SEO

SEO is the practice of improving a website so it ranks higher in organic (unpaid) search results for relevant queries.

SEO has three practical layers that get confused constantly: technical SEO (can search engines find, render, and index your pages — see Technical SEO), content and on-page SEO (does the page actually answer the query better than competing pages), and off-page SEO (do other sites vouch for yours via backlinks and mentions). A page can fail for reasons in any of the three, and diagnosing which layer is broken is most of the job.

"AI SEO" or GEO gets talked about as something new, but the fundamentals underneath it — answering search intent clearly, being technically crawlable, earning genuine citations — are the same fundamentals that have driven organic search for two decades. The surface (AI answer engines) is new; the mechanics of earning a citation aren't.