SEO vs. GEO: 5 Key Differences Despite the Similarities

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Getting your website to show up in Google searches. Goal: Get people to click your link.
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Getting AI chatbots like ChatGPT to mention your brand or information. Goal: Get AI to quote and mention you.
• Main differences: SEO brings visitors to your website. GEO puts your brand or content directly in AI answers (no click needed). SEO brings high-volume traffic that explores your site. GEO will bring less traffic to your site directly, but these visitors may be more likely to convert.
• What to do: Start with good SEO (it’s still essential), then add GEO tactics like including more original data, keeping your most important content up-to-date, or getting your brand mentioned more across the web.
• Bottom line: You need both. Think of SEO as your foundation and GEO as future-proofing your online presence.

Want the full story? Read on.

As you probably already know, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving your website so it appears higher in Google, Bing, or other search engine results when people search for topics related to your business.

The goal: get people to click on your link in the SERPs and visit your website.

How search engines work

Search engines work in three main steps:

1. Crawling. Programs called web crawlers (or spiders) browse the internet, following links and collecting webpages.
2. Indexing. The collected pages are analyzed and stored in a massive database called the search index.
3. Ranking. When you type in a search, the engine looks through the index and uses an algorithm to sort the results, showing the most relevant pages first.

In short, when you search for something, the search engine scans its index for matches, ranks them by relevance, and then shows you the best results on the search engine results page (SERP). AI search works differently—more on that in a bit.

Key SEO strategies

In practice, SEO is about using the right keywords, creating helpful content, earning trusted links, and making sure your site is fast, safe, and easy to use. Here are the core strategies:

• Keywords research: Finding and using the words and phrases your customers actually search for.
• On-page SEO: Creating helpful, detailed information that answers search intent.
• Off-page SEO: Getting other reputable websites to link to yours.
• Technical SEO: Making your site free from critical SEO errors. Mostly: making your site easy for search engines to crawl, safe for users, simple to navigate, fast to load, and mobile-friendly.

GEO, short for Generative Engine Optimization (also known as AEO or LLMO), is the process of getting your brand mentioned, cited, and accurately represented in AI-generated answers. That includes results from AI assistants like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Google’s AI Mode.

In other words, GEO is SEO for AI search.

How AI search works

With ChatGPT, the way it responds depends on whether it uses web browsing (also called grounding) to find the answer:

• No browsing: It generates answers from patterns it learned during training. It doesn’t pull from a live product database, just from its frozen knowledge (up to August 2023).
• With browsing: It searches the web, picks useful pages, and summarizes them so the answer is based on fresh information.

Key GEO tactics

All of these are covered in detail in our GEO guide, but here’s the quick version:

• Third-party mentions: Get your brand mentioned across industry sites, “best of” lists, and review platforms (most AI citations come from other sites, not yours).
• AI-preferred content: Create how-to guides, comparison pages (“X vs Y”), data studies, and “best of” lists - these get the highest AI traffic.
• Facts and statistics: Include specific, verifiable numbers and data that AI can confidently cite.
• Multi-platform presence: Build visibility on YouTube (2nd most cited by AI Overviews) and Reddit (3rd most cited).
• Structured Information: Use clear headings, Q&A formats, bullet points, and schema markup for machine readability.
• Fresh content: Keep information updated regularly - AI prefers citing newer content over older pages.

The key difference between SEO and GEO comes from how the search experience works. With AI answers, users don’t need to click links as often, but when they do, it’s usually because they want a deeper understanding or are ready to try the product the AI recommended. That in turn creates a different set of metrics to track.

In SEO, your website appears as a link in search results.

In GEO, your information or brand appears directly inside the AI’s answer.

If links appear in AI-generated answers, they are far less visible (and redundant from the perspective of users who wanted a quick answer). In AI Overviews, they can appear contextually with a small link icon next to a term, on the right-hand panel, or at the very bottom.

In SEO, the user journey typically looks like this: they search for something, see your link, click to your website, and read your content.

In GEO, the journey is different: the user asks a question, the AI provides an answer using your information, and the user may never visit your site at all, at least not directly from the AI answer (this is called a ‘zero-click’ search).

PEW Research Center recently studied how searches interact with Google’s AI Overviews, proving the “zero click” phenomenon.

They found that users click on search results only 8% of the time when AI summaries appear vs 15% without them - that’s nearly 50% fewer clicks. Only 1% of users click on sources cited in the AI summary itself. What’s more, 26% of users end their session completely after seeing an AI summary (vs 16% for traditional search).

Success in SEO is measured with metrics like keyword rankings, backlinks, organic traffic, and organic share of voice. This is part of the “click economics,” because your results depend on convincing people to click through to your site.

By contrast, success in GEO is measured with metrics like brand mentions in AI answers, citations when your content is referenced, AI referral traffic, and AI share of voice. This is “visibility economics,” where the more often your brand appears in AI responses, the more likely users are to trust and choose you, even if they never click.

Here’s what a GEO dashboard looks like, a screenshot from Ahrefs’ Brand Radar. The core difference is that there are no keyword rankings. Instead, you see how popular a brand is within a specific AI’s responses, and how that popularity changes over time.

Another key difference is where mentions come from. In SEO, your own site is the primary asset—you optimize your pages to rank as links in search results. In GEO, however, most brand mentions in AI responses originate from third‑party sites rather than your own domain. For this reason, GEO may turn out to be a more interdisciplinary effort than SEO (requiring, for example, PR and influencer marketing).

Industry rankings, “best of” lists, review platforms, PR coverage, and customer case studies often dominate as the top sources AI assistants rely on. For example, in Google’s AI Overviews, the top pages mentioning Ahrefs didn’t include ahrefs.com at all.

These mentions don’t even need to be linked. AI can pick up unlinked references just as easily. This makes broad visibility across the web more important than ever.

To find sites that often appear in AI answers, just plug their domain in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and look at the AI citation count in the Overview report:

Traffic from AI search looks different from traditional organic search. Visitors from AI tend to view fewer pages (4 vs. 5.2) but spend slightly more time on them (86s vs. 78s). They also have a higher bounce rate (67.8% vs. 63.7%), suggesting they arrive with a clear, specific goal (source).

AI search also drives users to homepages, product pages, and tools more often than organic search, while organic search brings more traffic to international pages.

Most importantly, AI traffic can convert at a much higher rate. In the case of Ahrefs, it was 23x more than organic search; despite being just 0.5% of traffic, it generates over 12% of signups.

That said, conversion rates will vary by site. As this recent study from Amsive shows, not every website sees the same uplift from LLM-driven traffic.

Despite their differences, SEO and GEO share important common ground based on content quality and brand authority.

Both SEO and GEO depend on having useful content, which builds topical authority. At the end of the day, search engines and AI tools are designed to bring people the information they’re looking for. The key difference is in how the answer is delivered: search engines point you to links, while AI often gives you the answer directly.

Case in point, Ahrefs’ content and product pages were mentioned 7,470 times across 2,309 pages without any special effort to optimize for AI. That’s because new search technologies still rely on the same foundation: quality, useful content.

Both strategies focus on understanding what people are really looking for and providing the best answer (the search intent).

Whether someone searches Google for “best project management software” or asks ChatGPT something more specific like “What’s the best project management tool for a team of 30 under $50?”, the intent doesn’t change. They’re looking for the top options, the reasons behind those recommendations, and a clear comparison to help them decide.

Google Search and AI assistants both rely on outside content; they don’t generate answers out of thin air. That means they face the same challenge: deciding which sources to trust. This is where your reputation as an expert becomes valuable for both SEO and GEO.

Just like in traditional SEO, brand authority is a major factor in GEO. Branded mentions across the web show a strong connection to visibility in AI Overviews (correlation of 0.664). Furthermore, brands in the top 25% for web mentions earn over 10x more AI Overview placements than the next tier down.

And that’s not just true for AI Overviews. AI Assistants also lean heavily on well-known sources. The main difference is that they tend to cite a slightly different set of sites.

Simply put, the more people talk about your brand online, the more likely AI is to feature you.

Search engines and AI assistants still rely on crawlers to fetch and process pages. AI struggles with heavy JavaScript, but it typically respects robots.txt rules. If they can’t access or interpret your content correctly, neither SEO nor GEO will work.

Think of SEO as your foundation and GEO as the upgrade. You need SEO first because it’s established, drives most web traffic, and provides the base that AI systems often learn from. 

But GEO matters too, because AI search is growing, and the “zero-click” trend is accelerating as more AI Overviews roll out. What’s more, Adobe’s recent study found that three in 10 U.S. respondents trust ChatGPT more than other search engines, and 36% of the people surveyed discovered a new product or brand through ChatGPT.

If you’re curious about the global traffic shift, check out our AI vs. Search Traffic Analysis dashboard, which pulls data from over 50,000 sites. For instance, from January to August 2025, Google held a 41.13% traffic share, while ChatGPT accounted for 0.21%.

Final thoughts

Worried you’re falling behind? Don’t panic. SEO dies every year and lives forever. The same qualities that make content strong for SEO also work for GEO. By adding GEO strategies to your SEO efforts and keeping an eye on your AI visibility, you’ll be well-positioned for today and prepared for what’s next.

Got questions or comments? Let me know on LinkedIn.