Your prospects have picked up a new habit. Before finding you, some ask ChatGPT: “which booking software for a restaurant?”, “which agency to rebuild our site before September?”. The answer runs a few lines, names two or three companies, and yours is in it or not.

That is the ground of GEO, for Generative Engine Optimization: being recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI answers. Here is how those answers get made, and what that changes for your website.

1. Google is not dead, and AI is not a gimmick.

Two facts, measured by SimilarWeb from August 2024 to January 2026:

• ChatGPT receives close to 6 billion visits per month. It is no longer a curiosity.
• Google receives about 15 times more, and its traffic has not dropped since ChatGPT arrived.

If AI were replacing search, Google’s curve would dive. It is flat. These are two habits living side by side: you type “car insurance” into Google to compare the results yourself, and you ask an AI a precise question that deserves a written answer.

Searches with strong purchase intent still overwhelmingly go through search engines. But AI is a new channel, a growing one, and your competitors have not settled on it yet.

2. An AI answers with two memories.

To know where to act, you need to know where the AI pulls its answers from. There are two sources, and they do not run at the same speed.

The first memory is huge and slow: what the web says about you today will only enter it at the model’s next training. The second is narrow and instant: if your page sits in the top results, the AI can cite it tonight.

3. The questions that pay off trigger a web search.

The AI does not search the web for every question. A definition, a historical fact, timeless advice: it answers from memory. It runs a search when the answer depends on recent or local data: a price, an availability, a comparison, an address.

Look at the list of questions that trigger a search: “where to buy this product”, “which provider is best for”, “which site has the best price”. These are exactly a buyer’s questions.

Queries with commercial value are the ones where the AI reads Google’s and Bing’s results. A well-ranked page therefore works twice: it captures visitors from search engines, and it serves as a source for AI answers. Your SEO is not competing with GEO, it is its foundation.

4. The strategy that holds: both, in this order.

Marketing history has played this scene before. When the internet arrived, the winners were the advertisers who kept television while taking position on the web. Those who cut everything on one side, or waited too long on the other, paid for it.

Same logic here:

1. Keep doing SEO. It is what brings visits today, and letting it slide means handing your positions to a competitor.
2. Take position on AI now, while your market is not paying attention. On a new channel, first movers keep their lead for a long time.

No need for two providers or two budgets. The fundamentals are shared, and the work done for one serves the other.

5. What it changes, concretely, on your site.

Three direct consequences for a business website:

• Content an AI can cite. Dated, numbered facts, in clean sentences. A page that says “website built in 2 weeks, from €3,500 excl. VAT” can be reused in an answer; a page of generalities cannot. A number beats an adjective, for readers and machines alike.
• Clean technical groundwork. Sitemap, tags, schema.org, load speed: what helps Google read your site helps AI read it. On our projects, that groundwork is part of every site’s scope, not an option.
• Crawlers let in. A robots.txt file that blocks AI crawlers makes your site invisible to them, whatever the quality of the rest.

This work is designed in from the start, not after launch. It is what Julien Tessier, founder of Padel Day, took away when his site was delivered:

He also built in search from day one, ready to be found on Google and recommended by AI.

If you have a launch, a fundraise or a trade show ahead, now is the right time to lay that groundwork. Book a call, thirty minutes to scope your project.