Short answer
SEO and GEO share a base: crawlable pages, clear content and a trusted site. They differ in the goal and the measure. SEO wants a page to rank high in a list of links and tracks position. GEO wants your business named, described correctly and cited inside an AI answer, and tracks how often that happens across many runs. GEO also leans harder on third-party pages, because AI apps often build answers from lists, reviews and directories rather than from your own site.
On this page
The shared base
Before any AI app can use your page, it has to find and read it. That is classic technical SEO. Google states that to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and that no extra special optimisation is needed. So if your SEO basics are broken, fix them first.
- Pages return a normal 200 status and are not blocked in robots.txt.
- Important text is in the HTML, not only drawn by JavaScript after load.
- Internal links connect your key pages.
- Each page has one clear topic and a clear title.
- Content is written for people, and shows real experience and expertise.
Where they differ
| Question | SEO answer | GEO answer |
|---|---|---|
| What are you trying to win? | A high position for a page | A mention of your business, and ideally a citation to your page |
| Who is the unit? | A URL | A brand or entity, across many URLs and other sites |
| What does the user see? | Ten blue links and ads | A short written answer naming a few options |
| How stable is the result? | Fairly stable day to day | Can change between two runs of the same question |
| How do you measure? | Rank tracking, clicks, impressions | Mention rate, citation rate, position in the answer, with ranges |
| Off-site work | Earning links | Being named accurately on pages AI apps cite |
| Query shape | Short keywords | Full questions with context, such as city, budget or team size |
The biggest shift: from pages to your brand
In SEO, you can win with one great page. In GEO, the AI app is building a picture of your business from many pages at once: your site, a comparison blog, a directory listing, a review site, a news article. If those pages disagree on what you do, or do not mention you at all, the AI app has little reason to recommend you.
That is why GEO work starts with an entity sentence: one plain sentence that says who you are, what you sell and who it is for. You then make sure that sentence, or something close to it, appears on your own site and on the third-party pages that matter.
Questions, not keywords
People type short keywords into search boxes but ask AI apps full questions. A keyword might be "billing software". The AI question is more like "what billing software works offline for a small medical store in Jaipur and costs under a few thousand rupees a year".
This matters for content. A page that only targets "billing software" may never be picked for the long question. A page that clearly covers offline use, medical stores and pricing has a better chance.
- Collect real buyer questions from sales calls, support tickets and chats.
- Group them by job: discovery, comparison, alternatives, pricing, how-to, local.
- Check which ones your current pages actually answer in the first paragraph.
Measurement is different
Rank tracking gives you one number per keyword. For AI answers, you ask the same question many times and count how often you are named. That gives you a rate, such as "named in 12 of 40 checks". Because the sample is small, you show it with a range. Our guide on measuring AI visibility explains how.
How to split your time
There is no fixed ratio that fits everyone. A practical way to decide:
| If this is true | Lean towards |
|---|---|
| Your site has crawl errors or pages that do not rank at all | SEO basics first |
| You rank well but AI answers do not name you | GEO: third-party lists, reviews, entity consistency |
| AI answers name you but describe you wrongly | GEO: fact sheet, About page, directory profiles |
| AI apps cite competitors' comparison pages | GEO and SEO together: publish honest comparison pages |
Most of the work helps both. An answer-first page with clear facts and sources is good for search and good for AI answers.
How we help
AI Knows Us is where we track the GEO side: blind buyer questions, repeated checks across AI apps, and the source domains each AI app used, so you can see whether your gap is on your own site or on other people's pages.
Frequently asked questions
Is SEO dead because of AI answers?
No. AI apps that search the web still need to find and read pages, and Google says AI features use the same indexing and snippet eligibility as Search. SEO is the base GEO builds on.
Do I need a separate GEO team?
Usually not at first. The same people who write content and manage your site can do GEO if they add question research, third-party outreach and repeated measurement.
Do backlinks matter for GEO?
Links still help pages get found and trusted. For GEO, what matters more is whether the pages AI apps read actually name and describe you, linked or not.
Can a page rank badly but still be cited by AI?
It can happen, because AI apps run their own searches and may phrase queries differently. But in general, pages that are easy to find in search are more likely to be read.
Which should a new startup do first?
Fix technical basics, write a clear entity sentence and About page, then publish a few answer-first pages for your most important buyer questions. Measure before and after.
Sources
Last verified: 17 September 2026. Facts on this page come from the public documents below. Brands such as Tallybook are fictional and used only as examples.