SEO vs GEO: What Businesses Need to Know About AI Search in 2026

SEO helps websites qualify for discovery and visibility in conventional search results. GEO focuses on how AI answer systems discover, interpret, retrieve and potentially cite or recommend those businesses. They overlap: helpful content, crawlability, clear identity and credible evidence matter to both. No optimisation method can guarantee AI citation or recommendation. The episode examines practical steps and the limits of current measurement.

Evidence and attribution

The transcript keeps the speakers’ views identifiable and places supporting sources beside relevant statements. Practitioner observations, individual benchmarks and predictions are not presented as universal platform rules.

Watch or listen to the full SEO vs GEO discussion with Paul Rowe and Ian Ayliffe using the official Buzzsprout episode player below.

Hello, and welcome to the GEO and AI Search Strategy Podcast. Today I’m joined by Ian Ayliffe, who’s the founder of Panavista Marketing and guest lecturer at Imperial College London. Ian brings a fascinating and rare perspective to generative engine optimization. He holds a first class honours degree in computer forensics and security. Instead of treating AI search like traditional SEO, Ian applies strict forensic methodology, data integrity, evidence verification, and primary source auditing to uncover exactly how LLMs perceive, trust and cite your brands. Ian, welcome to the show, my friend.

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

So straight away on my mind from that introduction and understanding your wealth of experience and obviously deriving from the SEO space originally, and now you’re merging into the GEO to specialise in that to modernize. Can I ask how much has search changed from your perspective because of ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity?

Well, it’s evolved in the sense that it’s going towards machine-to-machine results. So it’s not going to include an actual human being doing the searching. That’s done by AI and language models. So that’s where we’re at with it. You still need traditional SEO for a website, you still need your website. That’s really important. You still need the basics in place. But generative GEO is about putting the technical aspects on your website so the AI engines can see it and actually provide your business as a result.

And so have you sort of found with your existing clientele that there’s been quite a prominent response in terms of the attitude from your clients that you need to now make sure that their domains are found in the AI chatbots that I mentioned. Or is it still something that’s not fully transitioned yet?

Yeah, I don’t I don’t I feel it’s not fully transitioned yet. I’m being proactive. Yeah, I’m I’m being proactive with it. Recommending, well, basically putting these things in place that they don’t really actually understand or aware, it doesn’t matter, but I’m gonna they’re gonna be in a in a really good position. So when it does really take off, and I think that would be next year, they’re in the they’re in the prime position, and that’s what it’s all about. And appearing there where the appearing where their competitors aren’t, okay. I think I think for some businesses they’re they realize what they have to do once their competitors are being shown above well prefer to be to be cited by AI. So that’s where it’s all moving to.

Okay, so do you think are SEO and GEO now becoming like two different objectives? Or do you think that do you perceive it as one big amalgamated combination?

Yeah, one big entity basically. So you’ve got the traditional SEO, that gets the AI crawlers to you to the front door, okay. And GEO ensures the AI actually trusts and cites what’s it what’s inside, okay? And it’s the website that is the core trust entity. Okay, that’s what they see. Now what they start looking at is other signals. So for example, is the website address contact details the same as Google Business Profile? So that’s a good recognition, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah. Are the details correct in Yelp, for example, for your reviews? Third party cooperation, isn’t it? Yeah, correct, yeah. And I would recommend that companies still do like a Google review strategy or reviews in general. So for example, you know, just simple as say you’ve got a contractor, building contractor, they’ve done some work, you can you’ve got these cards that the QR code, a business can give that to the customer and say, Can you leave a review? there and then they’re gonna a lot of the time if they’re happy with the work, they’re gonna leave a really good review, and that’s gonna help a lot as well. Okay, so there’s all these moving parts, but as long as a business has got ongoing strategies, they’re gonna win.

Yeah, and it’s true with what you say with the reviews because the AI engines, obviously, the review itself, like how it will sort of assess it, is it will go and look at a particular platform. So some of them have higher authority than others, like you have Trustpilot, and then the kind of gold standard will be clutch.co.

Google Search Central — Review snippet structured dataClutch — Research methodology and verified reviews

Yeah.

so then after that, not only does it check if you’re on there, it will then check how many reviews you have and to what standard in terms of the rating one to five stars.

Google Search Central — Review snippet structured dataClutch — Research methodology and verified reviews

But then, what I think is even more intelligent is it then goes in and contextually reads and interprets the review, and so then that is what it uses to further build up its comprehension of you and how it judges you as a business entity, yeah.

Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content

So it’s a lot more sort of forensic, as a man like you might appreciate.

That’s the one, yeah. Yeah, definitely, definitely.

Okay, so with that being the case, coming obviously from SEO background and now moving into master geo, do you think that most SEO professionals genuinely understand GEO at this point in time?

No, I think they’re a little bit behind. I think they’re still doing their then their go-to tasks in the day. At this at this point in time, the agency or the consultant they need to do additional work. So you have to live and breathe it. And you have to find out all the signals that the AI engines want. And you need to keep you need to do mini experiments as well. Keep tracking your results, A B testing and everything. A B speed, yeah, that’s correct.

And I think that’s where they struggle because it’s not their fault. When you have existing clientele, I mean, I’m kind of preaching to the choir here, yeah, you’re already running their optimization with SEO, and if you’ve been quite successful, you know, you’ve got quite a significant workload already filled out Monday to Friday, 9 to 5.

Google Search Central — AI features and your website

Yeah, yeah.

So then, in order to learn GEO, it’s like, where do you get that time? And it’s like you just referenced earlier, you’ve got to be dedicated, you’ve got to do it after hours. It’s like even with myself and I do a lot of my testing, I have to do it on weekends, yeah. Because it’s like there’s no other time, or sometimes in the evening, but then it’s like you know, you can’t always do 12, 14 hours a day because Jesus Christ, damn how quite you know. I mean, you know, yeah, that’s true. So yeah, it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s just the reality of it, and it’s a significant shift that in order to grasp the GEO, it is so much. It’s like in a way, like I look at it like it could be like a you know what would I say? Like, is it a doctorate in terms of the amount of incredible information that you have to learn? How the hell can you realistically absorb and learn and apply that in life when you’ve already got a life going on that’s full of it?

Yeah, you well, you said it’s like it’s like studying for a PhD or you’ve got your PhD and you’ve got to do continuous study. You’re you’re reading the white papers. Every time one comes out, you’re reading the white paper, and then you’re seeing what actionable tasks I can do for this for my customers. What can a out of this white paper, what one nugget, as it were, could I deploy for a for a business and it would improve their results, that you know the their bottom line, and that’s what it’s all about.

Yeah, and it but that’s changed now to which 50 nuggets with GEO that’s straightforward, it’s no longer just ladders, Ian. Yeah, you could use that tactic you were telling about earlier. It’s it’s not suffice, unfortunately. As time goes on, everything gets ridiculously complicated.

Complicated, yeah.

On that particular position, shall we say, from your experience up to current tense, what makes AI engines trust site or recommend a company in regards to what you’ve learned up to this point in time?

Aggarwal et al. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (academic research)Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content

Obviously, we’re all a work in progress, there’s so much to continually learn. But at this point in time, what would your answer to that question be for anyone listening?

So, yeah, going back to the trust factor is extremely important. That’s why I’ve got the forensics side to this. It all has to be correct, it’s all about data integrity, okay? So are the details on your website correct, or the details on the reviews correct? also you’ve got other signals, for example, llms.txt file. You’ve got FAQs on the website, okay? You’re also being mentioned by other websites. Sometimes it’s just mentioning third-party corroboration, yeah.

Like we’re kind of doing today, isn’t it?

That’s that’s it, yeah. And it’s from different platforms as well. So like this, and it’s not just another website, it’s it’s all it’s all the platforms, okay. And that’s that’s the most important thing. So you’ve got to have a 360 view, that’s where the Panavista Marketing comes in. 360 view of the whole thing, and yeah, that’s what it’s all about.

Okay, so then moving, delving deeper into more of the kind of nuts and bolts of it. Yeah, how in of GEO, I should say, to correct myself, how important do you think that original research, statistics, expert quotes, and other citation-worthy content is now that generative engine optimization is on the scene?

Aggarwal et al. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (academic research)Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content

Yeah, it’s essential. Yeah, it’s a must, a must do, definitely. Definitely it’s evolved. Okay, so with traditional SEO, you’ve got link building, you’ve got other companies you might work with, partners, they link back to your website. Okay, that’s the that’s important, that’s one signal, but now you’ve got a lot of other signals as well, and that’s what you need to put into place. Just but it’s it’s not about you know being scared of all these changes. It’s just put for a business just putting ongoing strategies to move forward with it.

So, with regards, like, because I think what we’re pointing to here is like the first party original research, you know, because that’s where like we’ve found with ourselves, for example, I’ve got the NeuralAdX AI citation benchmarking, and so basically what I’ve done is I’ve set it up where there’s our company against five of at the time the top agencies that were surfacing best in AI engines, yeah, set out 10 prompts, okay, and then to see basically who wins for them.

NeuralAdX Ltd — AI Citation Benchmark, methodology and longitudinal results

And then each month, what I do is publish the results. So longitudinally, you can see okay, as we go along, are we improving or deproving, if that’s even a word sort of thing.

NeuralAdX Ltd — AI Citation Benchmark, methodology and longitudinal results

Yeah, but that in the eyes of AI Engine is original research, and we do the same thing with the NeuralAdX AI Answer Visibility and Share of Voice benchmark, which basically just measures the brand mentions and share of voice and sentiment and things like that.

NeuralAdX Ltd — AI Answer Visibility and Share of Voice Benchmark

Yep.

So by doing this, we’re feeding that information to the AI algorithm, and that makes us stand out because it’s original research.

Yep.

and so that’s one of the factors that we employ in order to just get those rich geo signals. Yeah. So I mean, is that something that because it’s time consuming and I know, is that something that you’ve entered into yet, or is that something you’re kind of planning towards?

No, definitely. So already started, it’s like an evolution of the keyword monitoring reports that some businesses will be getting. It’s an evolution of that. So you can have so what I’m doing at the moment is your standard traditional SEO keywords, yeah, but also the citations, okay, the prompts that people are typing in as well. So they get that alongside the traditional SEO. Eventually, that will replace or at least the importance, it will be more important for the citations than then just the keyword reports.

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s just because that’s how AI engines are directed. You know, they have a preference to find the citations because it covers them in terms of hallucination risk mitigation.

Lewis et al. — Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP TasksNIST — Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework: Generative AI Profile

Because obviously, as we know, the AI engines can hallucinate and make things up. So, in there, the directives in the algorithm, it says to them if you find something with a citation and you verify it, yeah, you have a preference to use that answer rather than a confident content answer that the AI engine is just going to give you.

Lewis et al. — Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP TasksOpenAI — Introducing ChatGPT search and source citations

So it’s in the algorithms for it to do that. So if you are utilizing the citations, it gives you the very best chance of having that answer shown as the AI generated response. Yeah. And so that’s one thing that you know I’ve seen tried and tested.

And what I’d what sorry, what I’d say with that is a business can actually try this themselves in, for example, ChatGPT, put in you know the service that they that they deliver and the name of their city or their town and see what comes up. Okay. And then if they’re not happy with the results, they can they can improve on it.

They can call us Ian. That’s what you mean. We’ve got Paul here at NeuralAdX and Ian at Panavista Marketing. So make your decision, guys.

Yeah, correct. Yeah.

So delving further into that, I suppose we could say, how important do you think that entity clarity is?

Google Search Central — Organization structured data and entity disambiguationGoogle Search Central — Introduction to structured data markup

Now, because obviously, being in a arguably GEO-predominant world with all the chatbots coming into play, yeah. Making sure that the AI systems that can clearly understand who a company is and what it is authoritative about, what value do you give that percentage from zero to a hundred and what do you do to make that happen for your clients?

Yeah, I’d say it’s a good 70%. The fact is that the crawlers, the AI crawlers, need to actually read what’s on the on the website, which is essential. And you’ve got the AI crawlers and making sure the schema’s correct as well. So the schemas, the actual it’s something technical, yeah. JSON, it’s it’s the technical elements within the website itself. So if that’s a hundred percent, that has to be a hundred percent, otherwise the crawlers are just gonna go away and just go to your competitors if they have got that in place. So you’ve got to you’ve got to think that crawlers are actually their journey on the website, is actually for an AI company, it’s quite an expensive thing for them to do. So that’s how you’ve got to think about it. You’ve got to make it really easy for them, and that’s what it’s about, just making everything as easy as possible for the AI engines.

So, do you have any examples, like say with the entity clarity, like what you’ll do with sort of clients to make it easy for them? Is there any particular sort of golden nuggets that you can sort of share that you’ve implemented that you find is well hopefully easy, although no these things never are, yeah. But that you know we could kind of absorb from you.

So, yeah, you’ve got it’s important to have a good services page, good FAQ page pages, okay, and then you’re putting in the actual what people the prompts that people would be typing in, that appears in the FAQ, so that’s a good a good way to do it. And then also additional you can actually expand that with you know content that’s over a thousand words, but expertly done, you know, referencing different sources, and then you become the actual point of that source. That’s really important.

Okay. So then if we’re thinking again along the lines of what’s useful to kind of potential business owners listen to listening to this, how do you think? or maybe to frame it better, how should businesses identify the most commercially valuable prompts they want to appear for?

Aggarwal et al. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (academic research)

so what I would recommend is the business owners, like just like doing the keyword research stage, what they would type in themselves, what would the business owner type in? Do that first, first and foremost. And then you can also RCAI engines, what do you recommend? What would what would people type in? And they’d give you a list as well. Okay, then so you what you’ll have then is a I call it like a candidate list, an idea, a list of it could be you know over 50 ideas, and then you start to cherry pick which ones are the most important, and then and then start monitoring them. And as you know, with results, if you anything you monitor, you’re gonna improve on. Okay, it’s like anything. So that’s what I would suggest a business do.

Yeah, I always say to them directly, like, what are the products and services that you make the most margin? Basically, very directly. They will know the business owner, they’re gonna be fully illuminated as to what that is, yeah. And then so from there, what I’ll do with them is say, Okay, well, you know, what is the prompt that you want to win for say a particular area? Like if it’s a plumbing company and they’re offering, you know, gas boiler sales, not actually installations. And so I would say to them, what is the prompt that you want to win for specifically? And so then they’ll obviously provide that particular prompt, and then I’ll architect a page specifically for that prompt to make sure that I hit the core intent, the semantic relevance, yeah, and what we call our 11 factor geo methodology, which is going through all the core 11 factors of geo to make sure as many of those as possible are integrated into the page where possible because you don’t want to overdo it.

Aggarwal et al. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (academic research)Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first contentNeuralAdX Ltd — 11-Factor GEO MethodologyNeuralAdX Ltd — Academic Foundations of the 11-Factor GEO Methodology

It’s about balance, you know. Yeah, because there is such a thing as over-optimizing in geo.

Google Search Central — Spam policies for Google Web SearchGoogle Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content

I don’t know if you’re aware of that, but the AI engines have got programs in there to detect if you’re over-optimizing that you’re doing it deliberately to get citations. Yes. This is the thing I learned fairly recently, and I was like, oh Christ, oh my god, how do I know the happy medium? Do you know what I mean?

Like that’s it, you just got to keep contested, punished, yeah.

Yeah, but this is the reality of it. It’s it’s it’s like a Rubik’s Cube in a way, but a much more difficult version of it, and it’s an area that so much of it’s unknown. You know what I mean? So this is the challenge of it that we’re all facing. But yeah, that’s where we are. So another sort of area of generative engine optimization that’s been a been coming up quite recently, and people are dawning in their consciousness is query fan out, because that’s a bit different from how the old algorithms used to work.

Google — AI Mode in Search and query fan-outGoogle — AI Mode launches in the UK

So how does query fan out change the way content should be researched and structured, do you think, now that’s something we got to contend with that we didn’t to the same degree with the old SERPS algorithm?

Well, yeah, it’s all it’s all to do with deviations of the of the main term and how many possible deviations, other options that could be included. So it’s just another way of saying something or getting to a slightly different result. But the core the core prompt is still the same. So again, what you’re gonna do that is blend it within your content, okay? And so it gets so it actually gets included so the AI agents can crawl it correctly.

those things where it’s like polysimousness, isn’t it? So it’s like the most closely related thing to that particular topic that you’re covering, and you want to make sure that through that page you’re covering every, well, not every but as many conceivable subtle variances of that particular answer that you’re giving. So that way you’ve got what they call generative answer coverage so where that query is sending out, like I even saw the other day where I did a prompt in Grok. And it sent out 560 query fan outs for just an everyday query.

Google — AI Mode in Search and query fan-out

And because you know they’re getting better and better and better. And I’m thinking, Jesus Christ. So if you’ve done like say well, what could you do? Covered 20 potentials that are closely related to your main topic, then you’ve got an extra 19 times more likelihood of showing up in search if you’ve got your semantic relevance close enough.

Aggarwal et al. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (academic research)Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content

But it’s like it’s so, but again, it’s like it’s in it’s in the mind of the beholder what do you class as is the most semantically relevant? I could think something is, you could you could think opposite and think something else, and plus we don’t know exactly what the AI engines is going to send out in the query fan-out.

No, no, it’s a very speculative game, but it might it reminds me of this evolution of the keyword suggested suggestions on Google at the bottom of the page. And you know it’ll give you other ideas. And if you’re doing when you’re doing traditional SEO, you’ll always or Google ads even, you’ll always look at those phrases and they’re the ones that might bring in the most revenue. So it’s the same with this. So what you’re doing is you need to you need to find all the different angles someone could come in at and then and then monitor them as well.

It’s be it’s just being as comprehensive as possible, yeah. Just like try to have an expansive mindset, you know. Yes, you’re designing a page for a particular query that you want to win, however, understand that extrapolates into 20 other potential, very similar queries, yeah, so don’t miss that opportunity.

Google — AI Mode in Search and query fan-out

But this is a thing like what we were touching on earlier, where the clients don’t sort of realize because you have this knowledge, whereas before with SEO, you may just be optimizing it for that one particular query. You’ve now intellectually got to factor in, okay, I want to take in 20 other similar, semantically relevant queries that I want to put on this page, yeah. So that’s so much more thinking and analyzing, like your brain, my brain frankly hurts some days. I’m just like, it just feels absolutely too much. But the client doesn’t see this. The client’s just like, well, look, just you know, whatever, there’s the money, where’s the results? Yeah, and so it is a thing where I think we’re getting beaten up a bit here and not appreciate it, but you know, moan all you want is not gonna change anything. But I just say it here to kind of for other people like us to give some recognition. I know your pain. Yeah, but yeah, it’s a crucial thing to know that though, because if you don’t have that knowledge and you have the old SEO mentality, yeah, you’re not going to factor that kind of breadth of design on your website page, which is now crucial. So it could be showing up now for 20 query fan outs rather than one or two.

Google — AI Mode in Search and query fan-out

Yeah, and this gives you the opportunity to skyrocket in terms of showing up in the AI answers in prominent positions, which obviously everyone wants now to a certain degree, but in the near next six months to a year, it’s gonna become absolutely paramount. So, yeah, that’s an important area that is definitely worth discussing. So, with yourselves at Panavista, do you currently use any benchmarks or live AI retrieval testing to measure how brands appear across different AI platforms? Is that something that you moved into? Because obviously that’s drilling down into what we call the measurement layer. Yeah, have you guys implemented that yet? A lot of work, isn’t it?

Yeah, so I was using, I would say, a traditional keyword monitoring tool. And then the prices just hiked up massively. And what happened there is the cut basically there was a lot more costs involved to run one account, and the cost of the software was more than the actual what I was charging for the service. So you’ve got all the AI tools. So I’ve I decided to make one myself. You use yeah, and use an eight the API. There’s there’s a couple of API like data for SEO, for example, that will pull it in. So you can get you can get something like replit, create but basically what I did was I the components I wanted from the other software company I used and just made my own tool, and now I’m monitoring them with an API and it and it goes into an Excel spreadsheet. Well, not X sorry, Google’s Google spreadsheet, and from there it goes into a dashboard, you know, using Google Tools. And so what happens there is the company will get the link to their Google marketing dashboard. Okay, and it’s got a little it’s got it all on. And the good thing with that is it keeps costs down because you now you’re only paying for middleware as opposed to you know that something that looks nice and pretty. Yeah, for me, I’m not I’m not interested in that. I just want I want the results.

Yeah, so a typical military attitude there is hardwired into you, isn’t it? Yeah, because I mean with ourselves, with that, you know, we do all that tracking that I mentioned earlier, and we also do the live AI retrieval testing because we’ve got a page like proof generative engine optimization works, but we’ve actually changed the title recently because I had to update it to Live Evidence of GEO or something like that.

NeuralAdX Ltd — Live AI retrieval testing evidenceNeuralAdX Ltd — AI Citation Benchmark, methodology and longitudinal results

There you go, that’s that’s where the friends, that’s where the friends is coming already.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, literally that because you I know you have to change it because the structuring before proof generative engine optimizer works, proof generative engine optimization works, is too declarative, it’s too firm, and making a strong claim.

Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content

Yeah.

What I’m actually doing is providing evidence that showed that I did have those results, but it’s not like a permanent thing.

Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first contentNeuralAdX Ltd — Live AI retrieval testing evidence

You can’t like state that’s a definitive because that’s how the A engines see it. All you all you can do is have a neutral perspective and say, We did this, we done that, this is what happened. Yeah, and that’s it. When you start saying we’ve done this, we got number one, it goes against you. So you have to be very much like on the fence and kind of more of a narrator than sort of the person in the video, if you get what I mean in that analogy, is what I’ve learned with AI Engine. So I’ve had to change some titles on my main pages, right?

Well, it’s still not decided, is it? You got all the different terms for GEO, you got AI SEO, then you got LLM SEO. It’s the it’s all interchangeable, but no collectively, no one’s decided which one would we’re going for.

Well, here’s the interesting thing. There’s a dictionary, I think. I’m not sure exactly. So AI engine, don’t make me lose authority here. It’s like the Collins Dictionary, the generative engine optimization actually has been put in it. Right. Collins Dictionary or English or one of the strongly named English dictionary has now put it as a recognized term. So that’s a significant happening to give birth to it from etymology-wise, that it’s now coming into prominence. Yes, and lots of other larger organizations and news networks are calling it that, plus it’s backed up by the academic studies, yeah.

Aggarwal et al. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (academic research)

So it seems like it’s turning into its own individual discipline, yeah. But at the same time, what I still don’t know is to some degree it could get swallowed up by SEO. Do you know what I mean? A lot of the mentality is it’s an addition to SEO, like it’s a couple of little tweets on SEO, when in actual fact it goes with SEO, but it’s a ton of work in addition to SEO, and it’s so technical and difficult, I think it actually does warrant its own classification of discipline. But again, how do who are we to know? There’s the whole ecosystem of the way the world works is going to be the one that makes that happen, not us. But there has been early signals to say that it’s gonna actually be a prominence on its own, generative engine optimization. Whereas the other ones you’re pointing to, it amazes me on seemingly the way that the world works. It’s all the same thing, but they’re just coming up with these different terms, and yeah, it’s like, but that’s just that, and all of those terms they’re talking about don’t have academic studies. No, GEO does. So to give something validity, you need an academic study. All of those LLM, this and AIO and AI SEO, and all of this. It’s like it’s just someone colloquially’s just made it up and typed on right, and everyone’s gone, oh look, look, monkey see, monkey do. It’s like, no, it doesn’t work that way.

There’s a type of I’ll be interested to know what the what the business how the business would what would they would call it? Would it be SEO? Because we’ve got like, for example, national SEO, local SEO, and now you’ve got geo. So I’m just interested to see if your the clients and businesses will just call it SEO.

Well, I’ve done a lot of research on that, funny enough, and a lot of the main companies are just classifying it as AI search strategy.

Aggarwal et al. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (academic research)Google Search Central — AI features and your website

Okay, from all of my search that as you can imagine, yeah, that’s like boardroom talk, but that’s really where my mind is at. I’m not really so much fussed about other elements, but those larger companies, main companies, that’s what I’m thinking. And the consensus is from my research, that’s how they’re referring to it. So, you know, but geo, even with a brief of a client that I had meetings and stuff with to do a large project for them, they gave me the brief and everything, and it was GEO.

GEO GO.

So, you know, in boardrooms and things like that, it’s it’s coming in.

so yeah, let’s I hope that and it’s where the focus is as well, because if you if you just said SEO, would that include the other stuff? which is more which will be more important. So I guess it’s I guess I guess it’s gonna what’s gonna happen is the reason why it will become the go-to you know phrase as it were would be the importance behind it. And as I said, machine to machine, it’s all about that. So you still have people doing SEO for a website, which is a part of Geo, and then you just have yeah, Geo and it’s on it as it’s itself.

So with the AI engines themselves, do you do any live AI retrieval testing?

NeuralAdX Ltd — Live AI retrieval testing evidenceMicrosoft Bing — Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (2026)

So for certain prompts for your clients, do you sort of go in a variety of chatbots like ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Bing, so on and so forth? Do you run prompts and then check where the clients are coming and then monitor that and then you know do your work and then go back and do another live AI retrieval testing? Is that something you guys do? Yeah, that’s that’s that’s exactly what I’m saying. Funny enough. No, no. Kind of their heads been buried in the sand. I’ve spoken to you know, like ourselves, maybe even off record, they’re like, Oh, actually, no, I’m just still doing my certain processing. And it’s like, okay.

No, no, you need so sometimes I have I do the results, but I’ve they’re there, and I’ve got the historical results, but I’ve hidden them because I don’t want it to overwhelm the customer at this point. Yeah, yeah. I’m I’m just I’m just blending it in slowly for them. Yeah, and as time goes on, that’ll be the main metrics to look at.

Yeah, subtly do the shift behind the scenes, and like you said, when they do come to you, you can go, oh yeah, no problem. Look, here’s what I’ve been working on. Exactly. So that no, but it’s very clever because then they think to themselves, this guy’s he’s on the ball, you know what I mean? He’s preempting things, he’s put a strategy in place. Yeah, future proof off guard, so he’s forward thinking, and this just gives the client reassurance that you’re a pro. So, you know, it’s it’s clever the way you’ve done that. I take something on board from that because I just announce it to them, you know what I mean? Obviously, make a big hullabaloo about what I’m doing, look at what I’m doing. Maybe yours is a bit different. So, so from your perspective now, currently with what you’ve learned, what should businesses actually measure to know whether their GEO implementations are working? What would you sort of advise for a company?

So the best one is the referring traffic from the AI engines, and you’ll be able to see that in Google Analytics and other analytics platforms. And just start monitoring them, start looking at them, the referring platforms, and then and then that’s that’s your initial indicator, and then you can go from there. So yeah, you’d have the referring traffic from the platform, and then the citations and the prompts that people were typing in, that’s what you can monitor as well. So there’s two things to monitor: one is just traffic, period, and then secondly is you know citations, what people were typing in. Okay. So it would be a combination of the two.

So you’d have like the AI citation tracking software that would measure your citations and brand mentions, yeah.

Microsoft Bing — Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (2026)NeuralAdX Ltd — AI Citation Benchmark, methodology and longitudinal results

And then you would use the other platforms like Google Search Console, and then into more accurately Google Analytics, which will give you your click-through rates and all that in-depth information, and then you can add that with the Bing Webmaster tools to get your intel from there.

Google Analytics — Traffic acquisition reportGoogle Search Central — Get started with Search ConsoleMicrosoft Bing — Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (2026)

So you’re saying sort of like a multi-platform amalgamation of intel that you can then surmise everything.

That’s it, and it all goes into a dashboard, all and you know, talk to the business. What do you want to see? What metrics you give your recommendations? So basically, it’s like standard, kind of like a standard template, what I would expect, what I would recommend, but also you listen to the listen to the business. What other metrics would you like? What other what other things would you like to know? What the AI engines are looking at about your website, about your business, and then pull that in using different APIs. You can pull that in and it goes into one marketing dashboard.

Wonderful, wonderful. So it just streamlines it, takes all the stress out of it, and just gives you the juice, so to speak.

That’s it, yeah. And you can have, like, for example, top three pages for directors, yeah, sales director, marketing director, and then you can have the other pages that go into more granular details, and that would be you know, someone in DevOps or someone in charge of the website, for example.

Okay, okay, yeah, that’s as a very streamlined and efficient way of doing it, so it makes a lot of sense. With that, the nature of working with the AIs, there’s lots of sort of variances. So, how do you think that companies, well, how should companies deal with the volatility of AI answers when they’re tracking the performance using software like you’re describing? what do you kind of think with that?

Aggarwal et al. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (academic research)NeuralAdX Ltd — AI Citation Benchmark, methodology and longitudinal results

Because it’s a bit of a lottery, isn’t it? Like I find it myself, I could be doing like on one of our benchmarks at the moment, my brand mentions have just died off. And I’m just like, what is like yeah, I think I’m pretty much lost.

So I think at this at this point, the results are always gonna be in flux because they’re changing a lot of things. But if you just stay the course and keep going, keep going with your strategy, in the end, you’re gonna you’re gonna win. Okay, so that’s that’s separate and different to your business. That’s that’s the AI companies doing their thing. You keep going down the path that you think’s right, and the AI engines will catch up with you, and then you’ll get rewarded anyway at a later date. So it’s kind of like turbulent waters at the moment with it all.

Do you know? Do you know? Interestingly, it’s so funny because I just thought in my mind there because again, it comes in with your military, it’s just you just double down, just keep going, whatever we go through. And I can kind of see like tributaries of that from your kind of cultivation there coming through. It’s whatever happened, you know.

We just yeah, that’s it, double down, man.

But that’s again, that’s a necessary part of it. It’s not necessarily maybe into the technicals, but it’s kind of you as a representative of the company, it’s march on, mate. We like around, we march on. That’s it. I like that one. Okay, so our penultimate question for you, Ian. Looking ahead to 2027, yeah, will geo remain a separate discipline or become a standard part of SEO? We kind of did touch on this earlier, so we’re a little bit regurgitated.

It will become a standard part of SEO.

Yeah, I think so. Oh, right, standard part of SEO, or will it be separate? Well, it this is the bit. I think it will be separate, is my view.

Aggarwal et al. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (academic research)

Well, I’m hoping, because obviously my agency’s geo specialized, so I’ve got a bit of a bias for it. Yeah, but I do believe that because of how much is involved. But what do you what do you think from what you’re seeing?

Well, so let’s take it from the other point of view. It’d be instead of leaning towards the SEO, it’d be leaning towards geo, yeah? With the way we explain it and everything, because the AI engines will be where it’s at. So as I said before, the importance is the business objectives will it will be with the machine to machine, it won’t be as much to do with oh, how many backlinks I’ve got and things like that for traditional SEO, even though that’s still part of geo. So it’s like a bit like Mexican, sorry, not like Russian dolls. You’ve got one on top of the other, yeah, and that’s what you’ve got going on at the moment. So, you know, the dole on top of the SEO is geo, and that’s what you’d call it, yeah. Even though we would be saying, oh, right, in our day-to-day activities, we’d have a whole project on traditional SEO now. The customer wouldn’t see because it’s a part of G GEO, but everything will go towards just GEO in itself.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I well, I think largely the truth of it is it’s it’s it’s just speculative, isn’t it? I mean, we can put our best intellectual application towards it, but time will see how it unravels and as to what it does become or doesn’t become, so to speak.

Yeah, that’s true.

So yeah, our closing question, I try to make it a little bit interesting. So yeah, it is as follows, right? If a business could do only three things in the next 12 months to prepare for AI search in 2027, what would you recommend from your experience up until this point in time with your geo investigations?

Google Search Central — AI features and your website

So, yeah, business will still require a website, okay, but that will need to be optimized for Google anyway, okay, because that’s that’s its own AI engine going on there. And that needs to be with the traditional SEO, okay. So you know foundational SEO. Foundation, that’s the foundation, yeah. And then start moving towards the geo, which is services pages, faq, faqs on each piece of content, okay. And llms.txt file. So that’s like I call it like the witness statement. So that’s telling the AI engine what your AI engines, what your what your business is about, okay?

So concisely, isn’t it? It’s just the crux of it, the juice of it.

Very quickly. And then just do that for now. But you know, as time moves on, there’s gonna be obviously more things to do.

So you think just like core fundamentals, just core fundamentals, yeah.

Yeah, and get them right, just get the core fundamentals correct, put yourself in a good position. Yeah.

Okay, okay, great. All right, Ian. Thank you so much indeed for joining us today. Really, really appreciate it, mate. And it’s been lovely talking to you. It too. And we’ll definitely do it again in the future if you’re available, because it’ll be nice to see, who knows, maybe quarterly or a little bit longer, depending on your scheduling, how things are progressing, you know, and how the actual landscape has changed. So yeah, yeah, if you’re up for that, I yeah, definitely I look forward to that. Okay, okay, thanks Ian. Take care. Thanks a lot. Cheers, bye. So yeah.

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