GEO vs SEO: what’s the difference, and do you need both?
Short answer
SEO gets your pages ranked and clicked in search results. GEO (generative engine optimisation) gets your brand named and cited inside AI answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews. They share most of the same foundations, and Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in its AI features. So most businesses need both, but as one programme: solid SEO first, then GEO work on answer-first content, consistent entity details, third-party mentions, AI crawler access and citation tracking.
GEO and SEO aren’t rivals. SEO is about ranking in a list of links. GEO is about being the source an AI tool quotes or recommends when it writes its own answer.
This guide is for business owners and marketing leads in the US, the UK and Australia who want to know if GEO is a new budget line or a new label.
What is generative engine optimisation?
Generative engine optimisation is the practice of making your content and your brand more likely to be retrieved, quoted and cited by AI systems that generate answers. Those systems include ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.
The term comes from a 2023 research paper, “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” by Pranjal Aggarwal and five co-authors. It was published at KDD 2024. The authors defined GEO as a way for content creators to improve how visible their content is inside AI-generated responses.
Today “GEO” covers more than the paper tested. You’ll also hear AEO (answer engine optimisation) or LLM SEO. Same goal: be the source the answer is built from.
What the original GEO research actually found
The researchers built a test engine that fetched the top five Google results for each query, then had GPT-3.5 write an answer citing them. They rewrote those source pages nine different ways and measured how much of the answer each source “won”.
Here’s what they reported:
- Adding quotations, adding statistics and citing sources were among the strongest methods. The best methods improved visibility by 41% on their word-count measure over the unedited baseline.
- Keyword stuffing, the old SEO trick, did not perform well. It scored below the baseline.
- Lower-ranked sources gained most. Citing sources lifted the fifth-ranked result’s visibility by 115.1%, while the top-ranked result lost 30.3% on average.
- Results varied by subject area, so the authors argued for domain-specific approaches.
- Tests on Perplexity showed gains in the same direction.
Now the part most summaries skip. Every source in that experiment was already in Google’s top five. The paper measured what happens after retrieval. It says nothing about how to get retrieved in the first place.
Our view: that’s the most useful finding in the paper for buyers. GEO content tactics only work on pages an AI system has already found. Finding you is still an SEO job.
GEO vs SEO: side-by-side comparison
The two disciplines overlap heavily. The differences show up in what you’re trying to win and how you know you’ve won it.
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank a page high in search results and earn the click | Get your brand named, quoted or cited inside an AI answer |
| Surfaces | Google and Bing organic results, map pack | ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode |
| Main signals | Relevance, links, content quality, technical health, page experience | The same, plus how extractable your answers are, consistent entity facts, and mentions on third-party sites |
| Unit of success | A ranking position and a click | A citation, a mention or a recommendation, sometimes with no click |
| Measurement | Search Console, rank tracking, analytics | Prompt tracking, AI referral traffic, Bing’s AI Performance report, share of mentions |
| Timeframe | Usually months for competitive terms | No published standard. Tools that search live react faster than training data |
On timeframe, nobody publishes a standard. Our rule of thumb: tools that search live (ChatGPT search, Perplexity, AI Overviews) react to page changes far faster than anything a model learned in training.
What Google says about AI Overviews and AI Mode
Google’s position is clear, and it takes the heat out of a lot of GEO marketing.
Its AI features and your website documentation says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimisations needed. A page has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in normal Search. That’s it. Google also says you don’t need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup.
The same page explains that these features use “query fan-out”, running several related searches across subtopics. That means a page can be cited for a sub-question even if it doesn’t rank for the main one. Clicks from AI features are counted inside the normal “Web” search type in Search Console, not in a separate report.
So for Google’s AI surfaces, the SEO fundamentals carry the weight.
Where GEO work genuinely differs
There are five areas where the work changes in practice.
Answer-first content
AI tools lift passages, not pages. A section that opens with a direct, self-contained answer is easier to quote than one that builds up to it over four paragraphs. We write every section so it still makes sense if it’s the only part someone reads. Specific numbers, named sources and short quotes help too, which lines up with what the Aggarwal paper found.
Entity consistency
An AI system has to be confident about who you are before it recommends you. Your business name, what you do, where you operate, your prices and your people should read the same on your website, your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories and review sites. Conflicting details give a model a reason to hedge or leave you out.
Third-party mentions
Classic SEO values links. AI answers lean hard on what other sites say about you, linked or not. Reviews, industry lists, comparison articles, podcasts and forum threads all feed the picture. We cover the forum side in our piece on Reddit and AI search.
Crawler access
AI tools use their own crawlers, and many sites block them without knowing. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says sites that block OAI-SearchBot won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Blocking GPTBot, by contrast, is about model training. It’s worth checking your robots.txt and your CDN’s bot settings, because some firewalls block AI bots at the edge. Our ChatGPT ranking guide walks through the settings.
Citation tracking
SEO has Search Console. GEO needs a fixed set of prompts you run on a schedule across each tool, recording who gets named and cited. That’s the method behind our free AI visibility check.
How to measure GEO
Measure GEO with a mix of manual prompt tracking and the few platform reports that exist. No single tool gives you the full picture yet.
Start with a prompt set. Write 10 to 20 questions a real buyer would ask, such as “best bookkeeping firm for contractors in Manchester”. Run them in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google each month, and log if you’re named, cited or absent, and who’s named instead.
Then add the data you can get. ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to referral links, so those visits show up in analytics. Bing launched an AI Performance report in Webmaster Tools in February 2026, showing citations in Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries. Google’s AI feature clicks sit inside your normal Search Console numbers.
In our experience, the prompt log is what clients actually act on. A competitor named in most of your buyers’ questions is hard to ignore.
A worked example: a UK accountancy firm
Say an accountancy firm in Leeds ranks on page one for “accountant for landlords Leeds”. But when the owner asks ChatGPT the same question, three other firms are named and theirs isn’t.
The SEO diagnosis says the site is fine. The GEO diagnosis finds other problems. Their service page buries the answer under a long intro. Their Google Business Profile lists an old address. They have 12 reviews while the named firms have hundreds, and one of those firms appears in two local “best accountants” roundups.
The fix list is short: rewrite the page answer-first, correct the entity details everywhere, work on reviews, and pitch for the roundups. Most of that helps their Google ranking too.
So do you need both?
Yes, as one programme. Treat GEO as a layer on your SEO, with its own reporting.
Our view: if a provider sells you GEO without checking that you’re indexed, crawlable and ranking, they’re selling the second half of a job. And if your SEO provider ignores AI answers, nobody is watching a place your buyers already ask questions.
That’s why our SEO and GEO work runs as one retainer. We use the same playbook on Arché Academy, Glen’s own tuition centre, before we use it on clients.
Quick answers
Should I hire a separate GEO agency?
Usually not. Split the work and you’ll get two teams arguing over the same pages. Look for one provider that handles both and reports on AI citations separately.
What’s the first GEO task for my business?
Check where you stand. Run your buyers’ questions through the main AI tools, or book our AI visibility check and we’ll do it for you.
Does GEO matter for a local business?
Yes. AI tools answer “best X near me” questions by naming businesses, drawing on profiles, reviews and local mentions.
If your site isn’t ranking at all, start with why your website isn’t ranking on Google. If you’re outside Singapore, see how we work with international clients, or read more about our GEO service and get in touch.