Home / Our view on GEO
Part of the industry considers GEO an empty word invented by course sellers. I understand the irritation, and I disagree. GEO shares roughly 80% of its practices with SEO. It is the remaining 20% that decides today who gets cited and who does not.
Their argument is solid, and it deserves to be acknowledged first. Well-structured content, genuine authority, a technically clean site: those three pillars get you ranking on Google and get you cited by an AI. Nothing new there. And in eighteen months the word GEO has indeed become a convenient sales angle for reselling audits to worried marketing teams.
The reasoning goes wrong at the conclusion. From "GEO borrows heavily from SEO" they conclude "GEO does not exist". Those are not the same statement. Local SEO borrows most of classic SEO, and nobody concludes it does not exist. Neither does e-commerce SEO. A speciality is not defined by what it shares, it is defined by what it adds.
My position fits in one sentence: GEO is the AI layer of SEO, with its own metrics, its own formats and its own trade-offs.
Three gaps, in the order in which they cost you visibility.
AI crawlers do not behave like Google's.
They do not execute JavaScript the same way, do not follow the same crawling rules, and get filtered out by security protections that let Googlebot through without trouble.
A common outcome: a site ranking perfectly on Google, invisible to AI platforms, with nobody noticing. No SEO tool surfaces that information.
A written answer does not read like a results page.
On Google a hundred links coexist and a patient user eventually finds you. In an AI answer, three brands are named and one is remembered. There is no second page.
The notion of position therefore changes in nature, and SEO metrics do not cover it. You have to measure whether you are cited, where in the text, and whether a link points back to you.
What you produce is not in the same place.
In SEO, effort goes mostly into your own site. In GEO, the decisive share plays out elsewhere: directories, comparison sites, discussions, specialist platforms.
It is the most counter-intuitive gap for an experienced consultant, because it moves the work onto ground that SEO treated as secondary.
The third gap is not a hunch. It is what we observe consistently since Cockpyt AI started measuring.
More than 60% of the sites we analyse receive citations whose source is not their own site. AI platforms talk about them by relying on pages they do not control.
An independent study run by Stacker and Scrunch in March 2026, covering 87 pieces of content, 30 brands and 8 AI platforms, reaches a comparable order of magnitude: in 64% of cases where an AI cites a brand it relies on third-party sites, and in one case out of five those third-party sites are its only source.
Two different samples, two different methods, one converging result. That is what makes me treat this point as established rather than as a working hypothesis.
The practical consequence is uncomfortable for many brands: you can publish the best content in your market on your own site and still be absent from the answers, because AI platforms look elsewhere. What others say about you often weighs more than what you say about yourself.
AI Overviews has been live in more than 120 countries for two years. In France the rollout began on 22 July 2026, delayed by the dispute over press neighbouring rights, with full coverage expected before 23 September.
Through those two years the French market watched American data from a distance. That is over, and the concern is arriving all at once, on a subject other markets had time to learn gradually. This concentrated panic explains part of the current commercial noise, and therefore part of the irritation of SEOs calling out bullshit. They are confusing the noise with the substance.
These four points are convictions, not measurements. They are dated, and I will correct them publicly if the facts prove me wrong.
AI traffic will rise, search traffic will fall. Not through a sudden switch, but through continuous erosion on the search side and steady growth on the assistant side. The volumes will not cross for a long time, and that is not the question: what matters is the direction of both curves.
There will be clear winners and clear losers, and few brands in between. This is the point I believe is most underestimated. A results page distributes visibility to ten players. An AI answer cites three. The concentration is mechanical: brands that settle into those answers will gain a great deal, and those that are not there will not lose a little, they will disappear from the conversation.
Visits coming from AI platforms arrive with a more advanced intent. The user has already got their explanation, compared options, ruled candidates out. When they click, they are no longer discovering, they are verifying. Lower traffic in volume can therefore be worth more than larger search traffic.
GEO will progressively drift away from SEO. The 80% overlap will shrink. The more conversational interfaces become autonomous, the more the mechanics diverge, and the more the skills separate. I think many of those calling it bullshit today will change their position within two years, without necessarily saying so.
A position without a method is just an opinion. Here are the four choices that structure our measurement, including where they cost us commercially.
Every score comes from a real query sent to the AI platforms at the moment of the scan, never from a stored database of answers. AI platforms go looking for sources every time a question is asked: an answer recorded last month says nothing about your visibility today.
A bot driving the web application returns answers shaped by the session, the conversation history and the personalisation of whichever account it uses, and it breaks with every interface change. APIs ask the question under identical conditions at every scan.
AI platforms are not deterministic. Over 24 hours their internal variability weighs more than any real change in your visibility. Daily tracking therefore displays noise refreshed every day. It is less compelling than a curve moving constantly, and it is more honest.
If our method evolves, the change is recorded in your history. A series of measurements is only worth something if you know when the instrument changed. Comparing two periods measured differently does not produce a trend, it produces an illusion.
I have worked in search optimisation since June 2016, based in Nice. Before that, a master's in digital communication, a diploma in marketing, and above all a travel blog launched in 2014 that served as my laboratory: it was while trying to grow it that I discovered SEO, then decided to make it my profession after training with Olivier Duffez.
Since then, more than 300 clients supported through Redback Optimisation, mostly small businesses and independents. Highly competitive, distinctly unglamorous sectors: health, real estate, CBD, wellbeing, weddings. That is where you learn what actually works, because there is no budget to compensate for mistakes.
Cockpyt AI was founded on 14 February 2026, with Laurent Séjourné, who builds the technical side. The tool came from a need I could no longer meet by hand: my clients had been asking for months whether AI platforms cited them, and I was answering with screenshots taken one by one. It was neither measurable, nor reproducible, nor defensible.
Cockpyt AI will not remain a diagnostic tool. Measuring is the first step, and an essential one, but a dashboard corrects nothing. That is already why the monthly GEO audit produces a prioritised action plan rather than a report.
The next stage is to shorten the distance between the observation and the fix, directly inside the tool. We are not announcing a timeline here: this page is versioned, and what ships will be written here when it does.
Co-founder of Cockpyt AI, SEO and GEO consultant in Nice since 2016. This page states my personal position, not an industry consensus. You are welcome to disagree at [email protected].
The best way to settle the debate for your own market: look at what AI platforms answer today when asked about your sector.
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