Is GEO replacing SEO?

No. GEO builds on SEO. AI answers still draw on pages that can be found, crawled and trusted, and Google says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for its AI features.

Do I need special markup to appear in Google's AI Overviews?

No. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimisations necessary. Structured data still helps Google understand a page.

Can a small business show up in AI answers?

Yes. AI answers cite the page that answers the question best, not the biggest brand. A small business that answers specific questions clearly, with facts and sources, has a real chance of being cited.

What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO?

What is GEO?

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of shaping your content so that AI answer engines, such as Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity, understand it, trust it and cite it when they answer a question. Where SEO aims for a high position in a list of links, GEO aims to be one of the few sources an AI quotes in its answer.

The term comes from a 2023 research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, later presented at KDD 2024, one of the main data science conferences.¹ Its authors set out to measure what makes a source more likely to appear in an AI-generated answer, and found that how a page is written affects whether it gets cited.

01A buyer asks"Who fits e-bike conversions near me?"
02The AI searchesIt looks for pages, much like a search engine
03It reads the resultsOnly pages it can find and crawl
04It picks passagesThe clearest, best-backed answers
05It answers and citesA few sources get a link - ideally yours

Steps 2-3SEO gets you found

Steps 4-5GEO gets you quoted

SimplifiedThe steps an AI answer engine takes to pick the pages it cites. SEO covers steps 2 and 3, GEO steps 4 and 5.

Why does it matter now?

Because a growing share of searches now end in an answer rather than a list of links. In May 2024 Google announced that AI Overviews would begin rolling out to everyone in the US, and said it expected to bring them to over a billion people by the end of that year.²

For a small business, that changes what being found looks like. A buyer may ask an assistant "who installs e-bike conversions near me?" or "what is the best way to automate supplier orders?" and read a short answer that names two or three sources. If your page is one of them, you are in the conversation. If it is not, you may never know the question was asked.

How is GEO different from SEO?

They share most of their foundations. The difference is mainly in what you are aiming for and how the reader meets your content.

How GEO compares with traditional SEO
	Traditional SEO	GEO
The goal	Rank high in a list of links	Be quoted or cited inside an AI answer
Where you appear	Search results pages	AI Overviews, AI Mode, chat assistants
What the reader sees	Your title and description	A sentence or fact from your page, plus a link
What helps most	Relevance, links, a sound technical setup	All of that, plus clear answers, facts and sources
The unit that matters	The whole page	The passage that answers the question

The last row is the one most businesses miss. An AI answer rarely needs your whole page - it needs the one passage that answers the question cleanly. Pages that bury the answer under an introduction give it nothing easy to lift.

Before

E-bike conversions

...and yes, we fit conversion kits to most bikes.

AI answerNot cited

After

Do you fit e-bike conversions?

Yes - we fit conversion kits to most bikes, and 9 in 10 jobs need no extra parts.¹

AI answerCited: yourbusiness.co.uk

IllustrativeThe same page before and after: with the answer in its first lines, backed by a figure and a source, an AI has a clean passage to quote.

What does the research say works?

The GEO paper tested a range of changes to web pages and measured how visible each page became in generative answers. Its headline finding:

"GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses."

Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024¹

The methods that performed best were the ones that made a page more credible, not more keyword-heavy. The paper reports that its top-performing methods - citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics - achieved a relative improvement of 30-40% on its main visibility measure.¹

What does Google say?

Google's own guidance is clear that there is no secret switch for its AI features: There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.³ The same page says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search.

Its long-standing advice on content still applies too. Google describes people-first content as content that's created primarily for people, and not to manipulate search engine rankings.⁴ In other words, GEO is not a new set of tricks. It is good SEO, written so that the answer is easy to find and easy to trust.

A practical GEO checklist

These are the changes we make first on a client's site. None of them need special tools.

Answer first. Put a direct, one or two sentence answer under each heading, then expand. Phrase headings as the questions people actually ask.
Back claims with facts. Use specific numbers, name where they came from and link to the source.
Show who wrote it and when. A named author, a published date and an updated date help readers and machines judge freshness and trust.
Add structured data. Article markup can help Google understand more about the web page and show better title text, images, and date information.⁵
Keep the basics sound. Fast pages, clean HTML, a sitemap and nothing important hidden behind scripts or logins.
Be consistent everywhere. Your business name, services and location should read the same on your site, your profiles and the directories you appear in.

How do you know it is working?

There is no single GEO ranking report yet, so measure it from a few angles: check the questions your buyers ask in the main AI assistants and note who gets cited, watch for visits referred from AI tools in your analytics, and keep tracking your normal search performance, since the two still move together.