SEO is dead? Long live GEO.
Voie Editorial
October 20266 min readSEO & GEO
More and more people don’t search, they ask. They type a question into ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity, or read Google’s AI answer at the top of the page, and get one composed answer instead of ten blue links. So is SEO dead? No. But it’s no longer the whole game.
What is GEO?
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation: making your brand the source an AI assistant chooses to quote, cite or recommend when someone asks a question in your category. SEO helps your pages rank; GEO helps your brand show up inside the answer.
SEO gets you onto the shelf. GEO gets you recommended by the shop assistant.
What actually changes
- From pages to answers. Assistants pull short, clear passages. A page that buries the answer in paragraph six is easy to skip.
- From keywords to questions and entities. Models connect facts about your brand: who you are, what you sell, where, for whom. Inconsistent facts weaken that picture.
- From clicks to mentions. Some answers send no traffic at all. Being named and cited still builds demand that shows up later as branded search and direct visits.
What stays the same
The foundations of SEO are the foundations of GEO: a fast, crawlable, well-structured website, genuinely helpful content and real authority. If search engines can’t read you, assistants built on top of them won’t either.
Six things to do this quarter
- Answer real questions directly. Open key pages with a one-sentence answer, then explain. Add an FAQ written in your customers’ words.
- Make your brand an unambiguous entity. Use the same name, description, address and contact details everywhere: website, Google Business Profile, social profiles, directories.
- Add structured data. Organization, Product, Article and FAQ schema help machines read who you are and what each page is about.
- Publish things worth citing. Original data, clear comparisons, pricing logic and expert explanations with a named author are what models like to quote.
- Earn mentions where assistants look. Reputable media, industry lists, reviews and partner sites shape what an AI “knows” about you.
- Check your crawler policy. Make sure your robots.txt isn’t blocking the AI crawlers of assistants you want to appear in, such as GPTBot, Google-Extended or PerplexityBot.
How to measure it
Pick ten questions your customers really ask. Every month, ask them in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and log whether your brand is mentioned or cited. In GA4, watch referral traffic from AI assistants and your branded search trend. It isn’t perfect data yet, but it’s honest and it shows direction.
Where Voie comes in
Our SEO & GEO discipline covers both sides: technical SEO and content for classic search, and entity, structured data and citation work for AI answers. In our brief form we ask one simple question: is your brand visible in AI search today? If the answer is “we haven’t checked”, that’s where we start.
