The argument for moving budget out of traditional SEO and into AI search is loud, increasingly confident, and mostly wrong. Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is a real discipline with real commercial value. Ecommerce brands ignoring it will lose ground over the next eighteen months. But framing the choice as SEO versus GEO misreads how customers actually find products, and leads to budget decisions that hurt revenue in the short term and weaken topical authority in the long term.
The brands winning across both channels are running them as one programme. The work compounds where the disciplines overlap, and the gaps each one leaves are filled by the other. With the UK ecommerce market on course to hit £286 billion, brands that haven't fully committed to their digital strategy risk being left behind in one of the world's fastest-moving retail environments.
What traditional SEO still does that GEO doesn't
Google's traditional results drive the majority of revenue for most ecommerce sites and will continue to for some time. The blue links beneath the AI Overview, the shopping carousel, the local pack. The reason is buying intent. When someone types a transactional query like navy linen suit men or replacement filter for [model number], they're at the bottom of the funnel. They want to compare options, see prices, click through and buy. AI Overviews and LLM responses are not designed for this transaction. They summarise, recommend and link out, but the conversion path runs through a clicked link to a product page that ranks well organically.
Branded queries follow the same logic. Customers searching for your store name, your category names with your brand attached, or your specific product names need to land directly on your site. Traditional SEO controls this. AI search routes a fraction of these queries, and the routing is unpredictable.
Site architecture, technical foundations and structured data, the work that earns traditional rankings, also feeds AI search. Schema markup, internal linking and crawlability are signals that LLMs and AI engines depend upon. Investing in traditional SEO is investing in AI search infrastructure whether the budget line says so or not.
What GEO does that traditional SEO doesn't
The top of the funnel has moved. Research, comparison, recommendation. The work customers used to do across search engines, blog posts and review sites now happens increasingly inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. A meaningful share of category-level demand never reaches the traditional results page anymore. The user asks, the model answers, the brands cited get the consideration. The brands missing from the answer don't.
GEO is the discipline of being one of the brands cited. The signals that drive citation are different from the ones that drive ranking. AI engines weight authoritative external mentions more heavily. They prefer well-structured, declarative content over keyword-optimised pages. They cite sources they trust on the topic, which means topical authority across a category matters more than any single page ranking for any single term. The mechanics of getting cited in ChatGPT for best winter boots for hiking are not the same as the mechanics of ranking position one for the same query.
GEO also covers measurement. Tracking how often your brand appears in LLM responses, against which queries, alongside which competitors. None of this exists in Search Console. Building visibility into AI search requires a separate measurement stack.
Where the two disciplines overlap
The overlap is bigger than the AI search vendors suggest, and it's where the compounding happens.
Schema markup, particularly Product, Organization, FAQPage and entity-based schemas, supports both Google's traditional results and the retrieval logic AI engines use to identify what your brand sells and what it's an authority on. Implementing structured data once contributes to both channels.
Topical authority, building genuine depth across the categories you want to be known for, is the foundation traditional SEO has always rewarded and the foundation AI search rewards more aggressively. Content hubs, internal linking architectures and editorial coverage of related topics work for both.
External mentions and links from credible sources strengthen domain authority for traditional ranking and improve the likelihood of citation in AI responses. Digital PR done well now serves both disciplines.
Technical foundations, like crawlability, page speed, render-blocking resources and indexability, affect whether Google ranks your pages and whether AI engines can retrieve your content at all. Fixing technical SEO issues is GEO foundation work by another name.
Where the budget question actually lives
GEO doesn't replace SEO budget. It adds to it. The work that supports both is already covered by an SEO retainer worth its money. The GEO-specific work, like LLM visibility tracking, content restructuring for AI retrieval, entity optimisation and prompt-driven content gap analysis, is genuinely new scope.
Brands that try to fund GEO by cutting SEO see traditional rankings drift down, organic revenue soften, and AI visibility take long enough to materialise that the cut shows up in performance reports before the new channel pays back. Brands that fund GEO additively, even at a smaller initial scope, hold their ground in traditional search while building the new visibility.
A sensible starting position is to keep the current SEO programme intact and add a focused GEO scope on top. Measurement, schema and entity work first. Content restructuring and authority building second. The work is sequenced rather than substituted.
How Imaginaire approaches SEO and GEO together
At Imaginaire, we run ecommerce SEO and AI SEO as a single integrated programme rather than two parallel workstreams. The shared foundations of technical SEO, schema, internal linking and topical authority sit at the centre of both, and the channel-specific work extends out from there.
Our AI SEO services cover the GEO-specific scope: tracking how often your brand is mentioned across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, optimising your category and product pages for AI Overview citations, and building the entity signals that get your brand recognised as an authority in your category. Our ecommerce SEO services cover the traditional-search side, with the technical and content work that drives transactional and branded revenue from Google.
Combining the two into one programme means the work compounds rather than competes. We benchmark your current visibility across both channels, prioritise the highest-impact work first, and report on traditional rankings and AI mentions side by side so the commercial picture is clear.
If you're trying to work out the right balance between SEO and GEO investment for your brand, we'd be happy to put together a free AI readiness audit that benchmarks your current position across both.
