In this op-ed, Optimising founder James Richardson, argued that GEO and SEO are one job and should be one invoice.
There is an invoice doing the rounds in Australian marketing departments right now.
You know the one. SEO retainer. GEO retainer. A third line item for AI visibility. Three lines on one team’s work, billed at roughly double what it used to cost.
I have done SEO for 18 years, through every “this changes everything” moment, and through more algorithm updates than you can count. AI search is the next iteration in a long list of growth in this industry. It changes what we measure, and where we look, and it elevates SEO from a backroom conversation to something boardrooms are talking about. But underneath it all, the work has not fundamentally changed, and it shouldn’t result in a new line item on invoices, at double the cost.
The core principles of SEO are the same as they have always been, with some new focus areas for new channels and new algorithms. Technical health, content quality, authority, entity clarity and brand strength were the list Google rewarded for a decade. They are the list AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot are rewarding now, with a few additions specific to how the LLMs read, weight and synthesise.
Same signals as a decade ago, just being judged in more rooms. Call it an evolution if you like. But it is not a new category.
So why is the Australian agency market selling it like one?
GEO sounds new, and new sells. A new acronym, a fresh logo on the proposal, and a deck that did not exist 12 months ago. In a generally tough market for agencies, that’s an appetising opportunity.
The irony is most agencies pitching “GEO services” right now would struggle to show you any AI visibility measurement worth defending. Plenty are prompting ChatGPT once a month and calling it a dashboard. One of the most disappointing things for me, and other practitioners who have been in the game as long as I have, is that it’s a throwback to SEO of the early 2010’s – murky, overpromised, and generally misunderstood.
We have spent years recovering the reputation of SEO from that period only to fall back into the same trap.
Don’t misunderstand me, there are real new things to measure. Which AI tools are citing your brand, how often, against which competitors, and how consistently from one run of the same
question to the next. That is work worth doing. It is just much harder than what most “GEO” pitches in market right now actually deliver, which is a quarterly audit, a questionable tracking methodology, and a few slides.
It is okay that it is hard, we just need to be honest about it.
My perspective, SEO and GEO are one job. Run by one team, on one plan, against one set of numbers. Split them apart and you end up with artificial silos and a doubled invoice. Worse, the AI visibility work sits in no man’s land while the SEO team keeps reporting rankings that don’t capture the full benefit of the investment.
A client forwarded me a pitch a few weeks back from an “AI agency” offering to work alongside their existing SEO agency. Two retainers, two reports, the same underlying signals on the back end. That offer is impossible if you are actually doing the AI work, because the AI work and the SEO work are the same job.
I will leave you with this – the test if you are a marketer being pitched GEO right now.
Ask your existing SEO agency what they are doing on AI visibility, and what the variance looks like across a quarter compared to the old SEO work. If they cannot show you any of that, you do not have a missing service. You have a capability gap. The fix is not a second agency on a second retainer. It is an SEO partner who can do the work on the new surfaces without growing the invoice.
In two years the agencies worth hiring will be the ones running SEO and AI visibility together, with one team owning the numbers. When a board asks for proof, they will have it.
The rest are selling you a second invoice for the same job, with a noisier dashboard to prove it.
