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Blog · GEO vs SEO
SEO earns a position on a results page and the click that follows. GEO earns a mention or a citation inside an answer that most people never click out of. The difference is the unit of work. SEO works on a page. GEO works on a claim that an assistant can lift, attribute and repeat.
Google ranks a page
An assistant names a claim
For a small company the usual picks are Brand A, your brand and Brand B1 2.
A page ranks. A claim gets cited. The link under the claim often goes to someone else's page.
Key facts
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of getting a brand named or cited inside the answers that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI features give to buying questions. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the work of getting a page ranked on a results page for a keyword. SEO is judged by position and clicks. GEO is judged by mentions, citations and the place in the shortlist.
The two overlap in one place. An assistant can only cite a page it can read, so the crawling and indexing work of SEO is the floor GEO stands on. Everything above that floor is different work, and the rest of this post is about the difference.
A results page gives you ten links and the reader does the choosing. An answer does the choosing for them. It reads a handful of pages, writes a summary, and names a few brands or sources. Everyone else in the category is simply absent.
This is now the default surface for a large share of searches. Google reports more than 2.5 billion monthly users of AI Overviews1 and more than 1 billion monthly users of AI Mode2. ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly users3. Perplexity handled 780 million queries in May 2025, the last figure its CEO gave publicly4.
The click data is consistent across studies, and it points one way. In Ahrefs' first study, April 2025, the presence of an AI Overview correlated with a 34.5% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page5. In the February 2026 update on the same 300,000 keywords, the gap had grown to about 58%: position-one click-through rate on AI Overview keywords fell from 0.073 to 0.016, where Ahrefs' trend without AI Overviews forecast 0.0376. Pew Research tracked 900 US adults across 68,879 searches in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits. Without one, 15%. Links inside the summary itself were clicked in 1% of visits7.
How often people click a search result when an AI summary is on the page
Pew Research Center, 900 US adults, 68,879 searches, March 2025
Share of visits with at least one click on a traditional result, and on a link inside the summary itself7.
Click-through rate of the top result on keywords that now show an AI Overview
Ahrefs, 300,000 keywords, December 2025
About 58% lower than forecast6. The first study on the same keyword set, April 2025, found 34.5% fewer clicks5.
Google reads the same trend differently. In August 2025 its head of Search wrote that total organic click volume to websites had been "relatively stable year-over-year" and that Google was sending "slightly more quality clicks" than a year earlier8. Both things can be true at once: fewer clicks per query, and more queries. What is not in dispute is that for the query that shows an answer, the answer takes most of the attention.
Google ranks documents. It scores a whole page against a query and orders the results. Your job in SEO is to make the page the best answer to the query and to earn the signals that prove it, links above all.
An assistant that searches the web does something narrower. It retrieves a small set of pages, reads them, and attributes specific statements to specific sources. The thing being chosen is a sentence with a fact in it, and the page is only the place the sentence lives. Your job in GEO is to make sure the claim you want repeated exists somewhere the assistant can find it, in a form it can quote, with a source it can point to.
None of the assistant vendors publish how they pick sources. What can be observed is where the citations go. Semrush ran 230,000 prompts through ChatGPT, AI Mode and Perplexity between July and October 2025 and found the shares move sharply from week to week. Reddit's share of ChatGPT's top 25 cited domains went from about 60% to about 10% inside six weeks9.
Two things follow
The assistants lean on pages that state things plainly and are easy to attribute. That is why encyclopaedias and forums do so well.
The mix is unstable, so a single check tells you almost nothing. You measure it on a schedule or you do not measure it.
The table is the shortest way to show where the two jobs part company.
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of work | A page | A claim, on a page |
| Input | A keyword | A buyer's question, in the buyer's language |
| What you win | A position on the results page | A mention, a citation, a place in a shortlist |
| Main signals | Relevance, links, technical health | Quotable statements with numbers and sources, on a page that is indexed |
| How it is measured | A rank tracker | The same prompts, run in each assistant, on a schedule, with the answers stored |
The only controlled evidence on tactics is still the 2023 paper from IIT Delhi and Princeton that coined the term. The authors tested nine changes to source pages and measured how much of the generated answer each page ended up occupying. Adding citations, adding quotations and adding statistics were the three that worked, with a relative improvement of 30 to 40% on their position-adjusted metric. Keyword stuffing offered "little to no improvement"10. Google has since published its own guidance for generative features in Search11. Read it. It is short and it does not contradict the paper.
In practice the work is unglamorous. Find the questions buyers actually ask. Read what the assistants answer today. Notice which claims they repeat and where those claims come from. Then put a clearer, sourced version of your claim on a page you control.
Every assistant that searches the web reads pages the way a crawler does. A page that is blocked, marked noindex, or missing from the sitemap cannot be quoted by anything downstream. The unfashionable parts of SEO, crawlability and indexing, are the floor GEO stands on.
That is why we check index coverage daily and treat a page that Google has dropped as an emergency rather than a report line.
The floor GEO stands on
If the page that carries your claim is not in the index, the claim does not exist for the assistant either.
ChatGPT has had web search for everyone since February 202512. The answers it gives about your category are already being read at a scale no results page reaches. The question is only whether you are reading them too.
Published 21 September 2026. If a model or a figure above changes, this line says what changed and when.
Short answers. The detail is in the sections above.
No. The assistants that search the web read indexed pages, so the crawl and index work of SEO is the floor GEO stands on. What changes is the unit you optimise: a claim an assistant can quote and attribute, rather than a page competing for a position.
The terms overlap. Answer engine optimisation is the older label and covered featured snippets and voice assistants. Generative engine optimisation is used for answers written by LLM-based assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. The work in this post applies to both.
For the query that shows one, the evidence says yes. Ahrefs measured a 34.5% lower click-through rate for the top result in April 2025 and, in its February 2026 update, a rate about 58% below its forecast without AI Overviews. Pew found 8% of visits with an AI summary produced a click on a result, against 15% without. Google's position is that total organic click volume has stayed roughly stable year over year because queries have grown.
OpenAI has not published its selection method. Citation studies show what it favours in practice: pages that state facts plainly and are easy to attribute. Semrush ran 230,000 prompts through it in 2025 and found the mix of cited domains changes sharply from week to week.
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