What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO?

More and more people skip the list of blue links. They ask an AI assistant: "What's the best project management tool for a small agency?" or "Which running shoes are good for flat feet?" The assistant answers in a paragraph, names a few brands, and maybe links to a couple of sources.

If your brand is in that paragraph, you are in the running. If it isn't, the customer may never see you, however well you rank on Google.

That is the problem GEO (generative engine optimisation) and AEO (answer engine optimisation) set out to solve.

The short definitions

• SEO is about ranking your pages in search results, so people click through to your site.
• AEO is about being the answer: the featured snippet, the voice assistant reply, the "People also ask" box. The unit is a question and its answer.
• GEO is about being mentioned, recommended and cited by generative AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, which write a new answer every time instead of showing a list.

In practice the three overlap, and many people use AEO and GEO to mean the same thing. What they share is a shift from "where do I rank?" to "what does the answer say about me?"

How an AI assistant decides what to say

An assistant's answer about your market comes from two places.

What the model learned in training. Large language models are trained on huge amounts of public text. If your brand was discussed often and consistently (in reviews, comparisons, forums, news, your own site), the model has a picture of what you are and who you are for. If you were barely mentioned, it may not know you exist, or it may describe you wrongly.

What it finds when it searches. Many assistants now search the web while they answer, then summarise what they find and cite some of the pages. Here, classic search visibility matters a lot: if your pages, or pages that mention you, don't show up for the questions people ask, the assistant has nothing to quote.

Either way, the assistant is not ranking your page. It is forming an opinion about your brand from everything it can see, and then deciding whether you belong in the answer.

What carries over from SEO

A lot of good SEO still helps:

• Pages that answer real questions clearly. A direct answer near the top, followed by the detail, is easy for both search engines and assistants to use.
• Being crawlable. If search engines and AI crawlers can't read your pages, they can't learn from them or cite them. Check that your robots.txt doesn't block the crawlers you want.
• Structured data. Marking up your organisation, products, articles and FAQs helps machines understand what a page is about and who is behind it.
• Authority. Being referenced by trusted sites still signals that you are worth mentioning.

What is different

Some things matter more for GEO than they ever did for SEO:

• Mentions, not just links. An assistant can learn that you're "the affordable option for freelancers" from a Reddit thread or a review roundup, with no link at all. Being talked about, in the right terms, is the goal.
• Consistency. If your site says one thing, review sites another and old press coverage a third, the model gets a muddled picture. Say clearly what you do, who it's for and how you differ, everywhere.
• Comparisons. People ask assistants to compare: "X vs Y", "alternatives to Z", "best tools for…". If honest comparisons that include you don't exist, the assistant has to guess.
• No single position to track. Answers vary between assistants, between phrasings of the same question and from one day to the next. You measure how often you appear across many answers, not one rank.

Three things to do this month

1. Ask the assistants yourself. Write down ten questions a customer might ask before buying in your category. Ask them in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Note whether you're mentioned, how you're described, and which competitors and sources come up.
2. Fix how you describe yourself. Make your homepage and key pages say, in plain words, what you do, who it's for and what makes you different. Then check your profiles on review sites and directories say the same.
3. Fill one gap. Pick one question where competitors appear and you don't. Publish the clearest, most useful answer to it on your site, and look for one place outside your site where you could honestly be part of the conversation. Google's guide to creating helpful, people-first content is a good checklist for that page.

GEO is not a trick or a hack. It is the same work as good marketing: be clear about what you are, be useful, and be talked about by the right people. What has changed is who is listening, and how they repeat it.