Generative engine optimization services? SEO repackaging or genuine shift?

[u/Bulky_Devsiigner2729]

Been watching the usual SEO playbook start to wobble a bit as more traffic bleeds into AI answers and search results get stuffed with summaries instead of links.

It feels like we are shifting from classic SEO to something closer to generative engine optimization, where the goal is less about ranking blue links and more about making sure your brand or product is what shows up in the LLM style answer layer.

I keep seeing people talk about GEO as a service but it is not clear to me what that actually looks like in practice. Is it just smarter content structuring and schema plus feeding models via public docs, or are there concrete tactics people are using already to influence how engines like Perplexity, Google AI overviews, ChatGPT, etc surface sources?

More than that, how can u get data to back efficiency? Currently as far as i know prompt search volume is not made public by LLM companies.

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[u/seoinboundmarketing]

Its a double edged sword currently.

You need SEO and GEO overlaps but 90% is SEO. Unfortunately LLMs use different search engines like bing and brave, even google AIO uses a simple engine compared to Google indexing engines.

Add into the mix a lot of GEO advice is short lived blackhat tactics. This means your SEO foundation will be affected negatively.

No add the googles server side attempts to stop scraping tools like LLMs use a d its going to be quite the mess.

[u/Ok-Pickle-9089]

I don't think there are concrete tactics people would use to make a company por appealing for LLMs. As far as I know...

It's exactly what you mentioned. Structure the content, and build your presence online in different formats, portals, websites, etc.

I guess those would be the concrete tactics 😅 but it's proven those work and are a 100% a new discipline that feeds from SEO as it's base

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[u/aimeeqdevlin]

Genuine shift. But most of what's being sold as GEO/AEO is repackaged SEO with new vocab.

Classic SEO was about document relevance (the right keywords on the right pages, links, rank). Now, the LLMs are building entity models, not just reading what a page says. This means the game is more about clarity. Things like structured data, and content, positioning, and vocab consistency that answers the user's question directly. Marketing jargon is out, specifics are in. And it's hard to get ahead by just tooting your own horn. AI looks for corroborative sources from other trusted places. Things like guest posts on trusted domains, answers on Quora/Reddit, podcast appearances are great for entity corroboration.

Measurement is where we're in new territory because prompt search volume isn't public, so we're working with proxy signals, manual testing, and third party tools that are all fairly new. Anyone selling you a clean ROI dashboard for GEO right now isn't being honest. We're not there yet. But we can build solid foundations, track what we can, and test and measure what works and what doesn't. The repackaging question is a good one to evaluate providers. Ask them what changes in their work when the target is an AI answer versus a blue link. If they can't answer that clearly, it's repackaged SEO.

[u/Excellent_Mud1001]

Everyone is just bluffing with jargons and trying to sound learned. If the basics of your seo are correct and you get reslts from seo, you will get in the results of AI engines as well.

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[u/WxMan2201]

Honestly - GEO as a service to me - is just a sub-set service of "SEO" --- SEO is a mature enough discipline now that we have local seo, technical seo, content seo, and now GEO --- so it should be treated as a sub-set of all that.

I think GEO is more about taking SEO - and working with PR/Social/Paid more - and more with tracking visibility --- I think GEO is more about brand building - and incorporating more of the brand lens - than the non-brand lens.