Start with the question behind the acronym
On CRE8, SEO and GEO needed clear explanations. SEO concerns visibility in search results. We use GEO to describe work on how a brand and its content may be discovered and represented in generative answers. That wording describes an objective; it is not a guarantee of placement.
What changed on the site
We made the services explicit, added focused pages, connected related topics and included a guide comparing the two approaches. We also added canonical URLs, page metadata, a sitemap and structured data reflecting the visible organisation, services and article. No invented reviews, rankings or customer results were needed.
Keep the platform claim narrow
Google says its established SEO practices remain relevant for AI Overviews and AI Mode, without additional technical requirements specific to those features. That guidance concerns Google Search. It should not be stretched into a promise about every conversational assistant or answer engine.
Three different kinds of evidence
Implementation evidence answers whether a page contains a title, canonical URL or valid JSON. Discovery evidence answers whether a crawler can fetch a resource or process a sitemap. Outcome evidence answers whether the content is indexed, earns visits or appears in a sampled AI response. One does not automatically establish the next.
How I would record an AI mention
A useful observation would include the system, prompt, date, language, cited URL and the actual answer. Repeating the same prompt could produce a different result. This is a measurement approach for future work, not a claim that a production mention-monitoring dashboard has already been launched.
What the launch tells us
CRE8 has a more explicit content structure and its sitemap was processed in Search Console. Search traffic, lead quality and AI citations need their own evidence over time. Keeping that distinction visible makes the case study more useful than a list of optimisation promises.
Source & scope
Google Search Central: AI features and your website ↗
This note draws on the CRE8 implementation and the linked Google guidance. It does not establish results across all AI systems.
Written from project records with AI assistance and checked against the documented implementation. This is a build note, not an independent product audit.