AI SEO or GEO?
| AI SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| The goal | Pages that rank, and that Google can use as supporting links in AI Overviews and AI Mode | Being named in the answers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google write |
| Where it shows | Google and Bing search results | Answer engines, Google's included |
| The core work | Crawling and indexing, structured data, query research, content, internal links | The same foundations, plus consistent business facts, corroboration and first-hand content |
| How it is measured | Search Console, including its Generative AI performance report, and Bing Webmaster Tools | A dated log of customer questions across engines, plus the free scan |
The two overlap more than the names suggest. Google says a page needs to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, with no additional technical requirements, and describes optimizing for its AI features as still SEO. So the foundations below are the first half of any GEO engagement too.
What the work covers
Crawling and indexing
Pages Googlebot and Bingbot can fetch, render and index as the right URL: status codes, canonicals, redirects without chains, sitemaps that list only indexable pages, and content in the HTML rather than only after JavaScript runs. The technical foundations guide walks through each check.
Structured data that matches the page
The most specific business type, your services and your real profiles, marked up only where the facts are visible on the page. No review markup about your own business, which Google treats as self-serving, and no FAQ markup sold as a rich result: Google stopped showing those for all sites on May 7, 2026.
Query research from your own data
Your Search Console queries and pages first, because they are your customers' actual words, then the questions around them — including the related searches Google's AI features can run to build one answer, which can source a page for a question it never targeted.
Content, AI-assisted and human-edited
AI tools help us research, outline and draft. A person who knows the subject rewrites and approves every page. Google's spam policies define scaled content abuse as many pages made mainly to manipulate rankings, however they are produced, and we do not publish at a volume or quality that fits that description.
Internal links and site structure
Every service and city page reachable in a few clicks, and linked from the content that should send readers to it, with link text that says where the link goes.
Measured in Search Console
Queries, clicks and pages in the Performance report, impressions in Google's AI features in the Generative AI performance report, and Bing Webmaster Tools, reported monthly with what changed and what did not.
The evidence we work from
Technical fixes you can check
The Wild Sky Paragliding case study lists the fixes made to a Boulder operator's site with the date each was verified live, and says what has not been measured. Wild Sky is run by our founder, and the case study says so first.
A published rubric
The free scan's rubric — 26 scored checks across eight dimensions, with their weights and what the scan cannot see.
Where we work
In person across Boulder County and Broomfield. Denver north and northwest, Longmont, Fort Collins and Golden are regular drives, and each city page says what our research did and did not cover there: Boulder, Denver, Longmont, Fort Collins, Golden. For law firms, see AI search for Colorado law firms.
How it starts
A free scan and a conversation. The scan reads your site the way an answer engine's crawler does and shows what it could not find or verify; it does not query ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google. Then we sit down with you, in person where we can, and say which gaps are worth fixing and what that would cost — or that they are not.
