I don't like football. Your business is still in the tournament

I don't like football.

I couldn't name a single player in this World Cup. I don't know who England are playing, or whether they've done the penalties thing yet where they go out on a shootout and we all quietly agree never to speak of it. I've watched none of it. Not a minute.

And yet I know it's on. Of course I know. You can't not know. It's on the telly in the chip shop. It's why the roads went quiet on Saturday afternoon. It's three blokes outside the Co-op running a post-mortem on a match I will never see.

That's the World Cup for you. You don't have to care. It finds you anyway.

Which, as it turns out, is roughly how search works now.

Most business owners feel about SEO the way I feel about football. They don't understand it, don't want to, and would happily never think about it again. Fair enough. But here's the bit nobody mentions: you're in the tournament regardless. Google never asked if you were a fan. Your customers are out there searching whether you've opted in or not, and "I don't really do all that" is not the get-out it sounds like.

And now there's a second competition running alongside the one you were already ignoring. The AI answers. Ask ChatGPT or Google's AI for a recommendation and it picks for you, off its own bat, from sources you've never checked. That's GEO. The rules changed and nobody sent a memo.

The basics didn't go anywhere

Here's the part people get wrong when something new shows up. They assume the old game is cancelled. It isn't. Nobody won this World Cup by forgetting how to pass because the format changed. The fundamentals still decide it. Same with search.

A fast site still beats a slow one. A page that clearly answers the question still beats a clever one that doesn't. A site that's easy for a machine to read still wins over one that makes it guess. None of that changed. GEO sits on top of SEO, not instead of it. Anyone selling you "SEO is dead, do this one new thing" is selling you the football equivalent of a lucky scarf.

So if your site is slow, your pages waffle, and nothing tells Google what you actually do, the new game won't save you. You've got to turn up able to play the old one first.

What's actually different

Now the bit that has genuinely changed, and it's worth understanding because it changes what winning even looks like.

The old deal was simple. You ranked, someone clicked, they landed on your site. The click was the prize. The new engines skip that. Ask one for a plumber, a wedding photographer, a kitchen fitter, and it just tells you. It reads a stack of sources, decides, and hands over an answer. Often nobody clicks anything.

Which means the goal moves. You're no longer only trying to be the top blue link. You're trying to be the source the machine trusts enough to quote. Your name in the answer, even when there's no click. That's the new pitch, and most businesses don't know they're playing on it.

How you actually get picked

Good news: it's not mysterious, and it's not tricks. The engines favour what they can understand and what others vouch for. So:

Answer real questions plainly. Not keyword soup. The actual things people ask, answered in a way a machine can lift cleanly. If a page buries the answer under three paragraphs of throat-clearing, it gets skipped.

Get mentioned elsewhere. The old game cared about links. The new one cares about being talked about, full stop. A write-up, a directory, a supplier listing you, a local paper. The engine notices who keeps coming up.

Make your site readable to a machine. Clean structure, proper headings, the behind-the-scenes markup that says "this is a business, here's where it is, here's what it does." Most sites leave the engine guessing. Don't.

None of that requires you to love any of it. That's sort of the point.

The whistle

I still don't like football.

The World Cup will finish, England will go out in a manner we've all agreed not to discuss, and I'll go back to not knowing a thing about it. That's allowed. You can sit a tournament out.

You can't sit this one out. Search isn't a season. There's no final, no off-season, no quiet Saturday where nobody's looking for what you do. The game's always on, and the rules just changed under everyone's feet whether they were watching or not.

So you don't have to care about any of this. Plenty of people won't. They'll carry on assuming the old rules hold, the way I carry on assuming football is mostly men running about looking cross.

The difference is, my ignorance only costs me a conversation outside the Co-op.

Yours costs you the customer.