The AIO and GEO Hype Train: What Agencies Won't Tell You

Everyone in the SEO industry is talking about AIO and GEO right now. New acronyms. New service pages. New LinkedIn thought leadership every single day. But is this genuinely new ground, or is the industry just very good at repackaging what it already does? I’ve got some thoughts on that.

Everyone’s Talking About GEO. But Are They Asking the Right Questions?

I’m going to be honest. I am tired of it.

Every week there’s another agency launching a GEO service page. Another LinkedIn post telling you that SEO is dead and GEO is the future. Another webinar promising to teach you how to “optimise for AI” as if it’s some completely new discipline that arrived last Tuesday.

It hasn’t.

People seem to think GEO is why you appear in AI Overviews, in ChatGPT results, in Perplexity answers. Like there’s some secret switch you need to flip. Some new technique that only the enlightened few understand.

There isn’t. And the evidence backs that up.

But before I get into the data, let me make the one argument I haven’t seen a single agency, thought leader, or LinkedIn guru make yet.

If It’s Not Indexed, It Doesn’t Exist in AI

Google AI Overviews pull from indexed content. Perplexity crawls the web and surfaces indexed pages. ChatGPT’s browsing features also rely on indexed content. Every AI search tool that exists right now is getting its information from somewhere and that somewhere is search engines. Google. Bing. The indexed web.

So the obvious question is: if a piece of content isn’t indexed, how could it possibly appear in an AI Overview?

It can’t. That’s the simple answer.

The reality is that AI visibility still relies on the same fundamentals it always has.

• Can search engines find your page?
• Can they crawl it properly?
• Can they understand the structure and context of the content?
• Is the content strong enough to rank and earn visibility?

Because the better your content performs in search, the more likely it is to be cited by AI systems.

That isn’t GEO. That’s SEO. It’s what the industry has been doing for years.

And yet somehow it’s been repackaged with a new name, a new service page, and often a new price tag.

What AIO and GEO Actually Are (When You Strip the Branding)

Let me be fair. AIO and GEO aren’t made-up nonsense. The terms describe real things.

AIO (AI Optimisation) is about structuring content so AI platforms can understand, extract, and cite it. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is about optimising for generative search engines like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.

Fine. But what does that actually look like in practice?

Structured data. Clear heading hierarchy. Answer-first content. Authoritative citations. Entity markup. Technical crawlability. Content that genuinely answers the question a person is asking.

Sound familiar? It should.

I looked at one of the top-ranking GEO agency pages in the UK. Their service breakdown lists “answer-ready pages”, “entity markup”, “citations”, and “technical hygiene” as their GEO deliverables.

That’s a technical SEO audit. That’s what we deliver to every client, every month. The only difference is the landing page it sits on.

What Google Actually Says About AI Overviews

You’d think with all the noise around GEO, Google would have issued some big new set of requirements. New ranking factors. New technical specs.

They didn’t.

Read that again. No additional requirements. The best practices for SEO remain relevant.

Google is telling you, in plain English, that SEO is how you get into AI Overviews. Not GEO. Not AIO. SEO.

And it’s not just Google saying it. Digiday ran an investigation into the GEO trend and one agency CEO admitted openly that “80% of GEO is good, fundamental SEO.” Steven Frank, an SEO and Content Strategy Manager, put it even more bluntly on LinkedIn: “A lot of what’s being sold right now as some bold new playbook is just solid SEO with better branding.”

Then there’s the academic paper that actually coined the term GEO. Researchers at Princeton, IIT Delhi, and Georgia Tech tested nine optimisation strategies. The ones that actually improved visibility in generative engines? Citing sources. Adding statistics. Using quotations from authoritative figures. Structuring content clearly.

The paper that invented GEO essentially described good SEO.

What’s Actually Changed (And It’s Not Nothing)

I want to be clear about something. I’m not saying nothing has changed. It has.

AI search is genuinely shifting how information gets surfaced. The numbers are real and they matter.

When AI Overviews appear, the zero-click rate jumps to 83%. Without them, it’s 60%. Organic click-through rates drop by 61% when an AI Overview sits above the results. ChatGPT has over 800 million weekly users. Gemini has over 750 million monthly users. These platforms are where people are going for answers.

Brand search volume, not backlinks, is now the strongest predictor of whether your brand gets cited by AI. And only 11% of domains get cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity, which tells you these platforms source differently.

These are meaningful shifts. The landscape is evolving. I’m not pretending it isn’t.

But the response isn’t a new discipline. It’s doing SEO better.

When mobile changed search, we didn’t rename SEO. When Core Web Vitals launched, we didn’t rename SEO. When featured snippets appeared, we didn’t rename SEO. We adapted. We evolved. We got better at what we were already doing.

That’s what good SEOs do. And that’s what’s happening now.

So What Should a GEO Agency Actually Be Doing?

When people tell me they’re working with a GEO agency, I always ask the same question. What are they doing that an SEO agency isn’t doing?

The truth is nothing.

Or at least, nothing that a competent SEO agency shouldn’t already be doing. Technical SEO. Structured data. Content that answers real questions. Authority building. Freshness. Crawlability. Site speed. All of it feeds into AI visibility because AI pulls from the same indexed web that organic search does.

The better your SEO, the better your AI visibility. It all goes hand in hand.

At Six Digital, we’ve added AI search visibility to our reporting. We track brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews. We monitor which pages get cited and why. But we’re not calling it a new service. Because it isn’t one. It’s the same work, done to a higher standard, with broader visibility tracking.

85% of AI Overview citations come from content published in the last two years. That tells you freshness matters more than ever. But freshness has always been a ranking factor. 44% of citations come from 2025 content alone. So publish regularly, publish well, and keep your content current. That’s SEO. Always has been.

If you’re being told you need a separate GEO strategy on top of your SEO strategy, ask yourself what’s actually different. Ask what deliverables you’re getting that you wouldn’t get from a good SEO agency. And if the answer is “a new report with different acronyms on it,” you might want to ask more questions.

This is my honest opinion. SEO is the foundation. It always was. The channels are changing. The way information gets surfaced is evolving. But the fundamentals? They haven’t moved.

Do SEO properly. The rest follows.

So Why Does Six Digital Have AIO and GEO Pages?

Fair question. If I’ve just spent 1,500 words telling you this is all SEO, why do we have a page called AI Search Optimisation?

Because the market is asking for it. And we’d be bad SEOs if we ignored what people are searching for.

Joe Davies put it well on LinkedIn. Whether GEO is just SEO in new wrapping paper is, from a commercial standpoint, irrelevant. Clients and stakeholders know there’s a new channel. AI chat interfaces. Google AI Overviews. ChatGPT. Perplexity. They want to know it’s being handled. And if an agency can’t even talk about it, they’ll find one that can.

He’s right about that. The demand is real. People are typing “AIO agency” and “GEO agency” into Google right now. If we don’t have a page that meets them there, someone else will. And that someone else might sell them a rebrand of what they already have at twice the price.

The difference is what happens after the click.

Most agencies will tell you GEO is a brand new discipline. They’ll sell you a separate strategy, separate deliverables, separate invoice. We won’t. Our AI search page exists because you searched for it. But when you land on it, we’ll tell you what I’ve told you here. This is SEO. Done properly. With broader visibility tracking across AI platforms.

We have the page because we practice what we preach. We optimise for the terms people search. That’s the whole point.