What on earth is GEO? And why you shouldn't follow AI blindly.
I work in marketing, so terms like SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are part of my daily work. Put simply, it means designing and writing a website so that search engines find and reproduce it as often as possible. For many years, SEO has been what gets websites to appear as high up as possible in Google’s search results.
What is SEO? Here’s a simple example:
You type into Google:
Which OMEGA-3 product is particularly good for children?
Google shows you a list of websites. Which page appears right at the top depends on things like the quality of the content, the technical implementation and many other factors. And we’re not talking about the paid ads here.
The goal of SEO:
People should be able to find the website as easily as possible via a search engine.
With the rise of artificial intelligence, another marketing term now joins it: GEO.
So what is GEO?
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization.
This is no longer about appearing as high up a list of search results as possible. Instead, the aim is for an AI to understand a website’s information and take it into its answers.
If you ask an AI like ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot that same question today, you often get no list of websites at all, but a ready-made answer straight away. Even on Google’s own page, there’s now an AI-generated answer at the top.
And the AI decides for itself which sources it uses.
The goal of GEO:
An AI should understand the website’s content and use it as the basis for its answer.
The difference at a glance
| SEO | GEO |
|---|---|
| Optimising for search engines | Optimising for AI systems |
| The result is a list of websites | The result is a directly phrased answer |
| Goal: as high up Google as possible | Goal: to be used by an AI as a trustworthy source |
| The user clicks through to a site | The user often gets the answer immediately |
Why GEO is becoming risky for us as consumers
More and more of us put our questions straight to an AI like ChatGPT or LeChat. But even when you google, you get an AI-generated answer to questions like:
- “Which bank account in Austria is the cheapest?”
- “Which OMEGA-3 is the best?”
This fundamentally changes the classic search. Where nearly every search for information used to go through a search engine, and I would then click my way through a list of possible websites, AI systems now answer these questions for me directly.
At the moment, though, some companies have already tuned their websites for these AI searches, while others perhaps haven’t. In practice that means the AI isn’t finding the best Omega-3 product for me, or the cheapest account – it’s only showing the products of the companies whose websites it finds text about.
So if a bank has already addressed this specifically and writes in its text, ”… compared with recent years, our XY bank account is the cheapest in all of Austria …”, and that may well have been true in recent years, then that’s exactly the account that appears in your AI answer, with a link to the bank.
But what if another bank has had a better account on offer since last year, and the text on the website doesn’t reflect that? Then you won’t be opening the cheapest account if you follow the AI’s recommendation without questioning it. You’ll simply have opened an account.
Is Austria already preparing for the AI shift?
We notice it daily: the importance of artificial intelligence is growing rapidly. Every week there are improvements, new tools, apps and who knows what else.
According to a study commissioned by the federal government, however, 73% of the Austrian population have little or no knowledge of AI. At the same time, almost half of those surveyed view the development rather critically.
So in Austria we should be working harder on building AI skills. And that absolutely needs to start at home, with parents. Because we parents are raising children who will need to learn how to work safely with AI – not simply let AI do the work for them.
Important future skills such as
- evaluating information critically
- questioning AI answers
- using data safely
- recognising opportunities and risks
- using digital tools sensibly
will be among the most essential skills for the future.
Why this matters especially for parents
Many of our children use AI as a matter of course, often long before these topics are really covered in class. It starts with the youngest, as soon as they have their own access to the internet.
So as parents, we should be asking ourselves:
- Can I trust an AI’s answers? (No! Checking is part of it.)
- What data is my child allowed to enter? (Nothing personal.)
- Does AI really help with learning? (Yes, if used properly – but only as a tool.)
- How do I spot incorrect information? (Only by checking.)
That’s exactly why AI skills will become about as important over the next few years as reading, writing or using the internet safely. And that makes it a must for parents to learn these skills too.
Parents don’t need to become technology experts for this. What matters is understanding how AI works, being able to question answers critically, and supporting children in using it responsibly. And that’s precisely where we at Famalyzer want to help. With this blog, with talks at schools and parent centres, and with an app that makes AI safe to use.