GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — is the latest thing the SEO industry has invented to make you feel like everything you knew is obsolete and you need to hire someone new. It is, with a few minor caveats, largely nonsense.
Here’s the pitch: AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews are changing how people find information. Therefore, the argument goes, you need a whole new discipline — GEO — to optimise specifically for these systems. Different tactics. Different metrics. Different consultants charging different rates.
The reality is considerably less exciting.
What AI Search Actually Does
When ChatGPT answers a question, when Perplexity summarises a topic, when Google’s AI Overview appears at the top of a search result — all of these systems are doing roughly the same thing. They’re pulling from existing content on the web, synthesising it, and presenting it in a conversational format.
They are not magic. They don’t have opinions. They don’t have expertise. They read what’s already out there and produce a version of it. Which means the single most important factor in whether your content gets surfaced in an AI-generated answer is the same as it’s always been: is your content genuinely good, clear, and trustworthy?
That’s SEO. It has always been SEO.
The “GEO Tactics” Are Just SEO With a New Name
Let’s look at what GEO practitioners actually recommend:
- Write clearly and structure your content well — yes, this is on-page SEO
- Answer specific questions directly — this is what featured snippets optimisation has always been about
- Demonstrate expertise and authority — E-E-A-T, which Google formalised years ago
- Get referenced by authoritative sources — link building
- Use structured data / schema markup — technical SEO
- Keep information accurate and up to date — basic content hygiene
None of these are new. Every single one of them was on every competent SEO’s checklist before anyone had heard the word GEO. They’ve been repackaged with a new acronym and sold as a response to a new threat.
The Real Shift — Which Is Smaller Than Advertised
To be fair: something genuinely is changing. AI Overviews on Google are eating some of the clicks that used to go to organic results. Informational queries — “what is X”, “how does Y work” — are increasingly answered without the user clicking anything. That’s real, and it’s worth thinking about.
But the answer to that shift is not a new optimisation discipline. It’s a strategic question: are you targeting keywords where the answer can be summarised in a paragraph, or are you targeting the kind of intent where someone actually needs to visit a site to get what they need?
“What is compound interest” is a question AI answers perfectly well. You’re never going to win that click back. But “best accounting software for a 10-person business” or “should I use a limited company or sole trader for my consultancy” — those are still queries where people need more than a paragraph, where they want to read, compare, and decide. That’s where SEO still wins.
What About Brand Mentions in AI Answers?
There’s a real sub-question buried inside GEO which is worth addressing: how do you get your brand or business referenced in AI-generated answers? This is a legitimate concern for businesses where people are asking AI tools for recommendations rather than searching Google.
The honest answer is that no one has cracked this definitively, because the underlying models and retrieval systems are opaque and constantly changing. But what we do know is that the businesses most likely to appear are those with:
- Strong brand mentions across the web (reviews, press, industry directories)
- Clear, factual, consistent information about what they do
- Content that directly addresses the questions people are asking AI tools
Which is, again, just good SEO and PR. There’s no secret GEO lever to pull.
The One Thing GEO Gets Right
If there’s a genuine insight buried in the GEO conversation, it’s this: thin, generic content is more dead than ever.
AI can produce generic content at infinite scale. If your blog post is a surface-level overview that could have been written by ChatGPT, it offers nothing that AI search can’t already deliver. The only content that survives in this environment is content with genuine perspective, specific expertise, or original information that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
That’s not a GEO insight. That’s just the natural conclusion of where SEO has been heading for years. Google has been trying to reward genuine expertise over content farms since at least 2011. AI is just accelerating the same direction.
What You Should Actually Do
Ignore GEO as a separate discipline. Do this instead:
- Write content that’s actually better than everything else on the topic. Not longer. Better. More specific, more honest, more useful.
- Structure it clearly. Use headings that answer real questions. Answer those questions directly and early, not buried in padding.
- Build genuine authority. Get referenced by other credible sources in your industry. Be quoted. Get reviewed. Exist beyond your own website.
- Target intent that AI can’t satisfy. Move towards content that requires real context, comparison, or decision-making — not just information retrieval.
- Track what’s actually happening to your traffic. If you’re seeing AI Overview cannibalisation on specific queries, that’s useful data. Pivot those pages towards deeper content or different intent.
None of this requires you to hire a GEO specialist. It requires you to do SEO well — which, frankly, is harder and more valuable than any acronym.
The Bottom Line
The SEO industry has a long history of inventing urgency. Remember when mobile SEO was going to kill everything? When voice search was the future? Some of these shifts were real. Most were overstated by people who needed a new service to sell.
GEO is the current version of that. The underlying shift — AI changing how people get answers — is real. The idea that it requires a fundamentally different approach to how you create and optimise content is not. Good content, well structured, from a credible source, that genuinely answers what people are asking. That’s it. It worked before GEO existed. It’ll work after GEO is forgotten.
