The name is new and the underlying work is roughly eighty per cent shared with good SEO. What is genuinely new is the surface: being named inside a generated answer rather than ranked in a list. So it is a real discipline with a marketable name attached, and both halves of that are true.
The short version
- The scepticism is reasonable. Search marketing renames itself roughly every three years.
- The behaviour change underneath it is real and measurable, not a projection.
- Most of the work is recognisable: entity clarity, structured data, content quality, corroboration.
- The genuinely new part is the outcome. There is no list, so there is no position ten.
- Be sceptical of anyone selling GEO as entirely separate from SEO with its own separate retainer.
What is actually new, and what is not
Start with the honest part. A large majority of GEO work would be recognised by any competent SEO practitioner. Making an entity unambiguous, marking content up properly, writing so the answer comes first, earning credible third-party mentions: none of that was invented in the last two years, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling.
What has changed is what the work is aimed at. Traditional search returns a ranked list, and the economics of a list are well understood: position one gets most of the clicks, position ten gets few, and position thirty gets none but still exists. A generated answer has no list. It names two or three sources, and everything else is not lower down, it is absent.
That changes the shape of the problem in ways that matter practically. Being twelfth is worth something in search and worth nothing in an answer. A page can rank on page one and be cited never, or rank poorly and be cited often, because extraction and ranking are not the same test.
It also changes measurement, which is where most of the genuine novelty sits. Position and click-through rate describe a list. They do not describe whether you were named, how you were described, or which competitor was named instead.
How to check it yourself
Take a query you already rank well for. Run it in Google, then ask the same question in ChatGPT or Perplexity. If you are on page one but not in the generated answer, you have just seen the gap that the word GEO is pointing at. That gap is either worth closing or it is not, but it is real and you can observe it in under a minute.
How to tell a real practitioner from a rebrand
- Ask what they measure. If the answer is rankings and traffic with no citation measurement, the label changed and the work did not.
- Ask what they would do first. Entity work is the honest answer. “Publish more content” is not.
- Ask what they will not promise. Anyone guaranteeing AI citations is describing something they do not control.
- Ask how it relates to your SEO. If they claim it is entirely separate and needs its own budget line, be careful. If they say most of the foundations are shared, they are being straight with you.
For the fuller version of that argument, see GEO vs SEO and is SEO dead because of AI, which reaches a less dramatic conclusion than the title suggests.