SEO
Also known as: Search Engine Optimization, Organic search
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the combination of technical, content and link-building work that helps a website rank higher in the free, organic results of search engines such as Google and Bing for relevant searches.
SEO is usually split into three areas:
- Technical SEO: making sure the site can be crawled, loads quickly and gets indexed correctly. robots.txt, sitemaps, redirects and page speed all live here.
- Content: pages that genuinely answer the searcher’s question, written by people who know the subject and kept up to date. Google describes this through E-E-A-T.
- Off-site signals: links from other sites and mentions of the brand elsewhere.
SEO in the age of AI
AI assistants haven’t made SEO obsolete. Many of them rely on search engine results or their own crawling infrastructure when they compose an answer. A page that can’t be crawled or indexed is unlikely to be cited in an AI answer either. That’s why most GEO work sits on top of a solid SEO foundation.
What has changed is how you measure it. Rankings and clicks still matter, but as AI Overviews and zero-click searches grow, a page’s value can’t be judged by traffic alone.
Example
A dental clinic might rank on page one for “dental implant prices” yet not appear at all when you ask Gemini the same question. That means SEO is in decent shape and GEO has a gap. Measuring both side by side makes the difference visible.