SEO vs. GEO: how they differ, and why they work together
By Philip TsangSEO & GEO3 min read
Every few years a new acronym arrives and someone declares the old one dead. “SEO is dead” has been announced more times than we can count, and it is being announced again now that generative engine optimization, or GEO, has arrived.
GEO is real and it matters. But it isn’t a replacement for SEO, and treating the two as rivals leads to wasted budget. Here is a plain-English explanation of what each one does, where they overlap, and how we run them together.
What SEO does
Search engine optimization earns your website a place in search results. It has four main parts:
- Technical: making sure search engines can crawl, render and index every important page quickly, on any device.
- Content: pages that match what people search for and answer it better than the alternatives.
- Authority: links and mentions from reputable sites that signal your content can be trusted.
- Local: your Google Business Profile, reviews and local listings, which decide who appears in the map results.
Success is measured in rankings, organic traffic and, most importantly, the calls and enquiries that traffic produces.
What GEO does
Generative engine optimization earns your business a place inside AI-generated answers: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews. The term was popularized by a 2023 research paper of the same name, and it describes a simple goal: when someone asks an AI tool a question your business can answer, you want to be mentioned, described accurately and cited as a source.
Success is measured differently: how often you are mentioned across a set of real questions, whether the description is correct, whether your pages are cited, and how many visits arrive from AI tools.
Side by side
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank in search results | Be named and cited in AI answers |
| Where it shows | Google and Bing results, map pack | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews |
| What it rewards | Relevance, technical health, links, reviews | Clarity, consistency, corroboration, citable passages |
| How it’s measured | Rankings, clicks, enquiries | Share of mentions, accuracy, citations, AI referrals |
| Volatility | Moves over weeks and months | Can vary from one answer to the next |
Where they overlap
Many AI assistants run a web search behind the scenes and then summarize what they find. Google’s AI Overviews draw on Google’s own index. That means a page that can’t be found in search is far less likely to be quoted in an answer.
So the foundations are shared: a technically sound site, genuinely helpful content, authority earned from reputable sources, and consistent facts about your business everywhere it appears. Good SEO is most of the way to good GEO.
Where they differ
The differences are in emphasis. GEO puts more weight on a few things that SEO has traditionally treated as secondary:
- Corroboration. AI tools are more confident recommending a business when several independent sources describe it the same way. Mentions matter, even without a link.
- Passages that stand alone. AI answers lift short sections of text. A clear definition, a step-by-step process or a cost range that makes sense on its own is more quotable than a long, meandering page.
- Entity clarity. Structured data and consistent names, addresses, people and services help a model be certain who you are.
- Accuracy over time. AI tools can repeat outdated information for months. Correcting the sources is part of the job.
SEO, meanwhile, still rewards things GEO cares less about directly, such as links pointing at specific pages, targeting precise keyword phrases, and earning the click from a list of results.
How we run them together
We plan SEO and GEO as one program with one content plan, one technical roadmap and one report. The report shows rankings and organic enquiries next to AI visibility and AI referrals, so you can see the whole picture of how clients find you.
In practice, most of the work does double duty. A detailed practice area page with a named author and structured data ranks better and gets quoted more.
One warning. As with early SEO, some vendors now sell GEO shortcuts: hidden text written for AI crawlers, instructions buried in pages, or networks of thin sites created to manufacture mentions. These are the keyword stuffing of this decade. They may work briefly, and they put your reputation at risk. The durable path is the same one it has always been: be genuinely useful, be consistent, and be trusted by others.
If you’d like to see where your firm stands in both, start with our SEO and GEO pages, or tell us about your firm on Make It Happen.
Want to talk about how this applies to your firm?
Make It HappenMake It HappenKeep reading
