Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the work of making a website easier for a search engine to crawl, understand and rank, so that it appears higher in the list of results for the searches its audience runs. Google’s own description is that it helps search engines understand your content and helps people decide whether to visit.
The three layers
Technical: can the crawler fetch and render the page, does the server answer with the right status codes, does robots.txt let it in, is there a sitemap. Content: does the page answer the query in words the searcher used, and is it clear which business or person is speaking. Authority: do other sites link to it, and are they the kind of site the engine trusts. Google’s starter guide says most sites need nothing more than publishing to be found, that changes can take hours or months to show, and that a few weeks is the sensible wait before judging an edit.
SEO and GEO
The two share their fundamentals and differ in the unit of selection. A rank is assigned to a page; an AI recommendation is assigned to a business. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet, and that those features run several related searches for one question and may show different pages than the ranked list. So SEO is the ticket in. Whether the business is then named depends on whether a fetched page holds a passage the assistant can lift and an identity it can pin down. Generative engine optimization is the name for that second step.
A common question
Does ranking first mean an AI assistant will recommend you?
Not on its own. Ranking gets a page fetched. The answer is then written from passages on the fetched pages, and a page with no self-contained answer and an inconsistent name, address or phone number can be fetched and go unnamed. The rank is a property of the page; the recommendation is a decision about the business.
Related terms
Sources
Definition and timing: Google’s SEO starter guide. AI features: Google’s documentation on AI Overviews and AI Mode. No figures on this page.