What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimization: ranking in the blue-link Google results page.
What SEO optimises for
SEO is the practice of earning rank positions on a classic search results page - the ten blue links. Its levers are relevance (titles, depth, internal links), authority (backlinks), and technical hygiene (crawlability, page speed, canonical discipline). The outcome it buys is a click: a searcher scans the ranked list and visits your page.
That model still handles the majority of navigational and long-tail queries, which is why SEO is not going anywhere. What has changed is that a growing share of high-intent commercial queries are now answered above or instead of the ranked list, by generated answers that cite a handful of sources.
What carries over to GEO and what does not
The retrieval layer carries over completely: a page that is not indexable and crawlable can be neither ranked nor cited. Structured data, clean HTML, and site architecture serve both disciplines. So does genuine authority - engines cite sources their underlying indexes already rate as trustworthy.
What does not carry over is the content model. Ranking rewards comprehensive coverage of a query; citation rewards a self-contained passage an engine can lift verbatim. A page can rank #1 on Google and never be cited by ChatGPT, because its answers are buried mid-paragraph where no model can extract them cleanly.
Also known as: SEO.
Frequently asked questions
- Is SEO dead now that AI answers exist?
- No. Classic results still serve most navigational and long-tail queries, and Google's AI Overviews ground in the same live index SEO targets - a page that ranks nowhere is rarely cited. SEO remains the foundation; GEO is the additional discipline that turns retrievable pages into cited ones.
- Should I do SEO or GEO first?
- Do the shared foundation first: crawlability, indexability, structured data, server-rendered content. That work serves both. Then split effort by where your buyers ask: categories with heavy AI-answer adoption reward GEO's extraction-and-entity work sooner; categories still dominated by classic search reward traditional content and link building.
Every Osoro GEO scan measures this and the rest of the CITE framework on your own site - free, in about 30 seconds. How the CITE framework works →