service
GEO: generative engine optimization
The audit, the five layers, the pricing, and the list of things in this category we refuse to sell.
Read// channel choice
Classic SEO vs GEO
These get pitched as rivals and they are not. They share a technical foundation - if a crawler cannot reach you, both fail - and then diverge sharply on where the leverage sits. SEO leans on your own pages and the links into them. GEO leans far more on what independent sources say about you.
The question is almost never which one is better. It is which one your specific situation is currently losing on, and that is an empirical question you can answer in an afternoon rather than a philosophical one.
Side by side
Nine dimensions that decide it.
| Dimension | Classic SEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|
| What you win | A ranked link a user may click. | A named mention inside the answer the user reads instead of clicking. |
| Main lever | Your own pages, plus links pointing at them. | Third-party sources the engine already cites in your category. |
| Measurement | Position per keyword. Stable and repeatable. | A fixed prompt panel, three runs each. Noisier by nature - answers are not deterministic. |
| Time to first signal | Weeks to months, depending on domain age and competition. | Four to eight weeks from a placement going live, before anything shows in answers. |
| Cost shape | Front-loaded build, then content and links. | Front-loaded diagnostic, then ongoing placement work. Slower to compound. |
| Who controls the outcome | Largely you, plus the competition. | Partly third-party editors, which is why nobody can honestly guarantee a hit rate. |
| Effect of being blocked at the firewall | Fatal. | Fatal, and far more common - Cloudflare blocks AI bots by default on new zones since July 2025. |
| Effect of client-side rendering | Damaging but often partially handled by search crawlers. | Usually fatal. Retrieval bots do not execute JavaScript at all. |
| Traffic you can attribute | Reasonably well - referrers and search console. | Poorly. Most AI-influenced visits arrive with no usable referrer. |
How to decide
Pick by situation, not by preference.
Prioritise classic SEO when
- Your category still gets meaningful search volume with clear commercial intent.
- You have never built the technical foundation, in which case this is a prerequisite for both channels anyway.
- You need attributable traffic to justify the spend internally.
- Your buying cycle starts with research your buyers do themselves rather than with a question to an assistant.
- Budget is tight and you need the channel with the more predictable measurement.
Prioritise GEO when
- Your buyers describe starting their shortlist by asking an assistant, and you have checked rather than assumed.
- You already rank reasonably and still never appear when someone asks for options in your category.
- Your category is well covered by independent media and review sites you are absent from.
- You suspect a mechanical blocker - a firewall rule or an unrendered app - which is cheap to confirm and often the whole problem.
- Two brands sit under one legal entity and engines are visibly confusing them.
Our bias, stated
We sell both, so weigh this page accordingly and then check it against your own data. Our actual bias in the room is to run the access check first, because it is free and it settles the question faster than any argument: if a crawler is being turned away at your firewall, no amount of spend on either channel changes anything until that is fixed. We have ended first calls by telling someone their whole problem was one Cloudflare setting, and there was nothing left to sell them.
Questions
Follow-up questions.
Can we do both at once?
Yes, and the overlap is larger than the marketing on either side suggests. Crawler access, rendering, indexation and entity consistency serve both channels and are usually the first four weeks of either engagement. The paths separate afterwards - content and links on one side, third-party placements on the other.
Does ranking well in Google help us get cited by AI engines?
It helps, because engines retrieve from indexed content and a well-built site is easier to retrieve and parse. It is not sufficient. We regularly see brands ranking on page one for a term and completely absent from the answer to the equivalent question, because the sources the engine trusts for that category never mention them.
How do we know whether our buyers actually use AI assistants?
Ask them, in the next five sales calls. It takes one question and it beats every published statistic, because the answer varies enormously by industry, buyer seniority and region. If nobody in your pipeline is starting with an assistant, GEO is a bet on the future rather than a fix for the present, and it should be budgeted that way.
Still not sure which side you are on?
Thirty minutes, no pitch. We will tell you which of the two your situation actually points to - including when the answer is the one we do not get paid for.
Book a 30-min call