Is SEO Different to GEO?
IS SEO DIFFERENT TO GEO?
If you’ve been paying attention to SEO recently, you may have noticed another acronym starting to appear: GEO. GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation, and it generally refers to optimising your online presence so your business or content has a better chance of being understood, cited or recommended by AI-powered search experiences and large language models. So, is GEO replacing SEO? No.
SEO and GEO have slightly different goals, but there is a lot of overlap between them. In fact, many of the things that can help a business become more visible in AI search are the same things we have been working on through SEO for years. The bigger change is where people are searching and how we think about visibility.
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEO AND GEO?
Traditional SEO is about improving your visibility in search engines like Google. That might mean ranking a service page for an important keyword, getting a blog in front of someone researching a question or improving your visibility in local search results. GEO looks at visibility within generative AI experiences. Instead of only asking:
“Does our website rank for this search?”
we might also be asking:
“Is our business being mentioned, cited or recommended when an AI tool answers questions about this topic?”
That can include Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, as well as large language models such as ChatGPT and Gemini. So yes, the end result can look different. With SEO, we have traditionally focused heavily on rankings and clicks. With GEO, visibility could also mean your content being used as a source or your brand being included within an AI-generated response. But how we build towards that visibility is extremely similar.
SEO AND GEO HAVE A LOT IN COMMON
There is a temptation whenever something changes in digital marketing to assume everything we were doing before needs to be thrown out. That isn’t the case. Search engines and AI tools still need information they can find, understand and have reason to trust. That means many familiar SEO fundamentals continue to matter:
- Useful content. Your website should genuinely answer the questions people have about your products, services and industry.
- Technical SEO. Search engines still need to be able to crawl, index and understand your website.
- Clear website structure. Headings, internal links and well-organised pages make your content easier to understand.
- Authority. Backlinks, reviews, mentions and other signals around your business help build a stronger online presence.
- Real expertise. First-hand knowledge, examples, original insights and experience give your content something generic AI-generated articles can’t easily replicate.
None of those suddenly became irrelevant because people started using ChatGPT. If anything, they have become more important. For more on SEO in the age of AI read our recent blog.
SO, WHAT IS ACTUALLY DIFFERENT ABOUT GEO?
The biggest difference is that visibility is no longer limited to a list of search results. Someone might ask an AI tool for the best type of product for a particular problem, compare several services, research a complicated purchase or ask for businesses that meet a specific set of requirements. The AI can then bring together information from different sources and present an answer.
That changes how we need to think about content. It isn’t only about targeting a keyword and trying to move a page from position six to position three. We also need to think about the wider questions surrounding that search, whether your business is clearly associated with the topic and whether there is enough trustworthy information online for AI systems to understand who you are and what you know.
In other words, GEO encourages us to look beyond rankings and think more broadly about relevance, authority and recommendations.
DOES GEO REQUIRE A DIFFERENT SEO STRATEGY?
For most businesses, we wouldn’t recommend having an “SEO strategy” over here and a completely separate “GEO strategy” over there. They should work together. If we’re researching content opportunities, for example, we can look at traditional keyword data alongside the questions appearing within AI search. If we’re improving a service page, we can make sure it targets relevant searches while also clearly explaining the service and answering the questions surrounding it.
As SEO experts, we use industry leading tools which means we can also look beyond traditional rankings to understand where a business is already gaining AI visibility, what it is being surfaced for and where competitors may be appearing instead.
That information can then feed back into the wider SEO strategy.
WILL GEO REPLACE SEO?
No. GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation, which focuses specifically on improving visibility within AI-powered search experiences. SEO is still extremely important because traditional search hasn’t gone anywhere .People are still using Google to find products, services and businesses, which means rankings, local SEO, technical SEO, content and backlinks continue to play an important role in getting found online.
What has changed is that people now have more ways to search. Someone might discover a business through ChatGPT or a Google AI Overview before visiting its website, checking its reviews or searching for it on Google. That’s why we see GEO as an extension of modern SEO rather than a replacement for it. It adds another area of visibility to consider while many of the same SEO foundations continue to support both.
SHOULD BUSINESSES BE DOING SEO OR GEO?
Both, but that doesn’t mean doubling your marketing workload. You don’t need to abandon your current SEO strategy and start producing hundreds of articles designed specifically for AI. Start with the fundamentals.
Build a technically strong website. Create genuinely useful content around the things your customers are searching for. Demonstrate your expertise. Build reviews and authority around your brand. Make sure information about your business is clear and consistent across the web. Then use SEO and AI visibility data to understand what’s working, where you’re being surfaced and where the opportunities are. The platforms might be changing, but the underlying goal is still very similar: make your business easy to find, easy to understand and worth recommending.
At Sleepi Digital, we don’t see SEO and GEO as two completely separate strategies. We look at the bigger picture of how people are searching, where businesses are appearing and what we can do to improve that visibility across both traditional and AI-powered search.
Want to improve your online visibility but not sure where to start? Sleepi Digital can help you build the right foundations and start your SEO journey with a strategy that makes sense for your business.