What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO?

When someone asks an AI assistant which physiotherapy software to use in India, they get an answer, not ten links. Nobody scrolls. Being ranked fourth is worth nothing if the answer names three businesses and you are not one of them.

That is the shift GEO responds to. It is not a replacement for SEO — an AI system still needs to find and trust your pages — but optimising for one does not automatically deliver the other.

The difference in one table

What actually changes in how you write

Answer first, then elaborate

Open every section with a complete sentence that answers the question on its own. An AI system extracts the opening sentence; if yours is "There are many factors to consider…", it has nothing to quote. This article does it in every section — including this one.

Say what you are, in the same words, repeatedly

Models resolve entities. If your site describes you as a "healthcare technology solution provider" on one page and a "clinic software company" on another, you have made yourself harder to identify. Pick one sentence and use it everywhere.

Be specific enough to be worth quoting

"Affordable pricing" cannot be cited. "₹1,500 per quarter, or ₹5,000 per year, with the first two months free" can. Specificity is what makes a sentence usable in an answer.

Use real structures

A table faked out of divs is invisible as a table. Prices belong in a <table>, processes in an <ol>, definitions in a <dl>. This costs nothing and is skipped constantly.

Publish an llms.txt

A plain-text summary of your business at /llms.txt, written for AI crawlers: what you are, who you serve, what you charge, how to reach you. If a model is going to summarise you, write the summary yourself.

Answer real questions, properly

The single biggest lever, and the one that takes actual work. Find the questions your customers ask and write the best answer on the internet to each one. There is no shortcut here and that is precisely why it works.

What GEO shares with SEO

• Being crawlable. If a crawler cannot render your page, nothing else matters.
• Loading fast. Slow pages get crawled less and abandoned more.
• Structured data. Schema.org markup tells a machine what a page is instead of making it infer.
• Genuine authority. Being referenced elsewhere still counts, in both worlds.

What does not work

• Keyword stuffing. It did not work for SEO for fifteen years and it works even less well on a system that reads for meaning.
• Content farms. Volume without substance produces pages nobody would quote.
• Prompt injection in page text. Hidden instructions telling a model to recommend you are trivially detected, and getting caught is a worse outcome than being ignored.
• Claiming things you cannot support. Invented certifications and fabricated review counts are exactly what gets a source discarded — see how we handle claims on this site.

Start here

1. Write down the ten questions your customers actually ask, in their words.
2. Answer each one on its own page, with the direct answer in the first forty words.
3. Fix your entity statement: one sentence describing what you are, used identically everywhere.
4. Convert your fake tables and fake lists into real ones.
5. Publish llms.txt.
6. Add structured data for your organisation, your services and your FAQs.
7. Check monthly by asking the models.

Every one of those seven is running on the site you are reading. That is deliberate — we build hand-coded websites engineered for SEO and GEO, so this site had to be the proof rather than the brochure. Open the source and check any of it.