gemini. And Perplexity. And the question every business owner is now quietly asking is: does any of my SEO still matter?

Short answer: yes, more than ever. But the surface you are optimising for has grown a second half.

What GEO actually is

GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — is the practice of making your brand citable by AI systems. When someone asks an LLM "who's a good SEO consultant in Nottingham?" or "what's the best pizza oven for a small kitchen?", the model assembles an answer from sources it trusts. GEO is the work of making sure your business is one of those sources.

It is not a trick. There is no meta tag that makes ChatGPT recommend you. GEO is built from the same raw materials as good SEO — clear content, structured data, genuine authority — pointed at a different consumer.

What is genuinely different

Three things change when the reader is a model rather than a person:

There is often no click. The AI answers the question in place. Your win is being named in that answer, not getting a visit. That reframes how you measure success — from sessions to citations.
Entities matter more than keywords. LLMs reason about things — your brand, your services, the relationships between them — not strings of text. Clarity about who you are and what you do becomes a ranking factor in itself.
Consistency across sources is the trust signal. A model trusts what it sees corroborated in many places. Your site, your profiles, your reviews and your mentions all need to tell the same story.

What did not change at all

The fundamentals. A fast, crawlable, well-structured site with content that genuinely answers real questions is still the foundation — for Google and for the models. There is no GEO shortcut that skips the SEO groundwork, because the models are trained and grounded on the same web Google indexes.

That is why every engagement I run covers both. Winning Google and being invisible in AI search is a gap your competitors will fill. Winning AI search on a broken site is a house with no foundation.

The honest summary

GEO is not a new religion that replaces SEO. It is the recognition that your customers now ask their questions in two places, and you need to be a good answer in both. The work rhymes. The measurement changes. The fundamentals hold.

If you want to know where your brand currently stands across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok, that is exactly the kind of thing worth a conversation.