Every few years an acronym arrives and the industry spends a season arguing about whether it is real. GEO — generative engine optimisation — is real, and the confusion around it is caused by one thing: it is being sold as SEO with a new label, and it is not the same job.
Search engine optimisation competes for a position in a list. The list is public, the ranking is measurable, and the click is the prize. Generative engine optimisation competes for something else entirely: to be one of the two or three sources a model uses when it assembles an answer, and to be represented accurately when it does. There is no list, no position, and often no click at all — the person got what they needed inside the conversation.
That changes what the work is. Ranking is won by relevance and authority against a query. Citation is won by being the most usable source on a subject: specific, unambiguous, structured so a fact can be lifted without being misread, and consistent with what every other credible page says about you. A model will not cite a claim it cannot verify against itself, which is why vagueness is fatal here in a way it never quite was for search. You cannot cite an adjective.
The foundations overlap — a fast, crawlable, well-structured site helps both, and any agency telling you to abandon SEO is selling you the next thing rather than the right thing. But the outputs differ, and so should the reporting. If your GEO report is a list of keyword positions, you are being sold SEO.
The service behind it
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
Optimisation for AI search: making a brand the source ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers are assembled from.