Just as you were beginning to understand SEO, along came GEO, AI search and a fresh collection of people implying your website had become invisible overnight.
It hasn’t.
The places people ask questions are changing. Someone may search on Google, ask ChatGPT, use an AI summary or move between all three before visiting a website.
The useful foundations are reassuringly familiar: explain something clearly, answer the real question, show where the answer came from and make it obvious who knows what they’re talking about.
SEO helps people find the right page
Search engine optimisation, at its most useful, helps a search engine find, understand and show a page to somebody who needs it.
That includes technical work. The site must be accessible to crawlers, reasonably fast, usable on a phone and organised clearly.
It also includes language. If you call your service “The Becoming Portal” while every potential client is searching for “online booking system for therapists”, a search engine isn’t the only one who may struggle.
Good SEO brings the words of the expert and the words of the client close enough to meet.
GEO is the name people are using for AI visibility
Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is commonly used for work intended to improve visibility inside AI-generated answers.
The term is new enough that people don’t always mean exactly the same thing by it. Some are discussing solid content and technical foundations. Others are selling a small bag of mysterious tricks.
Google’s current guidance for generative AI features is unusually plain: its existing SEO foundations still matter. It recommends original, non-commodity, people-first content and says you don’t need to rewrite everything “for AI”, create special AI files for Google or chop every answer into unnatural little pieces.
That’s a relief. Your website is allowed to remain readable by people.
LLM visibility isn’t one ranking list
Large language models and the products built on them don’t all find, retrieve or present information in the same way.
Some use live web search. Some rely partly on indexed material. Some show sources clearly. Some don’t. Their behaviour changes.
No honest person can promise that one article will make every model cite you.
What we can do is make your knowledge public, clear, well supported and easy to connect to you. That improves the chance that people and systems can recognise its value.
Create pages that know what they’re about
One strong page should answer one recognisable family of questions.
“What can a WordPress website automate for a one-person business?” is clear.
A page covering web design, nervous-system regulation, your favourite books and an event next Thursday is harder for everybody to understand.
Use a descriptive title. Answer the question early. Add sections that help a reader move through it. Link to the relevant service or related article. Name the author. Keep dates and factual claims accurate.
This isn’t writing for robots. It’s basic kindness with technical benefits.
Give the internet something only you can supply
The web doesn’t need another summary of ten tips already repeated ten thousand times.
It may need your distinction. Your case study. Your original framework. The moment you changed your recommendation because the client’s situation didn’t fit the usual advice.
First-hand material helps a reader judge you. It also gives search and AI systems something more distinctive than a rearrangement of everybody else’s sentences.
Sources make confidence believable
If you make a factual claim, help the reader see what it rests on.
Link to the research, official guidance or original data. Explain how it applies and where it doesn’t. Don’t borrow scientific language simply because it sounds expensive.
For case studies, name what was observed and how. “The booking journey became shorter” can be demonstrated. “Conversions exploded” needs numbers and a source.
Trust is often built by the sentence that refuses to pretend.
What hasn’t changed
People still want an answer that understands the problem they actually have.
They want to know whether you’ve seen it before, whether your explanation makes sense and whether taking the next step with you feels safe.
Make the site technically sound. Organise it clearly. Publish useful, attributable knowledge. Let one article lead naturally to another. Update important pages when the world changes.
You don’t need to write for a robot. You need to make what you know clear enough that a person, a search engine or an AI tool can understand why it’s useful.
People still come first. Conveniently, that’s also the strongest long-term discovery strategy.