The short answer. SEO (search engine optimisation) gets your pages ranking in search results. GEO (generative engine optimisation) gets your business mentioned and recommended in answers from AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews. They overlap heavily, because AI tools draw on the same pages and signals search engines use, so most businesses need both.
What SEO is
SEO is the work of making your pages easy for search engines to find, understand and trust, so they rank for the searches your customers make. It covers technical health, content, site structure, internal links, keywords, and links and mentions from other sites.
What GEO is
GEO is the work of making sure AI tools describe your business accurately and choose to recommend it. You'll also see it called AEO (answer engine optimisation), AI SEO or LLM optimisation. The labels differ; the work is much the same.
AI tools answer with a summary and a few names. They pick those names from what they find about you across the web: your own pages, other sites' coverage, reviews, listings and structured data.
How they compare
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank pages in search results | Be named and recommended in AI answers |
| Where it shows | Google and Bing results, map results | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, AI Overviews and AI Mode |
| What counts most | Relevant pages, technical health, links | Clear answers, consistent facts, mentions on trusted sites |
| How it's measured | Rankings, clicks, enquiries | Mentions and recommendations across a set of questions |
Where they overlap
AI tools don't invent their sources. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI features search the web and lean on pages that already rank and answer the question clearly. So a site with technical problems, thin pages and no links won't do well in either.
What GEO adds is attention to things SEO often skips: checking what each AI tool says about you, correcting facts that are wrong, writing so the answer sits in the first few lines, and earning mentions on the sites AI tools cite.
Why you need both
Google still sends most website traffic. But when Google shows an AI summary, people click a result far less often: in 8% of visits, against 15% without one, according to Pew Research Center. And when someone asks ChatGPT who to use, there's no second page of results to fall back on.
That's why our search plans treat them as one piece of work, with AI search checked first and reported every month.