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Engine Optimisation) is the latest thing the SEO industry has invented to make you feel like everything you knew is obsolete and you need to hire someone new.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 label
Here’s what GEO practitioners actually recommend:
- Write clearly and structure your content well, that’s on-page SEO
- Answer specific questions directly, featured snippets optimisation, which has been a thing since 2016
- Demonstrate expertise and authority, E-E-A-T, formalised by Google years ago
- Get referenced by authoritative sources, link building
- Use structured data and schema markup, technical SEO
- Keep information accurate and up to date, basic content hygiene
None of these are new. Every 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 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 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 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 not getting that click back. But “best accounting software for a 10-person business” or “should I use a limited company or sole trader”, 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 in GEO worth addressing: how do you get your business mentioned in AI-generated answers? This is a legitimate concern for businesses where people ask AI tools for recommendations rather than searching Google.
The honest answer is that nobody has cracked this definitively, because the underlying models and retrieval systems are opaque and constantly changing. What we do know is that the businesses most likely to appear have strong brand mentions across the web, clear factual information about what they do, and content that directly addresses the questions people are asking AI. Which is good SEO and PR. There’s no separate GEO lever to pull.
The one thing GEO gets right
Thin, generic content is more dead than ever. AI can produce generic content at infinite scale and zero cost. 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 is content with genuine perspective, specific expertise, or original information that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
That’s not a GEO insight. It’s where SEO has been heading since at least 2011. AI is just accelerating the same direction.
What to actually do
Ignore GEO as a separate discipline. Write content that’s genuinely better than everything else on the topic, not longer, better. Structure it clearly. Build real authority by getting referenced by credible sources — and when you’re evaluating those sources, ignore their Domain Authority score. DA is a third-party metric that Google doesn’t use, and the SEO industry’s obsession with it is a separate problem worth reading about. Target intent that AI can’t satisfy with a paragraph. Track what’s happening to your traffic and adjust where you see specific queries being answered in AI Overviews.
None of this requires a GEO specialist. It requires doing SEO well, which is harder and more valuable than any acronym. The same is true of AI SEO — a different flavour of the same problem.
