Google's own guidance, published this year, says preparing for generative AI search features "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still [SEO]." Bing's documentation uses the term outright: Generative Engine Optimization, GEO. By September 2026, trade press stopped treating this as a future trend and started treating it as baseline — GEO is now "a new reporting layer and content discipline sitting on top of durable search fundamentals," not a replacement for the fundamentals themselves.
That's the part that gets skipped. Every GEO guide this month is about structuring content so an AI answer engine can cite you. Almost none of them mention the precondition: the AI has to be able to find the page at all.
We learned this the annoying way, on our own site. Not through a GEO audit — through an ordinary crawl. Seven pages, including the segment landers meant to bring in SaaS founders, Shopify stores, and AI tool builders, had zero internal links pointing to them. Zero. Google could only see them through the sitemap. No nav item, no footer link, nothing. GEO citations, AI mentions, "brand visibility in ChatGPT" — none of it is reachable if the page is structurally invisible to begin with.
If you haven't touched GEO yet, the honest first move isn't a new content push. It's confirming every page you want an AI engine to cite is actually linked to from somewhere a crawler will find. Check that before you write anything new.