SEO and GEO
Search still ranks pages. Answers now name companies.
Google still returns links. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity often return names. What that changes in the writing, and what it does not.
By Found. Updated 22 September 2026.
You can lose an afternoon reading that search is over. It is not. Google still returns a list of links. On some queries it also shows an AI Overview, a short answer above those links. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity answer in sentences, and they often name a handful of companies instead of handing you ten URLs. A link result and a named answer are different reading experiences, so they reward different pages.
Two jobs, two names
SEO is the older job: be findable in ordinary search. A page that deserves the query, a title a person can scan, links a crawler can follow. That work is not withdrawn because a chat box exists.
GEO, generative engine optimization, is the awkward name for the newer job. Make the company easy to name, and make one passage easy to quote, when the product answers instead of listing ten links. If an answer is going to mention three warehouse tools, your name has to be attached to a fact. If it is going to cite a source, some sentence on your site has to be worth lifting without the paragraph around it.
Found uses both words and does not sell a retainer that claims to rank you inside someone else's model. The Found Score is a scorecard on the public page. We do not log into ChatGPT to produce it. The rules are in the methodology. Same URL, same integer, on purpose.
What a link result needed from the writing
A page built to win a blue link can get away with a title, a meta description, and a heading that matches the query. The click does the rest. A person lands and skims. Thin pages have ranked for years when the rest of the site was strong enough. That is a flaw in classic SEO, not a pattern to copy, but it explains a lot of the copy still on the web.
- The title carries the query.
- The description has to earn the click.
- The page can wander, because a person is there to skip ahead.
- Proof can sit three screens down and still count for the human who scrolls.
What a named answer needs instead
An answer compresses. It does not hand the reader your whole site. It keeps a name, sometimes a reason, sometimes a link. Found's ladder is our plain version of that compression: Recommended, Cited, Mentioned, Absent. The cut-points on a 0 to 100 score are 80, 55, and 30. Those numbers are ours. They are not a leak from any lab. We publish them because "are we visible?" is too vague to act on. First name in the answer is a different state from a footnote.
Harborline is the fictional warehouse-software company in these notes. The sentence below is the kind of line that gives an answer nothing to repeat.
Do not publish
Harborline is a leading provider of innovative logistics solutions.
This one can be quoted, and it can be checked: Harborline is warehouse software for teams of 50 to 500 people. It does not do route planning. Implementation takes six weeks. The public price starts at $2,400 a month. Vague copy is how a company stays off the list while a blunter rival gets named.
What does not change
You still need a page a person can read without wincing. You still need the company name in the title and the H1, an About page, a way to reach a human, and a price or an honest reason the price is not public. Repeating "best warehouse software" in every line does not get clever because a model might read it. It reads as stuffing to a person, and a careful answer can skip it.
Do not build two sites, one blog "for Google" and one FAQ "for AI." Buyers do not browse two internets. Write one page that answers in the first screen and still deserves the click from a link result. The editing version of that is Write the sentence you want quoted.
What we will not claim
We have not measured what share of your buyers start in a chat box. A percentage without a study is a guess, including from us. The claim we will stand behind is smaller. If a buyer asks an assistant who to use, the name has to come from somewhere: your site, a directory, a review page, a news story, or the model's memory of those. The part you control this week is your site.
- Rewrite the first paragraph of the homepage if it does not name the customer.
- Put one number you can defend on a public pricing page.
- Add a real revision date to any page you still want quoted. Do not stamp a date on text nobody reread.
The scorecard version of that, on your URL, is the free Found Score. It will not say you rank third in Gemini. It will say whether the public page is easy to name, easy to quote, or easy to skip.