What is Traditional SEO?
SEO — Search Engine Optimisation — is the practice of improving your website and online presence to rank as highly as possible in traditional search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The goal is to appear in the top positions of search engine result pages (SERPs) for keywords relevant to your business.
SEO has been around since the late 1990s. It is well understood, well documented, and the subject of an enormous industry. It works by improving a combination of on-page factors (content quality, technical health, user experience) and off-page factors (primarily backlinks).
What is GEO?
GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — is newer. It addresses a fundamentally different type of search: AI-generated responses. Instead of returning a ranked list of links, AI assistants generate conversational answers that may name specific businesses. The goal is to be named, recommended, and positively described by AI platforms.
The key difference: SEO puts your link in front of someone actively looking for you. GEO gets AI to recommend you to someone who does not know you exist yet.
When to Prioritise Each
Prioritise SEO when you are already well-known in your local market, when your customers are primarily local repeat visitors, or when you need to drive specific transactional traffic (e.g., an e-commerce site).
Prioritise GEO when you operate in tourism or hospitality, your customers ask AI for recommendations, you are in a competitive tourist market, you want high-converting recommendations rather than broad traffic, or your competitors have not invested in GEO yet.
Why You Need Both — and How They Reinforce Each Other
The good news: GEO and SEO are not competing strategies that require separate budgets and teams. Done properly, they reinforce each other.
Many of the signals that improve GEO performance also improve SEO performance:
- Schema markup helps AI understand your business (GEO) and also enables rich snippets in Google Search (SEO).
- High-quality, specific content that AI can cite as authoritative is also the kind of content that earns backlinks and ranks well in Google.
- Strong review velocity feeds AI training data (GEO) and improves your Google local pack ranking (SEO).
- Consistent NAP data across directories is essential for local SEO and also helps AI models build confident entity-understanding of your business.
The Commercial Case for GEO
- AI recommendations convert at 3× the rate of organic search links — because the AI has already done the evaluation work and is making a specific recommendation. The visitor arrives pre-sold.
- In tourist markets, AI search is where high-value customers are. Affluent international visitors who spend above-average are disproportionately likely to use AI for trip planning.
- Early movers have a compounding advantage. AI models build their opinions about businesses over time. A business that establishes AI authority now will benefit from that accumulated authority for years.
- Your competitors may not be doing it yet. In many tourist markets, GEO adoption is still low. This is a window of competitive opportunity that will close as awareness grows.