For twenty years, the unit of SEO was the page. You wanted Google to crawl it, index it, and rank it on the first page of results for the keyword you cared about. Everything from schema markup to backlinks to page speed was in service of that single goal: my page, ranked.
That model is starting to break. When a buyer asks ChatGPT “what’s the best CRM for a 5-person sales team,” they don’t get ten blue links — they get a paragraph. Sometimes that paragraph names you. Sometimes it doesn’t. The page you spent six months SEO-ing is no longer the artifact being ranked; the answer about you is.
So what is GEO?
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is the practice of getting your brand named, accurately and favourably, inside answers generated by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, and the rest. The unit shifts from page to mention. The success metric shifts from rank to share-of-answer.
Three things change in practice:
- Entities, not keywords. Models think in entities (“Stripe — payments processor — competes with Adyen”), not keyword strings. Your job is to make sure the model has the right entity record on file.
- Sources, not backlinks. Models cite specific URLs they trust. If you’re not in those URLs — Reddit threads, comparison articles, industry roundups — you’re invisible.
- Recency matters more. Models retrain. An outdated mention from two years ago can quietly become the answer about your company.