Technical
Can a machine reach your pages, read them and understand how they relate? Speed, mobile layout, clean URLs, no broken links, and a site that serves real content rather than a blank page waiting for JavaScript.
Learn
What SEO and GEO actually are.
Written for business owners, not marketers. No jargon that is not explained, and nothing here is trying to sell you anything — the prices are one page over if you want them.
Part one
Search engine optimisation
A search engine sends a bot around the web to fetch pages. It stores what it finds. When someone searches, it picks from that store and puts the results in an order.
SEO is the work of making sure your pages get fetched, get stored, and come out high enough in that order that someone sees them. That is the whole of it. Everything else is detail.
The detail falls into three piles.
Content
Does a page exist that answers the thing someone actually typed? Most businesses have a services page and nothing else. Search rewards the site that answered the question, not the site that listed the service.
Authority
Do other credible sites point at you, mention you, or list you? This is the slowest of the three and the hardest to fake, which is exactly why it counts.
Part two
Generative engine optimisation
A growing number of people no longer search. They ask — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, or the AI summary now sitting above Google's results. They get back one written answer rather than a list, and most of the time they never click anything.
That changes the goal. There is no position one to win, because there is no list. The question becomes whether the answer was built partly out of your page, and whether it said your name.
And here is the part that catches businesses out: ranking well on Google no longer reliably means being cited by an assistant. The two have pulled apart. Plenty of businesses sitting comfortably at the top of a search results page simply do not appear in the answers at all.
Side by side
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| What the user sees | A list of ten blue links to choose from. | One written answer, assembled from several sources. |
| What winning looks like | Ranking high enough on the page to get the click. | Being one of the sources the answer is built from, and named in it. |
| How you measure it | Positions, impressions, clicks, and what those visitors then do. | How often you are mentioned across the assistants, for which questions, and whether what they say about you is right. |
| How people ask | Three or four words. “plumber toowoomba” | A full sentence. “who should I call for an emergency hot water leak in toowoomba on a sunday” |
| What it rewards | Relevance and authority, accumulated over months. | Being clearly written, well structured, factually checkable and recently updated. |
They are not rivals. Most of the technical groundwork serves both, which is why we sell them together rather than as an upsell.
What actually moves GEO
Six things, in rough order of how much difference they make.
Be readable by machines
Assistants mostly do not run JavaScript. If your site paints itself in the browser, the crawler sees an empty page and you are invisible before the competition even starts.
Answer first, explain second
Lead a section with the direct answer, then give the context. An assistant lifting a sentence wants the sentence that answers the question, not the wind-up.
Structure it
Real headings, short paragraphs, lists where a list is honest. Structured data so a machine knows what is a price, what is an address and what is a question.
Be checkable
Named people, real credentials, sources for claims, dates on things. Assistants lean on what looks verifiable, because they are trying not to be wrong.
Exist elsewhere
Mentions on sites the assistants already trust matter, even without a link. Directories, industry bodies, local press, forums where your trade is discussed.
Keep it current
Stale pages fall out of answers. A page updated this quarter beats a better page from three years ago more often than it should.
The first one is not hypothetical
This site had exactly that problem. Every page served an empty shell to anything that did not run JavaScript, so the assistants saw nothing at all. We fixed it by rendering the pages to real HTML at build time. If your site was built on a modern framework, there is a fair chance it has the same fault — and it is the first thing we check.
The jargon, decoded
- Crawling
- A bot fetching your pages so they can be considered at all.
- Indexing
- Those pages being stored and understood, so they can be shown to someone.
- Keyword
- What a person actually types. Not what you call your service internally.
- Backlink
- Another site linking to yours. A vote, weighted by who is voting.
- SERP
- The search results page itself — links, maps, boxes, ads and all.
- Structured data
- Hidden labelling that tells a machine this is a price, this is a review, this is a question.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google's measures of how quickly and smoothly a page loads and responds.
- Citation (GEO)
- An assistant naming or linking you as a source in its answer.
- Share of voice (GEO)
- How often you come up across many assistant answers, against competitors.
- Zero-click
- The person got their answer without visiting anyone's site. Increasingly normal.
Want to know where you actually stand?
The audit tells you, before you commit to anything.