Strategy
Do I need GEO or SEO?
Ryan McMillan
AI search isn’t on the horizon. It’s already here. ChatGPT handles 1.1 billion queries a day, Perplexity averages 400 million searches a month and Google’s AI Overviews now appear in 13% of results.
Meanwhile, Bing has grown its share of the market, reminding us that SEO isn’t just about Google anymore, it’s about optimising for visibility across multiple engines.
And traffic volumes are only part of the story.
Early data shows that LLMs (large language models like ChatGPT) are emerging as one of the highest-converting traffic sources after direct.
They’re trusted almost like word-of-mouth referrals, which is the kind of influence that can shape six-figure buying decisions before a customer even reaches your site.
For B2B tech companies, it truly is the new frontline of discovery.
So which do you need and where should you focus?
Here’s the shift too many marketers miss: it’s not about SEO vs. GEO, Google vs. Bing or even social vs. search. Buyers move across all of these, often in the same journey.
Stats vary (wildly!), but B2B buyers engage in a bunch of different touchpoints before converting, with some sources citing 50+. Supposedly, this number is growing, too.
Marketers love little funnels, but the reality is that B2B discovery journeys are sprawling, AI-mediated and can be highly compressed.
So our job as marketers isn't to optimise in silos. It’s to map, measure and optimise the entire buyer journey across all of ‘the engines’, AI platforms and social channels.
The companies that win are those that treat visibility as an ecosystem, not a single channel.
SEO trends have been around long enough that most of us know what they involve. Optimising for rankings, gaining backlinks, tracking keyword positions and chasing clicks.
But GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) doesn’t focus on optimising for traffic.You should aim to be the source that AI engines cite when generating answers.
If a buyer asks ChatGPT, “Which attribution model works for SaaS with long sales cycles?”, GEO decides whether your business is mentioned in the response.
Many of your buyers are already spending a lot of time in AI search. According to McKinsey, 90% of businesses now use AI in digital marketing in some form. Clicks aren’t the metric in GEO. References are.
At Atlas, we don’t see SEO and GEO as an either/or scenario. The future belongs to the companies that can master both.
So we’ve stepped back and repositioned our entire service around ‘Organic’ rather than a specific part of it, creating overall online discoverability for our clients.
Organic discoverability is as much about managing your online reputation as it is about building content, technically optimising your site and a bunch more activities.
But if you want to build an edge in AI, you should focus here:
If you really want to benchmark how you're performing, I'd recommend measuring these:
This is where our thinking ties directly into attribution. In a recent article about this, we said that companies need to look beyond last-click metrics to understand how marketing activity actually influences pipeline. The same applies here: SEO and GEO only matter if you can prove how they contribute to deals and dollars.
Immediate moves:
Strategic planning:
Technical must-haves:
Google’s AI Overviews are expanding, Apple is rolling AI into Safari and Perplexity’s experiencing explosive growth.
The search landscape isn’t shifting, it’s being rewritten. Companies that adapt now will own visibility in both worlds. Those who don’t will be left fighting for scraps with traditional search alone.
Most companies have been flying blind. Now we don’t have to.
The real question isn’t whether AI search will affect your business. It’s whether you’ll be prepared when it becomes your buyers’ default.
Ready to find out? Let’s talk about how your content can win in the AI age.
