Where SEO is about ranking a page in a list of results, GEO is about being the source an answer engine draws on when it writes a reply. The engine has to be able to crawl the site, has to understand what the business is, and has to judge the content worth citing. Each of those is a separate piece of work.
In practice GEO means allowing AI crawlers in robots.txt, declaring the organisation clearly in structured data, writing answer first content with visible sources, and publishing things worth citing, such as original data. Our study of 56 UK accountancy firms found roughly one in ten blocking AI crawlers without knowing it, which is the first thing GEO fixes.