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

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is the practice of making sure AI assistants know your business, recommend it, and describe it accurately.

It matters for one reason: a growing share of buyers now ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for a recommendation instead of searching. When they do, they don't get ten blue links to choose from. They get an answer — usually naming one to three businesses. You're either in it or you aren't.

The difference in one line

SEO competes for a position on a page of results. GEO competes for a place in a sentence.

That difference drives everything else:

• There is no page two. A search engine shows ten results and you can win traffic from any of them. An AI assistant names a handful and stops. Eleventh place and no place are the same thing.
• You can't see it happening. A visitor who reads about you in ChatGPT and then types your name into their browser looks like direct traffic. Nothing in Google Analytics tells you the recommendation happened, or that a competitor got it instead. That invisibility is the whole reason GEOpulse exists.
• Rankings aren't stable or public. There's no ranking to look up. The same question can produce slightly different answers each time, and each model answers differently, so visibility has to be sampled — asked repeatedly, across models — rather than checked once.
• Being described matters as much as being listed. A search result can't be lukewarm about you. An AI answer can name you and then hedge. How you're talked about is part of the outcome.

What still carries over

GEO isn't a replacement for SEO, and most of the work isn't wasted. Models learn from the same web that search engines index, so the fundamentals still apply:

• Clear, specific pages that state plainly what you do, for whom, and where.
• Structured data, so a machine doesn't have to guess your category, location or hours.
• Third-party corroboration — reviews, directories, press. Models weight what others say about you heavily, often more than what you say about yourself.
• A site that renders without JavaScript, since many AI crawlers don't execute it.

What's genuinely new

• Crawler access is a separate decision. Allowing Googlebot doesn't allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended. Those are distinct rules, and blocking them — often accidentally — makes you invisible to models that check live sources.
• Answering questions beats matching keywords. Models assemble answers from content that reads like an answer. A page addressing a real customer question tends to outperform one optimised for a phrase.
• Your competitive set changes. The businesses AI names alongside you are often not the ones you'd list yourself, and marketplaces frequently outrank every individual provider.

Where to start

Run a scan and look at your mention rate before anything else — it's the signal that tells you whether this is a visibility problem or a ranking one. From there, what is a GEO score explains how the number is built, and why am I not mentioned covers the usual causes of being left out.