You have probably had the email. The one warning you that ChatGPT is about to make your website invisible, that a new thing called GEO is here, and that you need a package to fix it before your competitors get there first.
Take a breath. The principles behind what you have done with your marketing up to this point are sound, after all, as Michele always says: ‘people buy from people’.
GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation, is real. It is the practice of getting your business mentioned when someone asks an AI a question, rather than getting a link in a list of ‘ten blue results’. ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot now answer a lot of questions directly, and they pick a handful of sources to build the answer from. GEO is about being one of those sources.
But here is the part the fear emails skip. If you have been doing SEO properly, you are already most of the way there. The engine reading your site has changed. The things that make your site worth reading have not.
The secret: GEO is largely the same as SEO
Strip the acronyms away, and the two disciplines line up pretty closely. We have just started calling the same work by new names.
| What we call it in SEO | What we call it in GEO |
|---|---|
| Keywords and topics | Semantic relevance and entities |
| Link building and backlinks | Getting cited and mentioned by trusted sources |
| Ranking on the results page | Share of model, being named in the answer |
| E-E-A-T (expertise, authority, trust) | The same signals, arguably weighted higher |
| Featured snippet, position zero | Being the synthesised answer itself |
| Crawlable, well-structured pages | Machine-readable content the model can lift cleanly |
| Rank tracking | Prompt-set testing across the AI tools |
| Click-through traffic | Citations, often with no click at all |
None of that is a new skill set. It is the old skill set pointed at a new reader/engine/audience – the model.
Link building becomes getting cited
The one shift in emphasis worth calling out is off-site. In SEO, we spent years on link building, earning links from reputable sites to prove your credibility. GEO does the same thing with a slightly different currency. The models care less about the link itself and more about being mentioned and quoted by sources they already trust.
That changes where the effort goes, not what the effort is. Instead of chasing any link, you want your business talked about in the places these models lean on: established industry press, well-regarded directories, genuine third-party write-ups, and the odd community thread where real people compare notes. A structured, factual press release with actual numbers in it now earns its keep, because it hands the machine something clean to quote.
So, same principle, different address book. If your PR and outreach were already aimed at credible, relevant places rather than link farms, you were doing GEO before it had a name.
It still comes down to real content
Under all of it, the thing that makes a difference is the thing that always has done: genuinely good content on your website.
Not thin pages stuffed with keywords. Real, useful, credible material. Clear answers to the questions your customers actually ask. Honest detail about your products, your process, where things come from. Specifics and numbers rather than fluff. Content laid out so it can be read at a glance; it doesn’t matter if that is a person scrolling on their phone or if it is a model pulling out the relevant line.
This is the part we can help with directly. At Holler, we write and structure content that reads well to a human and lifts cleanly for a machine, on sites built so both can find it. That is not a GEO service bolted on the side. It is the same work that made your site worth visiting in the first place, done properly.
Local food businesses, do not get carried away
To national brands fighting to be the name an AI recommends or electronics retailers trying to get their washing machine link served, ‘share of model’ is worth real money and real effort. If you are a local food and drink business, your world does not work like that. Your growth comes from farm shops and markets, from wholesale accounts, from your packaging catching an eye on a shelf, from a well-run ad campaign and a social feed that actually looks like you.
The GEO that matters for you is small and you are probably already doing it. When someone asks an AI “where can I buy proper smoked salmon/pies/jams/cakes in Yorkshire,” the model leans on the same signals as the map results: your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your basic local presence. Keep those right, and you have covered the GEO that applies to a local business.
So our advice to most food producers is similar to what it was before the ‘S’ got changed to a ‘G’. Get the fundamentals right and leave them right. Then put your budget where it earns for you: local reach, strong packaging, ad campaigns, and social that builds a following. Those still sell more jars, more boxes and more covers than any amount of chasing a citation in a chatbot.
The one genuine difference is measurement
Here is where GEO does part company with SEO, and it is worth being honest about it.
People talk about SEO measurement as if it were a science; we have never pitched our marketing services on the back of achieving a golden KPI. Rankings have always bounced around. Everyone sees a personalised, localised version of the results, so “we rank number one” was always “number one for some people, somewhere, sometimes.” Google stopped handing over keyword data more than a decade ago. Attribution, working out which touchpoint actually won you the sale, has never been clean.
The bad news: GEO is even worse, and in a whole different way. An SEO result has a measure of stability, ask the same question twice and you get the same page order, at least for that day or so. An AI answer is not. Ask ChatGPT the same thing twice and you can get two different answers, even with different businesses named. So you cannot check a rank, you have to sample. You run a set of realistic questions, over and over, across the different tools, and measure how often your business shows up and how it gets described. That last part matters too, because the AI is writing sentences about you, and there is a difference between being called a “trusted local producer” and being called “hard to find.”
Note: be wary of anyone selling a clean GEO score. The honest version is a range, sampled and tracked over time, not a single number on a dashboard.
The short version
GEO is not a threat and it is not magic. It is mostly SEO with a new reader and a harder tape measure. Do the fundamentals well, put your energy into content and presence that would matter with or without AI, and you are in a good place.
If you want us to look at your fundamentals and tell you honestly where your money is best spent, that is a conversation we are always happy to have, the kettle’s on.