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Two workstreams, one job
Traditional SEO and generative engine optimisation, planned and run together by the same team.
People no longer search in one place. Our SEO and AI search team in London and Leeds combines traditional SEO with generative engine optimisation (GEO), so your brand ranks in Google, gets cited in AI answers and stays visible wherever discovery happens.
The same question now gets asked of ChatGPT, an AI Overview, Perplexity, a marketplace or a social feed, and each of them decides differently what a good answer looks like. We plan for all of it as one job rather than as an SEO retainer with an AI afterthought.
Two workstreams, one job Traditional SEO and generative engine optimisation, planned and run together by the same team.
Built on three signals Authority, relevance and experience: what every search system has always rewarded, and still does.
Measured in AI answers Tools we have invested in and built in-house track how often AI answers name your brand, not just where you rank.
Paid and organic as one Paid and organic search planned together, so you stop paying for clicks you already earn.
For more than a decade, Google defined how people found things, and it won by giving the best answer. That part hasn't changed. What has changed is how many systems now compete to give it.
An AI answer doesn’t hand you ten links to weigh up. It returns one synthesised response that names a handful of sources. Miss that list and you aren’t further down the page. You’re absent from the comparison, and no paid budget buys you back into it.
So the job splits in two. Rank where people still search. Get cited where they no longer need to.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO), also spelt optimization, is the practice of structuring content so AI systems can read it, verify it and cite it. The better the optimisation, the more likely tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews are to mention and recommend your brand.
You need both, and they’re less separable than the table suggests. A page a crawler can’t reach can’t be cited either.
Strip away the platforms and every search system, past or present, runs on the same three signals. Google weighted them one way. Large language models weight them differently. Neither ignores them.
Models measure confidence differently: is the information about you consistent, cross-referenced and backed up somewhere other than your own website? That moves the work off-site, into the forums, publications and platforms that shape what a model already believes about you.
Models go further and look for insight they can check against a credible source. Content that sounds like everyone else's gets absorbed without credit. Distinct, provable information gets quoted.
They still do in Google. In AI systems, though, more of the experience happens inside the model, so the emphasis shifts from how a person reads your page to how cleanly a machine can parse it. Technical SEO still matters. What it's optimising for has moved.
Four measures work instead, and we have invested in industry leading technology to track them. Mention accuracy is the most underestimated: an inaccurate citation does more damage than no citation at all, and it’s far harder to spot.
Citation share How often AI answers name you as a source for the questions that matter to your business.
Mention accuracy Whether models describe your brand correctly when someone asks about your category.
AI referral traffic Visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI assistants, tracked separately from organic search, plus AI Overviews impressions from Search Console.
Rankings alongside citations The two move differently, so you need to watch both.
SEO usually takes months rather than weeks to show results, and longer than anyone selling it would like.
Technical fixes can show up quickly, sometimes within a fortnight of going live. Content and authority take longer, because they depend on being crawled, then indexed, then trusted, and that last stage can’t be bought. Anyone promising page-one rankings in thirty days is targeting terms nobody searches for.
AI visibility can move faster in one respect. A well-structured, well-sourced page can start being cited within weeks of publication. The authority signals underneath it build at the same unhurried pace as everything else.
Search is changing quickly, and it’s easy to get lost in the terminology. Here are clear answers to the questions we hear most about SEO, AI search and what it takes to stay visible as discovery evolves.
An SEO agency does three things: fixes the technical issues that stop search engines reading your site, creates content that answers what your audience asks, and builds authority by getting credible sites to reference you. In an AI-first market there’s a fourth job: making sure AI systems can read, verify and cite you.
SEO (search engine optimisation) earns rankings in search results. GEO (generative engine optimisation) earns citations inside AI-generated answers from tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. AEO (answer engine optimisation) is an older term for shaping content so it can be lifted as a direct answer, and it’s now used almost interchangeably with GEO. Most of the work overlaps.
No. They share the same technical foundations and much of the same content work. Splitting them across two teams usually means duplicated effort, and content optimised for one at the expense of the other.
AI crawlers do different jobs. Search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT) and PerplexityBot fetch pages for live answers, so blocking them keeps you out of those answers. Training crawlers such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot are a separate choice, and blocking Google-Extended doesn’t remove you from Google Search. Decide on purpose, not by your platform’s or CDN’s defaults.
Partly. Off-site authority work (mentions, citations and consistent information about your brand) can run on its own. But if your own pages can’t be crawled or parsed, you’ve capped what any of it can achieve.
Our AI-readiness audit shows whether AI systems can read your site, how your brand is described in generated answers, and what to fix first.
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