Note revised on 25 May 2026. The slug of this page contains a word — vs — that captures a formulation this very text sets out to deconstruct. It is kept as is, because the trace of what came before has its pedagogical value. This note also absorbs the content of the piece previously titled "From SEO to GEO: the online search revolution", de-indexed and redirected to this page. Here is why.
Two years of a discipline that was not one
Between 2024 and 2025, the digital consulting market installed a new narrative. The arrival of ChatGPT in the mainstream, then the extension of AI Overviews in Google search results pages, then the deployment of Perplexity and Claude into professional usage were supposedly opening an editorial and technical discipline distinct from SEO. This discipline would bear a name: GEO, for Generative Engine Optimization. It would obey its own rules, mobilise specific tools, demand new skills. It would amount to the great catch-up exercise companies needed to remain visible in the world of generative engines.
Agencies relabelled their offerings. Consultants reinvented themselves in a few weeks. Executives accepted to pay for audits whose exact scope was not clearly defined. The consulting media ecosystem multiplied articles such as "5 GEO strategies to stay visible", "10 GEO mistakes to avoid", "The complete GEO guide for 2025". The word itself became a marker of editorial modernity.
Over those two years, MCVA Consulting SA did not sign a single GEO contract treated as a standalone discipline. Not out of prescience. Out of a close reading of the fundamentals. A generative engine integrated into search could not rest on rules radically foreign to those of search itself, without a technical break that would have been visible from afar. That break did not occur.
What Google Search Central wrote on 15 May 2026
On 15 May 2026, Google Search Central published a page entitled Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search, filed among the Search Central fundamentals alongside the SEO Starter Guide[1]. This editorial positioning is a message in itself: generative fundamentals do not constitute a separate discipline, they extend the search fundamentals.
The text states a structuring position in a few sentences. Google Search's generative features — AI Overviews, AI Mode, multimodal search — rely on the central ranking and quality systems that already govern classical search. They add specific generation techniques, notably retrieval-augmented generation and query fan-out, which decomposes a user query into sub-queries synthesised into the final response. But the eligibility bedrock of content remains familiar: helpful and non-derivative content, technical crawlability, transparent sources, authority signals built over time.
The page explicitly lists the practices to be implemented. It proposes no new acronym, no new profession, no new skill to acquire separately. It invites a more rigorous application of what the Search Central documentation has described for years.
Why this publication removes the GEO narrative's main source of legitimation
For anyone who follows Google's documentation closely, the content of the 15 May page is no surprise. What is more striking is its editorial positioning. Four days before Google I/O, while the market expected the annual event to validate the rhetoric of an autonomous GEO discipline, the doctrine clarified the argument in advance. The break announced by the market will receive no official validation.
This absence of official legitimation does not mean, of course, that the formulation "GEO" will disappear tomorrow from commercial brochures. It means that what was being sold under that name as a distinct discipline no longer finds any foundation in the actor that structures a large part of the search market. A training course presenting GEO as a new profession in 2026 will have to do so in direct tension with Google's doctrine.
The practical effect is twofold. Companies preparing to allocate a GEO budget can redeploy it to strengthening existing SEO fundamentals, whose rigour of application becomes the main lever. Consulting firms that had structured their catalogue around a GEO offering must ask the question again: what are they selling, under that name, that is not already covered by SEO fundamentals applied seriously?
A measurement, not a discipline
Google's official doctrine does not, however, remove the relevance of a factual observation: what generative models select for a response is not exactly what engines rank in a list. The two correlate, but imperfectly. A company can hold its organic positions and lose its presence in generated responses on the queries that matter. This is an observable fact, independent of the doctrinal position one adopts on the opportunity to invent a discipline to describe it.
This observation calls not for a new discipline, but for a new measurement. A measurement that applies to the synthesis regime, that runs on the generative models where this synthesis takes place, and that produces an indicator a management team can track over time.
MCVA Consulting SA has stabilised this measurement under the Score GEO™ name. The terminological distinction is precise and held: GEO as a sellable autonomous discipline left the firm's vocabulary on 15 May 2026; the Score GEO™ as a proprietary instrument for measuring AI citability, on the other hand, remains. The word score expresses this modesty. We observe, we compare, we document gaps. We do not promise a break.
Going further
The full Score GEO™ measurement method — models covered, construction of query baskets, seven-theme grid, scoring mode, observation cadences — is set out in the Cahier MCVA n°1 — Measuring AI citability after May 2026, the first volume of the Cahiers MCVA collection. The Cahier also delivers a reading by typology of Swiss companies and an operational roadmap.
Sources
[1] Google Search Central, Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search, 15 May 2026. developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide [↩]
Jérôme Deshaie is CEO of MCVA Consulting SA, a Swiss firm specialising in strategic consulting on artificial intelligence, based in Valais.