We already pay for SEO. Is this the same thing?

Where the two jobs part ways

A search result is a list, and being on page one means being one of ten links. An AI answer is a paragraph, and it names two or three businesses. Someone who asks Gemini for an emergency plumber in your city does not scroll; they call one of the names it gave. So the question SEO answers, where do we rank for this keyword, is not the question GEO answers, which is whether the engine says your name at all when a customer describes what they need.

The inputs differ too. Nobody types "dentist" into ChatGPT. They ask who does same-day crowns near them and takes their insurance, and the engine builds its answer from whatever it can read and corroborate: your pages, a "best in town" listicle, a couple of review sites, a local thread on Reddit. Ranking well on Google does not put you in that answer.

What the two share

Both need a site the crawlers can read and pages that say something specific. A site that blocks AI crawlers in robots.txt, hides its text behind scripts, and never says which neighborhoods you serve can still rank, but it cannot be quoted. When we open crawler access, put the text in the page, and rewrite your service and location pages to say what you do, where, and for whom, Google reads the same improvements. That is why the fixes tend to help your rankings as a side effect.

Working next to your SEO agency

If your agency is doing good work, we do not ask you to drop them. Our part is measured differently, by your mention rate per engine and your share of voice against the businesses the engines name instead of you, tracked daily for your city, so the two reports do not compete for the same credit.