GEO basics
What are the GEO basics if you already know SEO?
Most of the foundation is still good SEO. The new part is learning how answer engines compress public evidence into a recommendation.
Start with the part that did not change
The least interesting GEO take is also the most useful one: if your site is messy, vague, slow, uncrawlable, or allergic to saying what the product actually does, answer engines will not rescue you. Clean structure, sensible headings, internal links, focused pages, and real authority still count.
That is why the old SEO foundation belongs in any serious generative engine optimization plan. The mistake is pretending the foundation is the whole house. SEO often asks whether a page can rank and win a click. GEO asks whether the public evidence around a brand can be compressed into a confident answer.
The new basics are about answer-readability
Answer-readability means your important claims are easy to extract, verify, compare, and reuse. A good page does not merely say 'built for modern teams.' It names the buyer, the use case, the alternative, the constraint, and the proof. It gives the assistant a sentence it can safely repeat without inventing the missing parts.
This is where AI source intelligence matters. The assistant may be drawing from your site, a review page, a comparison article, a community thread, or a page that never appears as the visible citation. GEO basics include knowing which sources keep shaping the answer, not just which page ranked last Tuesday.
The practical checklist is short
Build a stable set of buyer questions. Run them across the assistants your market actually uses. Save the exact wording. Track whether your brand is omitted, named, considered, or recommended. Note which competitors appear and which sources or claims seem to support the answer.
Then improve one piece of public evidence at a time: a clearer category page, a comparison page that answers a real objection, a proof point tied to a concrete use case, or a source trail worth strengthening. If you need a starting method, use the AI visibility measurement guide before buying a new acronym.