What GEO is, what it is not, and how to read a pitch
Generative Engine Optimization defined, compared against SEO, and stripped back to the narrow set of work that survives scrutiny.
Short answer
Generative Engine Optimization is structuring a business's public information so AI answer engines can identify it, trust it and name it inside a generated answer, where SEO competes for a position in a list of links. It does not replace SEO, because answer engines are built on search infrastructure and being retrievable by an index remains a precondition for being retrievable by an assistant. Much of what is sold under the GEO name has no causal evidence behind it. The part that holds up is narrow: crawler access, server-rendered pages, a direct answer near the H1, and being mentioned on sites you do not own.
A lot of what is sold as GEO is rebranded SEO with a thinner evidence base, and saying so in a room costs us work. The field is young, the vendors are many, and the tactics with the loudest marketing tend to be the ones with the least published support, which is why NovaTechRay publishes what it refuses to sell alongside what it does. A pitch is worth sitting through when it states a method you could repeat, keeps Google's surfaces separate from ChatGPT's, and says out loud what it will not do. Walk when you hear guaranteed placement, a single blended visibility score, or llms.txt on the invoice. Nobody in this field has the data to guarantee an outcome yet, and the ones behaving as though they do are counting on you not checking.