SEO and GEO: what changes when AI answers the search

SEO is the work of ranking in search results; GEO, generative engine optimisation, is the work of being cited or recommended in the answers AI assistants write. They share most of the groundwork: a crawlable site, pages that answer real questions, and authority from other sites. What changes is the unit of success, a mention in an answer rather than a position in a list, and that changes how you write and how you measure.

What stays the same

• Technical health: fast, crawlable pages with a clean structure and structured data.
• Content that answers the questions buyers actually ask.
• Authority: links and mentions from sites people trust.
• Indexing: assistants that search the web rely on search engine indexes, so being indexed in Google and Bing still comes first.

What changes with GEO

• Answer-first writing: the answer in the first two sentences, then the detail, so an assistant can quote it.
• Consistency: the same name, description and facts on your site, profiles and directories, so assistants describe you correctly.
• Mentions, not only links: being named in articles, lists and reviews counts even without a link.
• Formats machines read easily: FAQs, comparison tables and plain HTML, and optionally llms.txt and Markdown copies of your pages.
• Measurement: you check what assistants say about you, not only where you rank.

How to measure each

• SEO: impressions, clicks and positions in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and the leads that organic visits bring.
• GEO: a fixed list of buyer questions asked to each assistant every month, recording whether you are named and how; and the visits referred by chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and similar sites.

A practical order of work

1. 01Fix the technical basics, and get the site indexed in Google and Bing.
2. 02Map the questions buyers ask to one page each, and write each page answer-first.
3. 03Make your facts identical everywhere you are listed.
4. 04Earn links and mentions on sites your buyers and the assistants read.
5. 05Review rankings and assistant answers every month, and update the pages that slip.

How GrowAxis helps

GrowDigital runs SEO and GEO from one plan: technical groundwork, answer-first content, structured data, listings and mentions, and a monthly report on rankings, leads and what AI assistants say about you. It goes live within 30 days.