SEO gets you found. GEO gets you cited. Here’s the structural shift.
What’s different
Traditional SEO optimises for crawlers indexing pages and ranking them in a list. GEO optimises for LLMs reading content and citing it in generated answers. The mechanics are different.
What LLMs reward
- Definitive answers. One sentence that directly answers a likely question, near the top of the page.
- Structured FAQs. Question + complete standalone answer. No “see above”. No “as discussed earlier”.
- Specific numbers. “30% lift” beats “significant improvement”.
- Named entities. Company names, product names, dates, places — LLMs anchor citations to these.
- Schema markup. FAQPage and Article schema make your content machine-legible.
What LLMs ignore
- Clever marketing copy that buries the lede.
- Listicles (“10 ways to…”) without specific, concrete content under each item.
- Long preambles before the answer.
- Image-only content (yet).
The structural pattern
Lead each section with the answer. Support with evidence. Close with a clarifying example. This pattern is rewarded by both search engines and LLMs.
How to test
Ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity about your category. See whose name comes up. See which sources they cite. That’s your GEO baseline. The work is moving up that list.