SEO is the long game — building the digital infrastructure that makes your business discoverable to the customers already searching for what you offer. GEO is the newer game — making sure AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews recommend you when someone asks them for a business like yours.
SEO is the practice of making your website answer the questions your customers are already typing into Google. It’s the work of structuring your pages so search engines understand what you do, who you serve, and why they should recommend you over the competition.
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is the same idea, adapted for a world where a growing share of searches never reach Google at all. Your customers are increasingly asking AI assistants “what’s the best Japanese restaurant in Glasgow’s West End?” and making decisions based on the answer. GEO is about making sure the answer includes you.
Both are infrastructure work. Neither produces fireworks in the first week. Done right, both produce customers who find you, trust you, and choose you — for years.
The issue isn’t usually that your business is bad at what it does. It’s that your website isn’t telling search engines and AI engines what you’re good at — in language they understand.
Every SEO engagement starts with an honest look at what’s actually happening. Where do your pages rank? For what terms? What’s indexed? What’s broken? What are search engines telling your customers about you right now? We’d rather spend a week discovering the real problem than three months fixing the wrong one.
Most sites have basic technical issues that are holding their rankings down — slow pages, missing structure, broken canonical tags, mobile issues, indexing problems. These don’t need to be glamorous to fix. They just need to be fixed.
Google ranks pages that answer specific questions well — not homepages that list services generically. We build the dedicated pages your customers’ searches actually lead to. This is also where GEO starts to matter. AI engines pull from well-structured content with clear claims and clear evidence.
SEO without measurement is gardening in the dark. We track rankings, traffic, conversions, and — increasingly — mentions in AI-generated responses. Monthly reports in plain English. What’s working, what isn’t, what we’re adjusting.
Written document covering technical health, keyword position, content gaps, and competitive landscape. A document you can share with anyone.
What to fix, in what order, by whom, by when. Not a 90-page PDF. A document you can execute from.
The terms your business should be ranking for, mapped to the pages that should target them. For GEO: the questions AI engines should associate with your business.
Rankings. Traffic. Conversions. AI-engine mentions. Plain English. What changed, what we’re changing next.
Available as a one-off audit + action plan, or as a monthly retainer for businesses that want us maintaining the work over time.
Before we started, Nanakusa’s previous website was built on Flipdish — an ordering platform designed for takeaways, not for a restaurant with Nanakusa’s character. The templated architecture meant Nanakusa was competing against thousands of other restaurants using the same system, and the site offered little beyond a homepage and menu. We replaced the Flipdish template with a bespoke website built around Nanakusa’s actual identity, with dedicated pages targeting the searches their customers were making.
Nanakusa went from a site Google couldn’t properly understand — an ordering template pretending to be a restaurant — to a site that tells Google exactly what this restaurant is, who it’s for, and why it deserves to rank. The traffic followed.
SEMrush data shows traffic approaching 2,800/month by end of 2024 from a baseline of roughly 1,400 in May. A steep mid-2025 decline appears to be a measurement issue in SEMrush’s data collection rather than a genuine traffic loss; traffic subsequently recovered to May 2024 levels and continued rising. Keyword positions have remained steady with recent signs of renewed growth. Backlink profile is holding — more new links gained than lost, and no vital links lost.
Across 2025 and 2026, the share of searches that end in an AI-generated answer rather than a list of blue links has grown sharply. If your business isn’t cited by these engines, you’re invisible to a growing share of your potential customers — even when your website ranks well on Google.
Classical SEO is about ranking. GEO is about being cited. They overlap heavily — both reward well-structured content, clear claims, and authoritative sources — but they diverge in important ways:
We write content with explicit, citable claims. We structure pages so AI engines can extract and attribute specific facts. We monitor AI-generated answers for the terms that matter to your business. And we treat citations in AI answers as a metric, not an afterthought.
GEO is still new enough that most agencies aren’t doing it at all. For businesses acting now, the window to establish AI-engine visibility before competitors catch on is open — but not for long.
The new Sichuan House website was built with proper page structure, dedicated content for the menu categories that matter, and a CMS that lets the team keep the site genuinely current — a signal Google and AI engines both reward. Combined with social-side growth (video views doubled in month one), the brand’s digital footprint expanded across both classical search and AI-generated discovery simultaneously.
Read the full Sichuan House story →The first conversation is free, fifteen minutes, and has no prep. We’ll look at where you rank today, where you should rank, and whether AI engines know you exist. Then we’ll tell you honestly whether SEO work is the right investment for your business right now.
Book a free 15-minute chatNo pitch. No prep. Just a conversation about what you’re building.