SEO — Search Engine Optimisation — is the practice of making your website easy for Google to find, understand, and rank well. GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — is the same idea applied to AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, which increasingly answer people's questions directly instead of sending them to a results page at all. Together, they're the reason a parent researching schools, or a company choosing a venue for their conference, finds you instead of the organisation down the road.
SEO: earning your place in the results
Search engines rank pages based on how well they answer a real question and how much the rest of the internet seems to trust them. For a purpose-driven organisation, that usually means three things: your site needs to be technically sound (fast, mobile-friendly, properly structured), your content needs to genuinely answer what people are searching for, and other credible sites need to reference or link to you over time.
None of this is a trick. It's closer to the offline version of building a good reputation — except search engines are reading the evidence at scale.
GEO: the same trust, a different reader
Large language models don't crawl the web the same way search engines do, but they reward similar things: clear, well-structured, genuinely informative content, published by a source that shows up consistently across the web talking about what it actually knows. If your organisation has real expertise in, say, environmental education or non-profit governance, writing about it plainly and often is what eventually gets your name mentioned when someone asks an AI tool a related question.
The practical overlap with SEO is large — most of what makes a page rank well on Google also makes it more likely to be cited by an AI system. The two aren't competing disciplines; they're the same discipline, aimed at two different kinds of reader.
Why this is infrastructure, not decoration
It's tempting to treat search visibility as something you get to once the "real" marketing is done. In practice it's closer to plumbing — invisible when it works, and the reason nothing else you publish gets found when it doesn't. Get the infrastructure right once, and every piece of content you produce afterwards works harder for longer.