Most of what you will read about GEO vs SEO falls into one of two camps. One says GEO is just SEO with a new badge and you can ignore it. The other says SEO is dying and you need a GEO agency by Friday. I think both are wrong, and both cost business owners money in different ways.
The truth is less exciting and more useful. Most of the work is the same work. A smaller slice is genuinely different, and it is exactly the part most SEO providers are not doing. Below I show you which is which, with the research behind it. Then I explain how I would split the effort depending on what kind of business you run.
What is the difference between GEO and SEO?
SEO is the work of getting your pages ranked in search results so people click through to your site. GEO, generative engine optimisation, is the work of getting your business named or quoted inside an answer that an AI tool writes for the user. SEO wins a position in a list. GEO wins a mention in a paragraph.
That sounds like a small shift. It is not, because it changes what is being judged. Google ranks pages. An AI assistant recommends businesses, and it builds that recommendation from everything it can find about you, most of which you did not write.
The term GEO comes from a 2023 paper by researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi, later presented at KDD 2024. They tested nine ways of rewriting web content and found that some, such as adding statistics, quotations and cited sources, raised a page’s visibility in AI answers by up to 40 percent. Keyword stuffing, the oldest SEO trick there is, did nothing useful.
Where do GEO and SEO actually differ?
They differ in five places that matter: the target, the unit being judged, how the query works, how much weight sits off your website, and how you measure the result. Here they are side by side.
The query row deserves a closer look. When someone asks ChatGPT “which accountants in Manchester are good with small Shopify businesses and what do they charge?”, the tool does not search for that sentence. It breaks it into several smaller searches, reads the results, and stitches together a reply. Google calls this query fan out and has said openly that AI Mode works this way.
So you are not competing for one keyword any more. You are competing to be the most consistent, best documented answer across a cluster of related questions.
Can you rank on Google and still be invisible to AI?
Yes, and it is more common than people expect. In August 2025 Ahrefs looked at 15,000 queries and found that on average only 12 percent of the links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot ranked in Google’s top 10 for the same query. For ChatGPT alone the figure was about 8 percent. Perplexity was the exception, with nearly a third of its citations coming from top 10 pages.
That is the single best piece of evidence that GEO is not purely SEO renamed. If it were, the overlap would be far higher.
A second Ahrefs study, of 75,000 brands, explains where the gap comes from. The factor most closely linked to being mentioned in Google’s AI Overviews was branded web mentions, with a correlation of 0.664. Backlinks, the backbone of traditional SEO, came in at 0.218. The top three factors were all things that happen on other people’s websites.
Correlation is not proof, and I would not bet the business on a single coefficient. But the direction is clear. In SEO you can win mostly from your own site. In GEO, the internet’s opinion of you does a lot of the talking.
Where is GEO just SEO with a new name?
The foundations are identical, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. Google’s own guidance on its AI features says there are no extra technical requirements beyond normal search eligibility, and that you do not need special AI files or markup. ChatGPT’s search also relies on a web index. If a crawler cannot reach your pages, neither discipline can help you.
The shared list is long. A fast site that loads its content without heavy JavaScript. Pages that answer one clear question each, with a plain answer in the first couple of sentences under each heading. Real prices and a real address. An accurate Google Business Profile with steady reviews. All of that helps you rank and helps you get quoted.
Even the GEO paper’s best tactics are just good writing. Citing your sources and adding a hard figure is what a decent editor would have asked for in 2015.
What does GEO add that SEO usually ignores?
GEO adds work that most SEO retainers skip, and nearly all of it happens off your website or inside the AI tools themselves.
Take a hypothetical Manchester accountancy that specialises in ecommerce clients. Its SEO work this month might be a new page on VAT for Shopify sellers and a fix for a slow mobile homepage. Its GEO work would look rather different:
- Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode twelve questions a prospective client would ask, and record who is named.
- Check that Companies House, Google, Yell, ICAEW’s directory and the firm’s own site all show the same firm name and the same description of what it does.
- Reply to the Reddit and accountancy forum threads where people ask for ecommerce accountant recommendations, honestly and under a real name.
- Pitch one short comment to a trade publication such as Accountancy Age or a Shopify partner blog.
- Re run the twelve questions next month and compare.
None of that moves a Google ranking much. All of it shapes what an AI tool says when it reads about the firm.
How do you measure GEO compared with SEO?
SEO measurement is mature and free; GEO measurement is young, approximate and mostly paid. That is the most practical difference of all for a small business.
For SEO you open Google Search Console and see impressions, clicks and average position for every query. It is exact data, straight from Google. Bing Webmaster Tools adds a similar view, and now reports on Copilot citations too.
For GEO you are sampling. AI answers change between runs and between users, so the honest method is a fixed list of prompts tested on a schedule. You can do it by hand in a spreadsheet for nothing. If you would rather automate it, Otterly.ai starts at about $29 a month for 15 prompts, and the Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit is about $99 a month per domain on annual billing. Treat any single result as a weather report, not a league table.
How should you split your effort between GEO and SEO?
Split it by how your customers buy. If people search and buy within minutes, stay mostly on SEO. If they spend weeks comparing options before getting in touch, move a real share of effort into GEO.
As a rough starting point:
- Local trades and high street businesses (plumbers, dentists, salons): around 80 percent SEO, with the GEO share going almost entirely into reviews and directory consistency.
- Ecommerce shops: mostly SEO and product data, plus GEO effort on comparison and “best X for Y” questions where AI tools now shortlist products.
- Professional services and B2B (accountants, consultants, software suppliers, specialist manufacturers): closer to an even split, because buyers ask long, detailed questions and an AI shortlist of three firms is a very valuable place to be.
Whatever the split, fix the shared foundations first. A GEO campaign sitting on a site Google cannot crawl is money poured into a bucket with no bottom.
So which one do you actually need?
If I had to put it in one line: SEO gets you found, GEO gets you recommended, and you need the first before the second does much. I do not think a small business needs two agencies or two budgets for this. It needs one provider who understands both and is honest about which tasks serve which goal. That is how I run my search and AI visibility service, and it is the question I would put to anyone pitching you either acronym.
If you want to see where you stand, try the twelve question test above this week. It costs nothing but an hour. And if the results surprise you, or you just want a second opinion on what you have been quoted, get in touch and I will tell you plainly what I would do first. You can read more about how I work before you do.