GEO vs SEO: what is the difference?

GEO is generative engine optimization: the work that makes a website readable and quotable for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. SEO is search engine optimization: the work that makes a website findable in the result lists of Google and Bing. The difference is the place where a reader meets a company. In search, the reader sees a list of links and picks one. In an assistant, the reader gets an answer that names a few companies and cites a few pages.

What GEO and SEO share

Both start with a crawler that fetches a page and reads its text. An assistant can only name a company whose pages it can fetch and read.

Google states that a page needs no special optimization to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. Google advises keeping important content in text form and structured data in line with the visible text (Google, updated December 10, 2025).

Most GEO work is therefore careful search and content work on a company’s own pages. Text in the HTML and one page per service help in both fields.

Where GEO differs from SEO

Google’s Gemini reads pages through Googlebot (Vercel, December 17, 2024). A service list that a script loads after the page arrives stays invisible to ChatGPT and visible to Gemini.

A top position in Google counts for less in AI Overviews than in the classic results. In March 2026, Ahrefs found across 863,000 keywords that 38 percent of the pages cited in AI Overviews ranked in Google’s top 10 for the same query. In July 2025 the share was 76 percent (Search Engine Journal, March 2, 2026). A page that answers a narrow question can be cited from further down.

Does GEO replace SEO?

GEO builds on SEO. A technical SEO audit covers what a crawler meets on a site: status codes, forwardings, duplicate pages, titles, internal links, speed and structured data. GEO adds a record of what the assistants say about a company today. It also adds a look at robots.txt, where a Disallow line can lock out GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot.

What is not known

The vendors of the assistants publish no rules beyond the ones quoted above. Answers change with the model version and with the wording of the question. Nobody can make an assistant name a company. Both kinds of work remove the faults on a website that can be measured.

My work in both fields

I am an IT expert for data platforms in Frankfurt. I have built websites for more than twenty years and have worked on search engine optimization for more than ten. As editor in chief I built an information portal up to more than one million readers a year by January 2024. For a current client I optimize the website of a platform for search, conversions and agent readiness.

As an SEO freelancer in Frankfurt I check a website as a crawler reads it. Then I change its code, its page structure and its text myself. My audit of a company’s AI search visibility records what the assistants say about the company. I take on search work as a freelancer or as a permanent employee.

This site is my test case. It is a static Astro build that delivers its text in plain HTML, with JSON-LD in its pages. It lets the AI crawlers in and has an llms.txt that lists its pages for agents. Claude and Codex write much of the code under rules that a machine checks, and I review the result.