GEO vs SEO: what is different, what stays the same and how to measure it

GEO vs SEO: what is the difference?

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work of making pages that search engines can crawl, index, understand and rank, so that people find them in a list of results. GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of making content that AI answer engines can retrieve, understand and cite when they write an answer. The first competes for a position. The second competes for a place inside one written response.

The term GEO comes from the research paper GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Pranjal Aggarwal and co-authors from IIT Delhi and Princeton University, first posted in November 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024. You will also meet AEO (answer engine optimisation), LLMO and “AI SEO”. Google’s optimisation guide says AEO and GEO are terms you may see used and that the work is still SEO. Our own deep dive is generative engine optimization, and we cover the answer-focused label in answer engine optimization.

Two notes on wording. “GEO SEO” sometimes means geographic targeting for local search, and “GEO AI” can refer to geospatial topics. This article is about generative engines only.

SEO vs AEO vs GEO: how do the three terms relate?

Vendors do not agree on exact definitions, so use the labels as a rough map, not a taxonomy. In everyday use, SEO means ranking in classic results, AEO usually means writing content that answers a question directly enough to be lifted into a snippet, voice answer or AI response, and GEO means being cited in a generated answer. Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster Guidelines describe GEO as focusing on content eligibility for grounding and reference in AI responses, and add that GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations, just as SEO does not guarantee rankings or traffic.

In practice the three share one foundation. A page that is crawlable, indexed and written for people is the starting point for all of them. The extra work sits on top: direct answers, quotable facts and measurement of citations.

GEO vs SEO compared: goal, results, signals and measurement

What stays the same between GEO and SEO?

More than most GEO advice admits. Google’s guide to AI features and your website says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet to appear as a supporting link, and that there are no additional technical requirements. Its best-practice list reads like an SEO checklist:

• Access: let crawlers in through robots.txt and your CDN, and keep pages indexable.
• Content in text: keep important content available as text, and keep structured data consistent with what is visible on the page.
• Page experience and internal links: the same signals that help classic ranking.
• Original content: Google says unique, non-commodity content will likely influence your presence in AI search more than any other suggestion in its guide.
• No shortcuts: producing a page for every query variation can breach Google’s scaled content abuse policy.

If these basics are broken, no GEO tactic will fix it. A technical audit is therefore the first GEO step: it finds blocked crawlers, noindex pages, thin pages and pages that only render with JavaScript. Our SEO audit report example shows what that looks like on a real site.

What changes with GEO?

1. More crawlers, with different jobs. OpenAI separates OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot and ChatGPT-User, and blocking the training crawler does not remove you from search. Our guide to AI crawlers lists the other vendors.
2. Queries are split. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use “query fan-out”, issuing several related searches across subtopics. Cover the follow-up questions a reader would ask, rather than one keyword.
3. Passages matter more than pages. An answer engine quotes a fact, not a page. A clear heading, a direct answer and an attributed number make a passage easy to lift.
4. Results vary. The same prompt can produce different answers and sources, so a single check is a sample. You track a rate across many checks.
5. Bing matters more. OpenAI says ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers and links Microsoft’s privacy statement, and Bing Webmaster Tools now reports citations in Copilot. Verifying your site there is a cheap safeguard, covered in our Bing Webmaster Tools guide.

What does the GEO research show?

The original paper built GEO-bench, a benchmark of 10,000 queries, and tested nine rewriting methods against a simulated generative engine. The three strongest were adding quotations, adding statistics and citing sources, which the authors report as relative improvements of 30 to 40% on their position-adjusted word count metric. Adding keywords, the classic SEO tactic, offered little to no improvement. The abstract’s headline is that GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses.

Read that as an upper bound for a test setup, not a promise. In the experiment the sources were already in the engine’s context, so the results show what makes a retrieved passage quotable, not what makes it retrieved. A July 2026 survey of 45 GEO studies concludes that no reviewed technique shows a stable, longitudinal, cross-platform causal effect on discoverability, and that topical relevance and context position are the most reproducible levers. Our GEO guide walks through the paper’s numbers in detail.

How do you measure GEO?

SEO has one dominant data source in each search engine. GEO has several partial ones, and you need more than one.

Prompt tracking and citation checks

Write 20 to 50 questions your customers really ask, run them on the assistants that matter and record whether your domain is cited (linked) or mentioned (named). Repeat on a schedule and compare. Serpel’s AI visibility tracking does this for ChatGPT with web search and Google AI Overviews, and stores each answer’s sources so you can see who is cited instead of you. Our comparison of the best AI visibility tools covers the alternatives.

serpel ai add --project <project-id> --prompt "What is the difference between GEO and SEO?"
serpel ai run --project <project-id> --wait
serpel ai status --project <project-id>

Google’s and Bing’s AI reports

Search Console’s Generative AI performance report shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode over time and by page, country, date, device and search type. Google says it rolled the insights out to all websites worldwide on 31 Aug 2026, and that traffic from AI features is also counted in the normal Performance report under the Web search type. Bing’s AI Performance report launched in public preview in February 2026 and shows total citations, average cited pages and a sample of grounding queries for Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and select partner integrations.

Server logs for AI crawlers

Your access log shows which AI systems read your pages. Count requests per crawler, then check the status codes, because a crawler that receives 403 or 404 cannot cite you. User agents can be faked, so match them against each vendor’s published IP ranges before you trust a number.

grep -E -o "OAI-SearchBot|GPTBot|ChatGPT-User|PerplexityBot|Perplexity-User|ClaudeBot|Claude-SearchBot|Claude-User" access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

Should you prioritise GEO or SEO?

SEO first, GEO as an experiment loop on top. Google says its AI features are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems, and OpenAI says ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers, so being crawlable and indexed comes first either way. A sensible order:

1. 1

   Fix access and indexing

   Verify your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, allow the crawlers you want and remove accidental noindex rules.

2. 2

   Serve content as text

   Put the main content, headings and tables in the initial HTML. Our guide to JavaScript SEO explains why.

3. 3

   Write answers worth quoting

   Lead each section with the answer, add attributed numbers and cover the follow-up questions. Do not invent statistics or quotes.

4. 4

   Measure a baseline

   Run your prompt set, read the Google and Bing AI reports and count AI crawler hits before you change anything.

5. 5

   Change one thing at a time

   Edit a page, wait for crawlers to return and measure again. Be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success. Google says no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems.