SEO works to rank your pages higher in a list of search results. GEO, or generative engine optimisation, works to get your brand mentioned and cited inside the answer an AI engine writes. SEO competes for clicks on a results page. GEO competes for a place in the answer itself, before any link is shown.
Search engine optimisation is about position. You want your page to sit as high as possible in the list of results for a query, so that a person clicks through to your site. The whole model assumes a human scans a page of links and chooses one.
That model is changing. 69% of Google searches end without a click (Similarweb, 2024), and Google AI Overviews now appear on the majority of searches. People increasingly read an answer rather than a list. On top of that, 37% of consumers now start their searches with AI rather than Google (Conductor, 2025), often inside tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity that show no traditional results page at all.
Generative engine optimisation responds to that shift. The goal is not a ranking. The goal is to be the brand the engine names, describes accurately, and cites when it answers a question in your category. You are competing for a sentence in the answer, not a slot in a list.
The two disciplines share foundations. Clear, factual, well-structured pages help an AI engine understand and quote you, just as they help a search crawler. But the differences matter:
If your strategy is purely SEO, you may be ranking well and still be invisible at the moment a buyer asks an AI engine for a recommendation. A buyer who gets a confident answer from ChatGPT often stops there. If your name is not in that answer, the click you optimised for never happens.
This is not a reason to abandon SEO. It is a reason to add a second discipline that measures and improves a different surface. 94% of B2B buyers now use AI as part of their purchasing research, so the AI answer is now part of the buying journey whether you optimise for it or not.
The practical takeaway: keep your search foundations healthy, then measure your AI visibility separately, because a good Google ranking does not guarantee a good AI answer. See what GEO is for a fuller definition.
K&C measures the surface SEO ignores. Our AI Visibility Strategy scores your brand from 0 to 100 across a 12-pillar framework and three dimensions: AI Visibility, Source Quality and Narrative Fit. We run real prompts across the three engines that matter, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, and report exactly where you are named, where you are missing, and what the engines say about you.
From that baseline we build a plan to change the answer, then re-measure on a cadence so you can see the score move. The first measurement, the Exec Brief, is free. You can start with that to find out where you stand before committing to anything.
If you want to see how we work, read the methodology or start with a free Exec Brief.
Book an AVS Exec Brief: a real, one-off measurement of how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity talk about your business right now. Same methodology as the full AI Visibility Strategy, delivered manually, free of charge. Annual, Bi-Annual and Quarterly cadences are bespoke priced.
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