SEO or GEO: What Is the Difference and What Does Your Company Need?

In conversations with marketing leads, we hear two questions. "Is SEO dead now?" and "Do we need a separate GEO agency?" The answer to both is no.

SEO and GEO pursue different goals but share most of the work. Here is where they overlap, where they differ and how to cover both without paying twice.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It means everything that makes a website findable, understandable and rankable for Google and Bing. The goal is a high position for the terms your customers type in. That produces clicks and enquiries.

• Technology: pages that can be crawled and indexed, short load times, clean URLs, a sitemap.
• Content: one page per topic, matching search intent, with clear headings.
• Authority: links and mentions from other websites, reviews, a well-kept business profile.

You measure success in rankings, impressions, clicks and, in the end, enquiries. Google Search Console shows this for free.

What is GEO?

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. The term comes from a 2024 research paper by Princeton and other institutes. It means the work of being cited or recommended as a source in AI answers. You will also read AEO or LLMO. In practice, all three mean the same.

For commercial questions, the AI searches the web live. It reads a few pages and builds its answer from them. Whoever is among those pages and offers a paragraph that is easy to quote gets named. How the systems go about this is explained in Getting recommended in ChatGPT.

SEO and GEO compared

What SEO and GEO have in common

Most of the work is the same. Google says in its guide to the AI features: they rely on the core ranking and quality systems of search. A page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet. No special AI files or extra markup are needed.

• Accessibility: what a crawler cannot read appears nowhere.
• Content in the HTML: according to an analysis by Vercel and MERJ, the large AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript. Text that only loads via script stays invisible to them.
• Clear structure: one topic per page, descriptive headings, the answer at the top.
• Trust: a real address, named authors, references.

In short: a website with weak SEO is rarely cited in AI answers either. That is why SEO comes first in every GEO project.

Why a good ranking is no longer enough

When an AI summary sits above the results, fewer people click. In 2025, the Pew Research Center analyzed the search behavior of adults in the US. In searches with an AI summary, users clicked a regular result in 8% of cases. Without a summary it was 15%.

For questions the AI answers well, the visit therefore happens less often on your website. But the decision about which company gets named still falls on your pages. Google also breaks questions into sub-questions. A page that answers a precise sub-question can therefore be cited even without a top position.

What GEO additionally requires

SEO thinks in pages and search terms. GEO thinks in questions and quotable paragraphs. These points make the difference:

• The answer first: every section starts with one or two sentences that answer the question completely.
• Concrete facts: duration, service area, target industries, certifications. Models quote what can be verified.
• The same facts everywhere: name, address and services identical on your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and in directories. Contradictions unsettle a model.
• Mentions on other sites: trade articles, association lists, provider comparisons. AI answers often draw on such pages.
• Open doors: allow OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot in robots.txt, firewall and CDN.

The word llms.txt often comes up in this context. According to Google, search ignores this file. No major AI provider has confirmed using it for citations. It costs little, but it is not a lever.

Measuring and starting

This is the order we follow:

1. Check the basics. Are all important pages indexed? The "Pages" report in Search Console shows this.
2. Open the doors. Allow Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot in robots.txt, firewall and CDN.
3. Rebuild pages. One page per service, the answer in the first sentences, content in the HTML.
4. Align the facts. Website, profiles and directories with the same details.
5. Build confirmation. Trade articles, interviews, reviews with text.
6. Measure monthly. Search Console, referrals and a fixed set of ten customer questions.

Steps one to three are classic SEO and pay into both. Steps four and five also count for SEO, but weigh more in AI answers.

Frequently asked questions