Being found used to mean one thing: appearing in a list of blue links. Now there are two front doors, they reward slightly different things, and most of the work happens to serve both.

What is SEO?

SEO — search engine optimisation — is the work of making a website appear higher in search results for the things its customers search for. It has three parts: technical, making sure search engines can reach, read and index your pages; content, making sure those pages answer the questions people actually ask; and authority, the signals that suggest your page is worth trusting over others. Nothing about it is secret, and none of it is bought from the search engine.

The three parts are not equal in urgency. Technical faults are absolute — a page that cannot be indexed cannot rank, no matter how good it is — while content and authority are relative, a competition you can be losing and still be in. Which is why the technical half is the right place to start even though the content half is the part people find interesting.

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

GEO — generative engine optimisation — is making a site usable as a source by AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. It shares almost all of SEO’s foundation, because a page still has to be reachable and readable, but it adds two requirements: the AI operators’ own crawlers must be allowed to fetch you, and the answer must be liftable in one self-contained passage, because a quote is what an assistant produces.

The second requirement quietly changes how you write. A traditional search result rewards a page that covers a subject thoroughly; the visitor arrives and reads. An assistant does the reading and then quotes, so the unit that matters is not the page, it is the passage. Three clear sentences directly under a heading that matches the question will be lifted. The same information spread across an introduction, a table and four paragraphs will not. What that looks like in practice, engine by engine, is in how to get cited by AI search.

Do I need to do SEO and GEO separately?

Mostly no. The great majority of the work is shared foundation — pages that can be crawled and indexed, content in the HTML rather than assembled by JavaScript, clear answers under clear headings. The genuinely separate part of GEO is small and specific: whether the AI crawlers are allowed in, and whether your pages answer them the same way they answer everyone else.

That separate part deserves ten minutes of attention because it fails silently and completely. Robots.txt rules are matched per crawler, so a site can allow Googlebot and block GPTBot in the same file with nothing looking wrong. And the operators run several crawlers each with different purposes: blocking the ones that collect training data is a legitimate business choice, while blocking the ones that fetch a page to answer a live question removes you from the answers entirely. Most sites that have done the second did not mean to. It is covered in are you blocking AI crawlers.

What can I do myself for both SEO and GEO?

More than most people expect. Set up Google Search Console, check that nothing is blocking indexing, make sure every page has its own honest title and description, write the answer to each question in the first few sentences under a heading, and check that your robots.txt does not shut out the AI crawlers. That list costs an afternoon and covers the faults that stop most small sites being found at all.

In order, with what each is for:

  • Search Console. Free, ten minutes, and the only honest view of how Google sees you. Its data accumulates from the day you verify, so setting it up late leaves a permanent hole.
  • Check nothing is blocked. A leftover noindex or robots.txt rule is the most common reason a site is invisible — see why your website is not showing up.
  • One title and description per page. These are your advert in the results. Templates that fill twenty pages with one line waste twenty adverts — see titles and descriptions.
  • Answer first, then elaborate. Serves both disciplines: readers get their answer, and assistants get something they can quote.
  • Check the AI crawlers. Ten minutes, and it either confirms you are fine or reveals that you have been invisible to assistants for a year.

What you cannot do yourself, and what nobody can

Nobody can buy a position in the ordinary results. Adverts are a separate, labelled product; a "premium listing" in the index does not exist, and anyone selling one is describing something imaginary. Nobody can guarantee a ranking either, for the straightforward reason that no supplier controls the competition.

What an agency genuinely buys you is time and judgement — and the way to make that money go further is to hand them a site whose foundations already work, rather than paying professional rates for someone to find a stray noindex tag.

Keeping it working

The awkward property of all of this is that it does not stay fixed. A CMS upgrade resets a template. A new consent banner stops a script rendering. A framework change moves content from server to client. A CDN rule added during an incident shuts out a crawler. None of these look like SEO work, none will be reviewed as such, and the first symptom is traffic that quietly stops arriving.

TrustCtrl visits your site in a real browser on a schedule and checks the whole shared foundation in one pass — indexing blockers, robots.txt and AI-crawler access, sitemap accuracy, content that needs JavaScript, titles and descriptions, speed, mobile layout and security settings — and reports what changed since last time, in plain language with the fix. It is the difference between finding a fault in a week and finding it in a quarter.