Ranking first and being quoted are different achievements. A search engine sends someone to your page. An assistant reads your page, decides whether it is worth repeating, and then answers without the click. Optimising for the second is a different job.
Where they overlap
Being crawlable, being fast, having a clear structure, and saying something specific. Everything that made a page good for search still helps, because assistants largely read the same web. There is no version of this where a thin, slow, blocked site wins.
Where they pull apart
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Keyword density versus a quotable sentence
Search rewarded covering a term thoroughly. An assistant is looking for one sentence it can lift and attribute. A page that answers the question in its first line beats one that builds to it over eight hundred words.
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Traffic versus attribution
SEO succeeds when someone clicks. GEO succeeds when your name appears in an answer nobody clicks. That means your reporting has to change too, because analytics will not show it.
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Ranking position versus consensus
Search picks a best page. An assistant synthesises several sources and prefers claims that appear consistently across them. Being right in three places beats being first in one.
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Hedging versus specifics
Vague marketing copy is unquotable. Published figures, named integrations, stated processes and actual prices are the things an assistant can repeat safely, which is why hedged copy underperforms here.
Why published prices beat keyword density
When someone asks an assistant what something costs, it needs a number attached to a source. A page saying pricing is bespoke, contact us gives it nothing. A page explaining what drives the cost and giving honest ranges gives it something to quote, with your name on it.
The same applies to method. Say two to four weeks rather than rapid delivery. Say Sage, Xero and QuickBooks rather than integrates with your existing systems. Specificity is the currency.
What does not transfer
Backlink volume matters less than it did, and domain authority is not a field an assistant reads. What matters more is whether your claims are corroborated somewhere other than your own site, which is closer to a PR and directory problem than a link-building one.
Our service page covers the work itself: AI search visibility.
Questions we get asked
Will good SEO get us cited anyway?
Partly. Being crawlable and useful is the price of entry. But pages written to rank often hedge and pad, and hedged copy is exactly what an assistant cannot quote.
Do we have to choose between them?
No, and you should not. Write the page to answer the question in the first paragraph, then support it properly. That serves both.
How do we measure GEO?
By tracking whether assistants name you for the questions your buyers actually ask, across several models, over time. Analytics will not tell you, because there is often no click.
Is this just the old featured-snippet game?
It rhymes with it. The difference is that an assistant blends several sources and cares about consistency between them, so you cannot win it with one well-formatted page.