SEO vs. GEO: What Small Businesses Need to Know About Both
SEO, or search engine optimisation, concerns how people discover your website through search. GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is a term used for work aimed at visibility in AI-generated answers.
These interests overlap, but a place in search results is not a promise that an AI tool will name or cite your business. Tools and queries differ, and the relative effect of individual changes is not guaranteed.
What You Can Work On
For search discovery, review whether important pages are accessible, understandable, and useful for the questions they address. Make navigation, contact routes, and service details clear. Keep genuine location information and relevant public listings accurate.
For AI answers, also examine what the response actually says and which sources it cites. Correct factual errors in public pages you control and identify relevant sources where outdated information needs attention.
Do not assume that every tool uses the same sources or that you can reconstruct its training data from its answer.
A Hypothetical Difference
A business could rank in Google and be absent from one ChatGPT response. That response alone does not establish why.
Record the query, date, tool, and available search settings. Inspect the response and sources, then repeat relevant questions across tools and dates. Keep observations separate from guesses about ranking factors.
Practical Work That Serves Readers
Accessible service pages: State what you provide, who it is for, and how an engagement works. Make important details available as text and link to relevant pages.
Accurate public information: Correct wrong contact details and outdated services. Use an eligible Google Business Profile and relevant directories where they are useful to customers. Online-only businesses do not qualify for Google Business Profile simply by adding service areas.
Evidence people can inspect: Publish useful guides, verified qualifications, and documented results with permission. If you have no client results, use labelled demonstrations or explain your process.
Appropriate technical checks: Investigate crawl access, indexing, mobile usability, and structured data that contradicts the visible page. Google's AI feature guidance says no special AI markup is required for its AI search features, and inclusion is not guaranteed.
There is no established universal list of changes that help GEO more than SEO. Avoid treating domain age, a third-party authority score, directory counts, or social posting frequency as proven cross-tool selection rules.
Prioritise by the Problem
Start with broken pages, wrong business details, and unclear services. Then improve useful explanations and relevant references. Choose the work based on an observed gap, available time, and the customers you serve.
The work required depends on the current state and size of your online presence. A small wording correction and a complex access problem do not have the same effort or cost.
Measure Separately
Track search visits and relevant website inquiries using your available analytics. Keep a separate record of AI responses and citations for the queries you test. Ask new contacts how they found you, while accepting that attribution can be incomplete.
Review changes over time rather than promising a fixed improvement or assuming that one channel is always more valuable than another.
The Full Report is $39 one-time, human-reviewed, and delivered within 24 hours. It covers your website, Google Business Profile, social profiles, and relevant queries in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and Google AI. It includes two competitor comparisons, website headline and Google description rewrites, prioritised fixes, and a 90-day action plan.