I’ve run an agency for 11 years, and every year there’s a new word you’re supposed to get to grips with. Right now it’s GEO, generative engine optimisation. Others call it AEO or LLMO. It sounds like a new discipline with its own package and its own budget.
I see it differently. To me, GEO is just SEO. The rest is agency talk.
Google says so itself
Google spells it out in its guidance on AI search. There are no extra requirements for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode. You don’t need any special optimisations or new AI files either.
What Google asks for is what we’ve been working on for years. A page that can be crawled. Good internal links. Text instead of images of text. And up-to-date information in Merchant Center and on your Google profile.
The numbers point the same way
Marie Haynes has worked in SEO since 2008. She’s just gone through a year’s data from 100 websites with more than 145 million visits. For every 1,000 visits from Google’s organic results, just over 6 came from ChatGPT. All the AI chatbots together accounted for just over 7.
Visitors from ChatGPT do convert better, 13.8 per cent against 3.02 per cent from Google. Even so, her data showed 964 conversions from Google and 36 from all the AI chatbots combined. And growth in visits from ChatGPT stopped in August 2025. Her conclusion is that if you’re chasing mentions in ChatGPT, you’re looking in the wrong place. You can read the full analysis on Marie Haynes’s site. We see the same picture with our clients.
Same question, new list every time
Rand Fishkin of SparkToro has tested how stable AI answers are. Together with Gumshoe.ai, he got volunteers to put the same 12 recommendation questions to ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI almost 3,000 times. The chance of getting the same list of brands twice was less than 1 in 100. The same list in the same order was less than 1 in 1,000. The report is on SparkToro.
So when someone shows you that you’re number 3 in ChatGPT, it’s a snapshot. Ask again and you’ll get a different list. An AI ranking is the new ‘guaranteed number 1 on Google’. What’s worth tracking is how often your name comes up across lots of answers. And that comes down to the same thing as always: whether people know you.
Rand also says there are far too many new acronyms. He sees GEO and AEO as subsets of SEO. I completely agree.
Why SEO is GEO
AI answers are built on the same web as the search engine. Broadly speaking, the same things get you seen on Google and into an AI answer:
- You have the best answer to what the customer is asking.
- The page is fast and easy to read, for a machine too.
- Others mention you and link to you.
- People search for your name because they know your brand.
Ahrefs has looked at 75,000 brands. What correlated most closely with being mentioned in Google’s AI answers was how often the brand was mentioned elsewhere online. That’s PR and brand, not a new trick.
There’s nothing new on that list. It’s good SEO, and it has been for a long time.
I use the word GEO myself sometimes, because clients ask for it. What we do is still SEO: pages that can be cited and a brand people know.
What I’d do instead
- Build the brand. When anyone can create content with AI, the winners are the ones people know and trust. I’ve written more about that in my post on the analogue side.
- Measure what matters. An enquiry or a sale, not a ranking. Of the 100 sites in Marie Haynes’s data, 45 didn’t measure conversions at all.
- See how Google shows you. Search for your own company and services, and read the AI answer at the top.
- Get ready for the agents. The next shift is AI that acts on our behalf. If you run a webshop, I think your product data in Merchant Center matters more than a GEO report.
Where AI actually changes the work
We use AI every day at Amplify. In 2026, I’ve made more than 1,700 deploys with Claude Code and used more than 3.5 billion API tokens, and since March I’ve built our own AI agent, which the whole team uses. It goes through the ad accounts every morning and flags when something needs looking at. Recently it held back three ads because of a typo in a creative.
That’s the kind of AI that changes the work. A new name for SEO changes nothing. It’s also what I talk about when it comes to marketing and brand.
So next time someone offers you a GEO package, ask what they do differently from good SEO. If the answer is ‘not much’, you’ve had an honest answer.