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Introduction
Search is in the middle of its biggest shift since Google popularised the idea of “10 blue links”. For two decades, brands fought for visibility primarily through search engine optimization (SEO): ranking on Google and Bing, winning clicks, earning traffic, generating leads.
Today, users are getting direct, conversational answers from AI systems like Google’s AI Overviews (formerly SGE/Search Generative Experience), Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Perplexity and others. These systems don’t just list links; they summarise, compare, and recommend. They behave more like assistants than directories.
That change has created a new discipline alongside SEO: Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO. GEO is about influencing how AI-driven “answer engines” understand, cite, and present your brand inside their generated responses.
Before we dive into the differences, here are a few quick context points that matter for any marketing leader:
- Around 68% of all online journeys still begin with a search engine, and Google still handles the overwhelming majority of global searches.
- Organic search continues to drive over half of many websites’ traffic, and organic results on page one capture the vast majority of clicks.
- At the same time, AI-generated answers are already appearing on a large share of Google queries and in products like ChatGPT and Perplexity, reducing the need for users to click through to a site.
- 68% of organisations say they’re actively changing strategy to account for AI search and GEO, and over half are asking their SEO teams to lead that shift.
So, no, SEO is not “dead”. But the definition of “visibility” is getting broader — and more complicated.
This article explains SEO vs GEO in plain English, shows how they overlap, and gives you a roadmap you can use now.
Quick Definitions
What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of improving your website so it ranks higher in traditional search engines such as Google and Bing. It typically focuses on:
- Matching keywords and search intent
- Earning authority through backlinks and trusted mentions
- Delivering useful on-page content
- Ensuring technical health (speed, mobile experience, crawlability, structured data, etc.)
The goal of SEO is straightforward: get your pages to appear (ideally on page one) for relevant queries, drive qualified organic traffic, and convert that traffic into leads or sales.
Why SEO still matters:
- Organic search can drive more than half of a typical site’s traffic and is often cited by marketers as one of the top ROI channels.
- Google alone still holds well over 80–90% of global search share, depending on the dataset, so visibility there is commercially critical.
What is GEO?
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimising your content, brand signals, and digital footprint so AI-driven engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini/Copilot, Google AI Overviews) can:
- Understand you
- Trust you
- Cite you
- Recommend you inside their generated answers
Instead of only trying to “rank” a page, GEO aims to make sure your brand is included (accurately, and favourably) in the AI’s answer itself.
In other words, SEO tries to get the click. GEO tries to get the mention — preferably as the recommended answer or cited source.
Why GEO Exists (the shift to AI answers)
The way people search is no longer linear. A typical buyer might:
- Ask ChatGPT for an initial shortlist (“What’s the best payroll software for UK startups?”).
- Cross-check a product in Google, where an AI Overview summarises the pros and cons and pulls in snippets from multiple sources.
- Read two human-written reviews on Reddit or a trusted blog.
- Go back to Google for pricing and local availability.
That’s one journey, and none of it required scrolling through page two of Google.
AI Overviews in Google, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity now generate instant summaries above (or instead of) traditional organic listings. In many cases, users get what they need without clicking at all — a phenomenon often called “zero-click search”.
Some notable trends from recent industry reporting and research:
- AI Overviews and similar generative answers already appear for a significant share of Google queries, in some datasets approaching half of observed searches.
- Gartner has forecast a double-digit decline in traditional search volume in the next couple of years, with organic traffic expected to fall as users lean on AI-enhanced answers.
- Nearly 80% of consumers are expected to use AI-powered or AI-assisted search, and a majority already report that they trust AI-generated results.
This is why GEO has momentum. If AI engines are now “front of house” for discovery, you need to show up there — not just on page one of classic search results.
GEO VS SEO: The Core Differences
Let’s look at the two disciplines side by side.
Search Engines Targeted
- SEO: Optimises for Google, Bing and other conventional engines that crawl, index and rank web pages.
- GEO: Optimises for AI engines that synthesise content from many sources (websites, forums, PDFs, videos, product feeds, etc.) to generate an instant answer.
Output Format
- SEO outcome: A results page with around 10 blue links, featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, local packs, etc.
- GEO outcome: A single multi-paragraph answer, sometimes with tables, bullet points, comparisons, pricing notes and “recommended options”, often with just a handful of citations.
This matters because traditional search encourages exploration. AI answers encourage trust in the summary itself.
Ranking and Visibility Signals
Classic ranking factors like backlinks, keyword relevance, page speed and mobile experience still drive SEO.
GEO, by contrast, rewards:
- Clear, well-structured explanations
- Direct answers to common questions in plain language
- Use of schema/structured data (FAQ, HowTo, Product, Organisation, etc.)
- Strong brand credibility and evidence-backed claims
- Consistency across channels (website, social, reviews, thought leadership, forums)
In other words, GEO is less about repeating a keyword and more about being the most trustworthy, clearly expressed source on a topic so the AI feels confident citing you.
There is early academic-style work showing that relatively small content changes — such as adding citations, quotations and statistics — can boost how often a source is cited in generative answers by 30–40%.
Traffic Impact and Measurement
Here’s the uncomfortable part.
- Strong SEO performance tends to equal measurable organic traffic, leads and revenue. Organic search can account for over half of site visits and is repeatedly ranked by marketers as a top ROI channel.
- Strong GEO performance may not immediately show up as clicks. If a Google AI Overview or a Perplexity answer summarises your advice, the user might never visit your site because they already got the answer.
This is why marketing teams are starting to track “share of voice in AI answers” — essentially, how often the AI names you, quotes you or positions your brand as a recommended solution.
How GEO and SEO Work Together (Not Either/or)
There’s a myth that GEO will “replace” SEO. Industry consensus (and frankly, commercial reality) says otherwise:
- SEO is still the foundation. If your site is slow, thin, duplicated, unhelpful or untrustworthy, you will struggle in both traditional SERPs and AI summaries.
- GEO builds on that foundation by making your content easier for AI engines to parse, understand and confidently quote.
A practical way to think about it is:
- SEO earns you credibility, crawlability and topical authority.
- GEO converts that authority into presence inside AI-generated answers.
For most organisations, the winning move in 2025 and beyond is not “SEO or GEO?”. It’s “How do we show up everywhere the customer asks questions?”
The Role of E-E-A-T in Both GEO and SEO
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google has used E-E-A-T as a quality framework for years to help decide which pages deserve to rank, especially on sensitive “Your Money or Your Life” topics like health, finance and legal.
Why is E-E-A-T now even more important?
1. Experience
- Search engines and AI engines both prefer sources that demonstrate first-hand knowledge, testing, or real-world methodology.
- Publishing surface-level summaries is no longer enough; AI engines already generate summaries by themselves.
2. Expertise
- Pages should make it obvious who is speaking. Credentials, qualifications, years in industry, relevant awards or certifications all help.
3. Authoritativeness
- Authority still comes from backlinks and mentions from respected sources in your niche. In GEO terms, repeated positive mentions across the open web (reviews, forums, LinkedIn thought leadership, press coverage) help AI systems view you as a reliable voice worth citing.
4. Trustworthiness
- Transparent sourcing, accurate statistics, up-to-date data and security signals (HTTPS, brand transparency, clear policies) all feed trust.
- Generative engines are under intense scrutiny for hallucinations and misinformation. Sources that back claims with verifiable facts are safer to include in AI answers.
In short: E-E-A-T isn’t just an SEO box-tick. It’s becoming a GEO survival requirement.
How to Optimise for Traditional SEO Today
Strong SEO in 2025 is still built on fundamentals.
a) Technical Excellence
- Fast load times (users abandon slow pages in seconds).
- Mobile-friendly layouts (mobile drives most search traffic in many regions).
- Clean site architecture and internal linking so crawlers can index everything important.
b) Content Mapped to Intent
- Build pages that answer real questions buyers ask at different stages (informational, commercial, transactional).
- Use headings, summaries and FAQs to make answers scannable.
- Refresh high-value evergreen pages to keep data current and signal freshness.
c) On-Page Optimisation
- Title tags and meta descriptions that clearly explain value (not clickbait).
- Logical heading hierarchy (H1, H2, H3) so both users and crawlers understand structure.
- Natural keyword placement and related phrasing — no stuffing.
d) Authority Building
- Earn relevant backlinks and mentions from trusted publications, partners and industry communities.
- Publish original research, statistics, explainers and comparison guides that others will cite.
e) Measurement
- Track rankings for target keywords.
- Monitor organic traffic, click-through rate (CTR), bounce rate and conversions from organic sessions.
Think of this as your “hygiene layer”. Without it, GEO struggles, because AI engines tend to pull from sources that already demonstrate authority, clarity and stability.
How to Optimise for GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
GEO is newer, but a few principles are already emerging across agencies, enterprise SEO teams, and early academic research.
a) Write for Questions, Not Just Keywords
LLM-style engines often answer natural-language prompts (“How do I fix…?” / “Which tool is best for…?”). Structure your content to mirror those questions and give the clean, direct answer in the first few sentences.
b) Be Unambiguously Useful and Factual
AI systems prefer sources that present accurate, self-contained explanations with cited evidence. Including statistics, named methodologies, and specific steps increases the likelihood that a model will lift your wording.
c) Use Structured Data and Clean Formatting
- Mark up key pages with schema (FAQPage, HowTo, Product, Organisation, Review).
- Use bullet points, numbered steps, comparison tables and “In summary”/“Key takeaways” sections. This helps AI parse and reuse your content without misinterpreting it.
d) Strengthen Entity Clarity
Make it crystal clear who you are, what you offer, where you operate, and why you’re credible. Consistency across your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, industry directories, press mentions and review platforms helps AI engines resolve you as a reliable entity.
e) Spread Authority Signals Beyond Your Site
Generative engines increasingly quote forums (e.g. Reddit), social posts, YouTube explainer videos, podcast transcripts and Q&A style blog posts — not just homepages and service pages. Building a helpful presence in those ecosystems can raise the chances of being referenced in AI answers.
f) Monitor How Ai Already Talks About You
Ask generative engines questions you want to rank for (“What’s the best [service/product] for [audience]?”). Document whether your brand shows up, how you’re described, and which competitors are mentioned instead. This forms your GEO gap analysis.
g) Mitigate Hallucinations
If an AI answer misstates your pricing, features or credentials, that’s not only a reputational problem — it may cost you leads. Keeping clear, up-to-date, fact-checked product/solution pages and “About” pages reduces the risk of the model pulling outdated or invented details.
Discover How GEO & SEO Can Boost Your Visibility
Metrics and KPIs: How to Know You’re Winning
For SEO (Traditional Search):
- Organic impressions for priority keywords
- Average position / ranking movement
- Organic click-through rate (CTR)
- Organic sessions and conversions
- Revenue or leads attributed to organic
These are well understood and widely reported in analytics stacks.
For GEO (Generative Engines):
Because AI answers can satisfy intent without a click, GEO needs different indicators:
- Citation share / brand mentions: How often AI engines name you, cite you, or list you as a recommended provider.
- Answer accuracy: Whether the AI’s description of your product/service is correct.
- Sentiment / positioning: Are you framed as “top choice for X”, “budget-friendly alternative”, or not recommended at all?
- Referral traffic from AI surfaces: Some generative platforms still include source links. Track any traffic they send (UTMs and analytics filters can help).
- Comparative visibility: How often you’re mentioned vs. specific named competitors for must-win queries.
Over time you can build an “AI share of voice” dashboard in the same way SEO teams track SERP share of voice today.
Practical Action Plan for Marketing Leaders
Here’s a pragmatic roadmap to stay competitive without blowing up your current SEO programme.
Step 1. Protect and Strengthen Core SEO
- Audit site speed, mobile experience and crawlability.
- Update or consolidate weak, duplicate or thin pages.
- Refresh high-value evergreen content with 2024/2025 data, stats and examples.
Step 2. Map Your “money Questions”
List the 15–20 questions that matter most to revenue. These are usually “best”, “top”, “vs”, “cost”, “how to choose”, “is it worth it”, and “for [industry]” style queries. These same questions drive a lot of AI-assisted research.
Build or update content that:
- Answers each question in the first paragraph
- Includes a concise bullet-point summary
- Uses trustworthy evidence and up-to-date stats
Step 3. Add Structured Clarity
- Turn long, rambling blog posts into cleaner guides with subheadings, FAQs, tables and process steps.
- Add schema markup (FAQPage, HowTo, Product) where relevant so both traditional crawlers and AI parsers can interpret and reuse your answers.
Step 4. Build Proof of Authority Across Channels
- Publish case studies, testimonials, success metrics and quotes from recognised experts in your space.
- Encourage honest reviews and Q&A in credible communities (LinkedIn for B2B, Reddit/YouTube for consumer products, industry forums for niche tech or professional services).
Step 5. Track AI Visibility
- Test how you and your competitors appear in AI engines for “money questions”.
- Screenshot results and record wording. Repeat regularly to spot movement.
Step 6. Align Stakeholders
BrightEdge’s 2025 survey found that 54% of organisations have pushed responsibility for AI search strategy onto SEO and digital marketing teams — but those teams often lack full cross-functional support.
Create an internal working group spanning marketing, PR, product marketing and legal/compliance so you can respond fast when AI exposure changes.
Risks, Ethics, and Trust
Generative engines are powerful, but not perfect. They can:
- Misattribute quotes or product features
- Invent pricing, availability or policies
- Surface outdated advice as if it were current
- Favour content that “sounds confident” over content that is actually correct, if the confident source is structured in a way that’s easy to reuse.
That creates both opportunity and responsibility. Brands can attempt to “optimise” for AI, but manipulative tactics (overclaiming results, faking expert credentials, planting misleading forum content) risk regulatory, reputational and in some cases legal fallout.
There is also an accessibility question: if AI engines increasingly answer everything directly, large platforms become gatekeepers of information and recommendation. Analysts have already warned that this could accelerate “zero-click” behaviour and concentrate visibility among a small set of favoured sources.
The ethical route is to invest in accuracy, transparency, up-to-date data and demonstrable expertise. That is not only safer, it also aligns with how both SEO and GEO reward trustworthy brands.
The Future of Search
Several forces are converging:
- Traditional organic search still delivers massive commercial value. Organic listings continue to capture most clicks and drive a significant share of inbound revenue for many businesses.
- AI-generated answers are scaling quickly. Some industry analyses suggest AI Overviews are now surfacing on billions of searches and that AI recommendation surfaces could rival traditional Google search for traffic influence within just a few years.
- Marketers are responding. Nearly seven in ten organisations say they’re actively adapting to AI search right now, not in five years’ time.
Taken together, this points to a “search everywhere” reality: discovery doesn’t just happen on Google.com. It happens across AI chat interfaces, social platforms, video explainers, niche communities, and traditional SERPs.
In that world, GEO is not a fad. It’s a natural extension of SEO into AI-driven discovery. The smartest teams are treating GEO as an expansion of their visibility strategy, not a total rewrite.
Conclusion
So, what’s the difference between GEO and SEO?
- SEO is about helping your content rank in traditional search results so humans click through to your website.
- GEO is about helping AI engines understand, trust and quote you directly in their answers — even if the user never clicks.
They serve different surfaces but share the same backbone: credible, technically accessible, user-first information that demonstrates real expertise and trustworthiness.
Here’s the practical takeaway for leadership:
- Keep investing in SEO fundamentals. They’re still responsible for a huge share of qualified traffic and revenue.
- Layer in GEO. Make your authority, proof points and explanations so clear that AI engines can’t ignore you.
- Track how you’re represented in AI answers, not just where you rank in SERPs.
Brands that master both will control more of the conversation during discovery, evaluation and purchase — wherever those moments now happen.
At AIS Technolabs, we help businesses stay ahead of evolving search trends through cutting-edge GEO and digital marketing strategies, combining proven SEO fundamentals with AI-era optimisation so your brand shows up — and shows up accurately — wherever your customers are looking. For more information or to get started on optimising for both SEO and GEO, Contact Us.
FAQs
Ans.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the practice of making your brand and content easier for AI-driven answer engines (like AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot) to understand, trust, and recommend inside their generated responses.
Ans.
SEO focuses on ranking web pages in traditional search results so users click through to your site. GEO focuses on being cited or recommended directly inside AI-generated answers, even if the user never clicks a link.
Ans.
No. GEO builds on strong SEO. You still need technically sound, authoritative, helpful content to rank in search. GEO then ensures that same content is clear, structured and verifiable enough to be used by AI systems when they generate summaries.
Ans.
More search journeys start with AI-style questions (“What’s the best…?”, “How do I…?”). Instead of showing ten blue links, AI engines often produce one summary answer. If your brand is not included in that answer, you may never be seen.
Ans.
You optimise for GEO by writing clear, factual, well-structured answers to high-intent questions; using schema markup (FAQ, HowTo, Product); keeping product and service information accurate; and demonstrating real expertise and trust.
Ans.
Yes. Authority signals such as reputable backlinks, expert mentions, case studies, and positive reviews still influence how trustworthy you appear. Both traditional search engines and AI engines prefer reliable, evidence-backed sources.
Ans.
You can track how often AI answers mention your brand, how accurately you’re described, whether you’re recommended against competitors, and whether any traffic is referred from AI-generated answer boxes or summaries.
Ans.
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) underpins both. Search engines and AI engines are more likely to surface brands that show first-hand experience, real credentials, transparent sourcing, and up-to-date information.
Ans.
If your sales depend on organic discovery, comparison research, or expert credibility, yes. GEO helps you stay visible in AI-driven answers while SEO continues to capture traditional organic traffic.
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Yes. Modern digital marketing partners can align technical SEO, content strategy, structured data, and AI-oriented optimization. At AIS Technolabs, we help businesses strengthen search visibility across both classic results and AI-generated answers.
James Smith
James Smith, a seasoned Brand Marketing Manager with over six years of experience, excels in crafting and executing strategic marketing initiatives. With a keen understanding of consumer behavior and market trends, he effectively builds and enhances brand identities. James's expertise lies in developing comprehensive marketing strategies that resonate with target audiences, driving engagement and loyalty. His extensive experience and innovative approach make him a valuable asset in achieving brand objectives and driving business growth.
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