SEO or GEO: should you optimise your site for AI?

Since conversational assistants arrived, the question comes up in almost every meeting: is it still worth working on Google visibility, or should everything go into AI? We asked Mathis, who follows the subject closely at Tomaweb.

—Everyone says you now have to optimise for ChatGPT. Is classic SEO over?

That's the belief of the moment, and it's an illusion. Plenty of people assume GEO — visibility inside AI answers — has replaced SEO. Look at what actually happens in people's behaviour and you see something quite different.

The number of searches hasn't dropped since language models appeared. If anything it has risen. And above all, a new kind of search appeared alongside the classic one, with its own use cases. People didn't swap one habit for another: they added one.

The market didn't split. It got bigger.

That's the nuance almost everyone misses. If it had split, you'd have to pick a side. Since it grew, there are simply more places to be visible than before.

—What actually changes in the way people search?

The phrasing, mostly. Into a search engine you type three words. To an assistant, you describe a situation.

Someone no longer asks for "web agency Verviers". They explain that their site is eight years old, that they can't edit it themselves any more, that they'd like to sell online, and they ask where to start. It's far more precise, and there's far more context in the question.

That changes what you need to produce. Content that only answers a keyword is useless in that setting. Content that genuinely answers a question is not.

—So what do you actually put in place?

80/20. Eighty per cent of the effort on SEO, twenty on GEO.

It isn't a magic number, it's a question of proportion: classic search remains by far the larger volume. GEO is real and growing, but it doesn't yet justify moving most of the work there.

Putting your whole strategy into GEO today doesn't get you very far.

The reverse is equally true, mind you. Ignoring how AI reads a website means giving up a share that didn't exist two years ago and isn't going to shrink.

—So the real mistake is picking a side?

Exactly. A visibility strategy should never rest on a single channel. That's true between SEO and GEO, and just as true between search and social media.

What's reassuring is that both feed on largely the same groundwork: a clear structure, pages that answer real questions, accurate and verifiable information. A site built properly for Google already starts well ahead with AI systems.

What's next

What exactly goes into that twenty per cent deserves its own article. We'll come back to it next month.

In the meantime, if you're wondering where your own site stands on this, it's the first thing we look at: see search engine optimisation.