Acquisition — SEO & GEO

What is it?

SEO (search engine optimisation) improves your visibility on search engines. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) makes generative AI engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity — cite your company in their answers. Two sides of the same problem: being found.

The most useful thing to understand, and the least known: AI assistants do not cite sources from their training memory. When answering a current or commercial question, they run a search and read pages — through conventional search indexes. The direct consequence: a page search engines have not indexed has no chance of being cited by an AI. GEO therefore does not replace SEO, it depends on it.

The term comes from research by Princeton, Georgia Tech and the Allen Institute, presented at the ACM KDD conference in 2024. A literature review published in July 2026 examined forty-five studies on the subject: it retains only three factors at moderate-to-strong evidence level — relevance between question and content, the position of the useful passage within the page, and the presence of extractable evidence such as verifiable figures.

Everything else — the percentage gains announced, the word-count thresholds, declaration files such as llms.txt — is for now commercial narrative rather than established data. We would rather say so.

Signs you need it

• You do not appear on your own company name.
• Competitors come up first on the queries that describe your trade.
• You have pages published for months that Google has never indexed.
• When an AI assistant is asked about your field, names other than yours come up.
• Your traffic comes almost entirely from referral or paid advertising.

What is it for?

To capture demand that already exists: people looking for a tool, a service, an answer. Done well, it is the most profitable acquisition channel over time.

What makes SEO distinctive is its economics: the effort is up front, the return accumulates. A page that ranks keeps working at no marginal cost, where advertising stops the day the budget stops. That is also what makes it slow to start — and unsuited to a need for immediate results.

On GEO, keep in mind what the Pew Research Center measures: in the presence of an AI-generated summary, users click a conventional result on 8% of visits, against 15% without a summary, and click a source cited in the summary on 1%. In other words, being cited by an AI today brings plenty of brand exposure and very little traffic. It is a visibility objective, not an acquisition channel — and any claim to the contrary deserves suspicion.

Not to be confused with

Paid search

Paid search buys an immediate position that disappears with the budget. SEO builds a position that stays. The two combine well: advertising to validate demand, SEO to capture it durably.

Social media

Social media creates demand among people who were not looking for anything. SEO captures demand already expressed. The first is attention work, the second is answer work.

GEO

GEO does not oppose or replace SEO. It presupposes being indexed, then adds work on form: direct answers, self-contained passages, verifiable figures — what a model can extract without rewriting.

How it works

1. 01We check indexing first: a page Google does not index will never rank, and will never be cited by an AI.
2. 02We identify the questions and needs your customers actually type — not the ones we assume.
3. 03We produce clear pages that answer them directly, from the first paragraph.
4. 04We structure the site for engines and for AI: structured data, FAQ, extractable passages, sourced figures.

The mistakes that cost the most

• Working on content before checking indexing

  This is the most expensive mistake, and the most common. A wrong canonical tag, a forgotten noindex, an inconsistent sitemap: the page can be excellent and still be invisible. Technical diagnosis comes before writing.

• Targeting highly competitive definition queries

  Ranking for “what is an ERP” means taking on established vendors, on a query with no purchase intent. Narrower queries, where the person searching has a problem and a budget, are worth more.

• Confusing volume with value

  A thousand visits from curious readers are worth less than ten from qualified prospects. The right metric is not traffic but the number of inbound contacts it produces.

• Expecting from GEO what it does not deliver

  The available data show real brand exposure and marginal traffic. Building an acquisition plan on AI citation means funding visibility while believing you are buying leads.

What it costs, how long it takes

SEO splits into three very different items: technical correction, one-off and often the most profitable; content production, recurring; and building standing — mentions, citations, presence — which is the slowest and least controllable.

For a recent site, the order of priority is almost always the same: technical first, because an indexing error cancels everything else; then the company’s identity and credibility, because a young domain with no external signal does not rank whatever the content; content third.

The cost factor you cannot buy is time. A few weeks to a few months depending on competition, and a recent domain starts more slowly than an established one. Any offer promising fast ranking on a competitive query is promising something it does not control.

Glossary

Indexing

The fact that an engine has recorded a page and is willing to return it as a result. Without indexing, neither ranking nor citation is possible.

Search Console

Google’s free tool showing how it sees your site: indexed pages, exclusions and their reasons, the queries people arrive on.

Structured data

Machine-readable markup that explicitly describes a page’s content — organisation, questions and answers, product. It helps engines and AI extract the right information.

Extractable passage

A self-contained paragraph that answers a question without depending on the rest of the page. It is the form models reuse most readily.