GEO vs SEO: what actually changes, and what doesn't

SEO gets your pages ranked in search results so people click through to you. GEO (generative engine optimisation) gets your firm named and cited inside AI-written answers, in ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. Most of the work is shared, because AI answers are mostly built from pages that search engines can already find. The difference is what counts as winning: a click in SEO, a mention or citation in GEO.

That last point is the one that matters for budgets. Below is how I explain the overlap and the gap to firms deciding where to spend.

What is GEO, in plain terms?

The term comes from a 2023 research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by a research team that included Princeton University, later accepted at KDD 2024. They defined it as making content more visible inside answers written by generative engines, and showed that some changes to a page could increase that visibility by up to 40% in their tests.

In practice, when someone asks an AI assistant "which accountants in Leeds specialise in R&D tax credits?", the assistant searches, reads a few pages and writes a short answer that names some firms. GEO is the work of being one of those names.

How is GEO different from SEO?

Here is the comparison I use with clients.

That last row is worth dwelling on. Google's documentation on AI features and your website says plainly: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." To be shown as a supporting link, a page needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet. The same fundamentals apply.

What stays the same?

More than most GEO sales pitches admit.

• Crawlability. If a search engine cannot read your page, neither can the AI system built on top of it. OpenAI's crawler documentation is explicit that sites which block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
• Relevance. A page about "our services" does not answer "how long does probate take?". A page about probate timescales does.
• Authority. Links, reviews and mentions from credible sites help in both.
• Trust. Named authors, real credentials and sourced claims. Google's helpful content guidance says of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust that "trust is most important".

If your SEO is weak, GEO will be weak. I have not seen an exception.

What actually changes with GEO?

Four things, in my experience.

1. The answer has to come first

AI systems pull short passages. A page that buries its answer under an introduction gives them nothing to lift. The GEO paper found adding quotations, statistics and cited sources were the most effective changes they tested, each improving visibility by about 27% on their main measure. Keyword stuffing slightly reduced it.

2. Other sites carry more weight

In classic SEO, a link from another site is a vote. In GEO, a plain mention with no link can still shape the answer, because the model reads the text. Ahrefs, in its study of ChatGPT visibility, found brand mentions and YouTube presence correlated with appearing in answers. For professional firms, directories, professional bodies and trade press do the same job.

3. Longer, more specific questions

Google says early users of AI Mode asked questions "two or three times the length of traditional search queries", and that AI Mode breaks a question into subtopics and runs many searches at once (Google calls this query fan-out). That rewards firms with specific pages for specific situations, not one page per broad service.

4. Clicks are worth less, so measurement has to change

Pew Research tracked 900 US adults' Google searches in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% when there was none. Only 1% clicked a link inside the summary. If you judge GEO by traffic, it will look like it is failing even when it is working. Judge it by enquiries.

Should you do SEO or GEO?

Both, in that order, with a different weighting depending on who buys from you.

That last row surprises people. A referral who asks ChatGPT "what do you know about [your firm]?" and gets a vague or wrong answer is a referral at risk.

From our work

A US business law firm we looked at in September 2026 sat 4th and 6th for its two most valuable local searches, close to where the clicks go. Every page title on the site ended in one partner's name rather than the firm's name, and a fifth of its search traffic came from a single article about naming an LLC, read mostly by founders doing it themselves. None of that is a GEO problem. It is basic SEO, and fixing it would help in Google and in AI answers at the same time.

What we'd do in your first 30 days

1. Baseline both. Pull 12 months of Search Console data and list the 20 buyer questions that matter. Run each in ChatGPT, AI Mode and Perplexity. Note who is named.
2. Fix shared foundations. Crawler access for Googlebot, Bingbot and OAI-SearchBot. Indexing errors. Slow or script-heavy service pages.
3. Rewrite five pages answer-first. Your highest-value services. First two sentences answer the question. Add named authors, sources and real numbers.
4. Align your description everywhere. Website, Google Business Profile, directories, professional bodies and LinkedIn should all say the same thing about what you do.
5. Set up measurement that counts customers. Tag ChatGPT referrals (OpenAI adds utm_source=chatgpt.com), add "how did you hear about us?" to every enquiry route, and agree with finance how a won client is counted.

For the fuller version of how we run this, see our pages on generative engine optimisation and AI search.

FAQ

Is GEO just SEO with a new name?

Mostly, but not entirely. The foundations are the same. The differences are the weight on quotable answers, third-party mentions and a different way of measuring success.

Is GEO the same as AEO or LLM SEO?

They are overlapping labels for the same goal: appearing in AI-written answers. AEO (answer engine optimisation) predates the current AI tools and grew out of featured snippets and voice search. I would not choose a supplier based on which label they use.

Will GEO replace SEO?

Not while AI answers are built from search results. Google's own guidance says the same practices apply. What is changing is how people use the results, and how you should measure the return.

Do I need separate content for AI engines?

No. Write one page per real question, answer it directly, source it and name who wrote it. That page serves a human reader, a search engine and an AI system.

See where you stand

Want more revenue from Google and ChatGPT? Enter your website at our free Search Check and we will show you how you appear in both. Our team reviews every site and replies within one working day.