Start with a website that search engines can reach, understand and index. Then improve the pages customers use to evaluate your business. GEO adds attention to how your information may be retrieved and cited in AI answers; it does not replace sound SEO.
What is the difference?
SEO improves a website’s discoverability and usefulness in organic search. GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is a term used for work intended to improve how a brand and its information appear in AI-generated answers.
Think of one shared foundation with different ways of measuring outcomes. A useful service page should help someone arriving from a search result, a recommendation or an AI citation make the same decision: is this business relevant to me?
Use a practical order of work
- Check access. Confirm important pages load, can be crawled and have an intentional indexing status.
- Clarify the offer. Explain who the service is for, what it includes and what the next step involves.
- Answer buying questions. Cover scope, process, constraints and how a customer should compare alternatives.
- Attach evidence. Link to primary sources and distinguish documented results from expectations.
- Measure useful actions. Track qualified enquiries alongside search and citation visibility.
What Google and OpenAI actually document
Google says its existing SEO practices remain relevant to AI Overviews and AI Mode, with no special additional markup required for inclusion. OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot for search separately from GPTBot for model training. Treat search access and training preferences as separate settings.
Neither allowing a crawler nor adding structured data guarantees a ranking, citation or customer enquiry.
A useful first-month scorecard
Choose a small, repeatable set of business questions. Record the exact query, language, platform, date and cited URL. Compare those observations with enquiries and the pages visitors used before contacting you. Separate a one-off mention from a recurring pattern.
For a Hong Kong business, review English and Traditional Chinese queries separately. A literal translation is a starting point for research, not proof that customers use the same wording.
Sources & updates
Sources were checked on 3 October 2026. Prices, schedules and policies can change; use the original source for current details.
How we research and correct our guides · Suggest a correction