SEO, AIO & GEO

Largely, yes — roughly seventy per cent is the same technical and content work, because models mostly retrieve from the index Google already built. The rest is genuinely different: answer-first structure, entity consistency, and being mentioned on the third-party pages models trust. Anyone selling GEO as a wholly separate discipline is charging you twice for the overlap.

Technical fixes show up in weeks. Rankings for anything competitive take three to six months. AI citations are the slowest and least predictable — models refresh on their own schedule. I have seen a page quoted six weeks after publishing and another take five months. If you need revenue this quarter, run paid media and start this alongside it.

You can produce the volume. Models are getting better at recognising pages written to game them, and thin AI content is the fastest way to lose the citations you were chasing. What is hard to copy is the technical base, the entity work and genuinely specific content — numbers, methods, first-hand detail. If you have a subject expert in-house, I will brief them rather than write it myself.

Flat shows up inside the first eight weeks, not at month six — the baseline gives a tracked prompt set and a tracked ranking set, so there is nowhere to hide. Some markets are genuinely unwinnable organically, dominated by aggregators or publishers with twenty years of links. If yours is one of them I will say so in the audit and tell you to put the budget into paid instead.

If your tracking is broken, fix that first — otherwise you cannot separate organic from brand from paid, and this work will look like it failed. If you need customers inside ninety days, paid media first. Search visibility compounds, it does not rescue; it pays back best when something already converts and you want it cheaper.