For twenty years, getting found online meant ranking on Google. You optimized for keywords, earned some links, and tried to land on page one. That game is changing fast.
Now people ask a question and get one answer. They ask ChatGPT for the best clinic nearby, ask Perplexity to compare two products, or read Google's AI summary at the top of the page. They never scroll. If the AI doesn't mention you, you don't exist in that moment.
GEO vs. SEO
SEO optimizes to rank a link. GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — optimizes to be cited inside the AI's answer. They overlap, but GEO adds work that classic SEO never needed:
- Making sure AI crawlers can actually read your site
- Structuring content so a model can quote a clean, factual passage
- Building the entity signals that make AI confident it's talking about you
- Earning mentions on the sources AI models trust
Where to start
Start with an audit: ask the major AI tools about your category and see whether you come up. Then fix the basics — crawler access, structured data, and a few clearly written, quotable pages. It's the work we run for our own clients every month, and it's why this very site ships with an llms.txt and full structured data.