What is GEO?
The work of being one of the businesses an assistant names, also sold as AIO or AEO. It is real, it is young, and the honest version of it admits the second part.
Why it is not just SEO again
A results page gives ten answers and lets the reader choose. An assistant gives one, built from a handful of sources, and the reader rarely looks past it. Being eleventh used to cost you some traffic. Now it costs you the conversation.
What they read
Assistants lean on a smaller set of sources than a search engine does, and they favour text they can quote without rewriting: definitions, direct answers, plainly structured facts about who and where a business is.
They also read what other sites say about you, which is why a directory profile can be quoted about your business before your own site is.
What nobody can promise
There is no submission form, no ranking report and no setting to switch on. Anybody quoting you a position in an assistant's answer is quoting a number that does not exist. Our work on this says what we change and what we cannot, and appearing in ChatGPT goes step by step.
Questions worth asking
Does GEO replace SEO?
No, and the overlap is large. Most of what makes a site quotable by an assistant is the same work that made it readable by a search engine, done with more care about answering the question directly.
How would I know if it worked?
By asking. Open each assistant, ask what it says about your trade in your town, and write the answer down before anybody starts work. Without that, there is nothing to compare against later.
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