What is GEO (generative engine optimisation)?

GEO is how you get your site read, referenced, and cited by AI search. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Bing Copilot. It measures whether AI assistants can find your content, understand what you do, and recommend you when a buyer asks them a question. SEO answers "will Google rank me". GEO answers "will AI recommend me". In 2026 buyers ask both, so both scores matter.

SEO (search engine optimisation) is how you rank in Google. Technical crawlability, on-page signals, content depth, authority, and site speed. Done right, Google sends organic traffic for the queries that match your business. SEO has driven the bulk of qualified traffic for UK buyers for twenty years and still does. The shift in 2026 is that AI Overviews intercept some of those clicks before they reach your site, which is why SEO now has to sit next to GEO.

How much does a Pulse audit cost?

Pulse audits start at £695. Three disciplines, three tiers. Pulse SEO (SEO only) from £695. Pulse AI (GEO only) from £895. Pulse Complete (both disciplines, recommended) from £1,095. Growth and Dominance tiers go deeper and come with longer readout calls; tier-level pricing is quoted per buyer scope, email info@valux.uk or use the contact form to enquire.

What's the difference between an SEO audit and a GEO audit?

SEO audits score how you rank. GEO audits score how you get recommended. An SEO audit looks at Google: crawlability, indexation, page speed, content structure, backlinks, intent match. A GEO audit looks at AI search: can ChatGPT read your site, does Perplexity cite you, do you appear in Google AI Overviews, do entity signals and brand mentions line up. The two overlap in technical foundations but diverge on content shape and citation signals. Running one without the other leaves half the funnel unmeasured. Google sends the click. AI decides whether the click ever happens. Pulse Complete covers both in a single score so you see the full picture.

SEO vs GEO vs AEO: what's actually different in 2026

Three letters. Three letters. Three letters again. SEO, GEO, and AEO get used as if they were synonyms in 90 percent of marketing copy, and the result is buyers signing up for one when they actually need a different one. Before the next pitch deck lands on your desk with all three sprinkled across the cover, here is what each one is trying to win, and where they overlap.

The short answer, in three sentences

SEO wins the click on a Google results page.
GEO wins the citation inside an AI answer.
AEO wins the answer-box position on a Google SERP feature, like the People Also Ask drop-down or the highlighted answer at the top.

AEO is essentially a subset of SEO with answer-shaped content. GEO is its own discipline that overlaps SEO at the technical floor and diverges everywhere upstream of that.

Side by side, in detail

These are the practical differences a programme has to plan for. The categories below come from the seven-category Pulse rubric. See /scoring for the full weighting.

Surface optimised for. SEO: ten blue links. AEO: featured snippet, People Also Ask, knowledge panel. GEO: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews.
Primary success metric. SEO: organic clicks and ranking position. AEO: zero-click presence on a SERP feature. GEO: citation rate across a curated question set, plus brand mention recall.
Content shape. SEO: keyword-mapped pages, internal linking, depth. AEO: 40 to 60 word answer in a header-led structure with schema. GEO: 60 to 200 word self-contained passages with named statistics and source attribution.
Authority signal. SEO: backlinks. AEO: backlinks plus FAQPage and HowTo schema. GEO: brand mentions across Wikipedia, Reddit, Hacker News, Common Crawl, Clutch, LinkedIn, plus per-engine training-data presence.
Crawler list. SEO: Googlebot. AEO: Googlebot plus Bing. GEO: Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, CCBot, plus around fifteen others.
Time to result. SEO: weeks to months for ranking shifts. AEO: a recrawl cycle, often under a week for snippet wins. GEO: variable. Citation flow starts within days for retrieval-augmented engines (Perplexity, Gemini live search) and takes longer for training-data engines (ChatGPT base model), which only update their world view at training time.
Failure mode. SEO: thin content, slow pages, broken hreflang. AEO: missing schema, no answer-shaped passages. GEO: blocked AI crawlers, no llms.txt, weak off-site brand surface.

Why the distinction matters in real reporting

Treating SEO, GEO, and AEO as one bucket means a programme can score well on one and zero on another while reporting an "overall green". A site can have perfect Core Web Vitals, top-three rankings on every commercial keyword, and still be invisible to ChatGPT because nobody has touched the AI crawler list or written a single answer-shaped passage. Splitting the disciplines forces the report to show where the gap actually is.

Three acronyms, three different success metrics. A single "green" can hide a zero on the surface that matters most to your buyers.

The shared technical floor

All three disciplines share one technical floor. Get this right once and every layer above it works. Skip it and nothing works, which is why so many AI-readiness engagements turn into SEO clean-up engagements halfway through.

Crawlability. Robots.txt allows the crawler list above. No accidental noindex. JavaScript-only routes either prerendered or delivered as server-side HTML.
Schema. Organization, Article, Product, FAQPage, HowTo, all valid per the Google Rich Results test, all matching the visible content character for character.
Performance. INP under 200 ms, LCP under 2.5 seconds, no render-blocking third-party fonts.
Information architecture. One canonical URL per intent. No near-duplicate landing pages competing with themselves.

How Pulse handles the three

Pulse audits score AEO inside SEO, since it is part of the SERP-feature surface, and score GEO as its own dimension. The seven-category composite covers SEO and GEO across separate categories so neither hides the other. Per-category scoring and weights are at /scoring.

Where to start

If you have never measured your AI visibility, the fastest read is a free 60-second Pulse Check. If you want the full per-question citation report broken down by engine, the catalogue is at /pricing.