SEO vs GEO: what's different, and what stays the same
SEO vs GEO comes down to one question: does being named in AI answers need different work from ranking in Google?
Short answer
- Mostly no. Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
- What differs: other crawlers read your site, third-party sites matter more, and AI answers are harder to measure.
- Ranking top 10 helps less than it did: cited pages in the top 10 went from 76% to 38% in Ahrefs' studies.
- AEO has no single definition. Today it means the same work as GEO.
Updated 14 October 2026 · By Michael Nefedov, noetio
SEO vs GEO: the comparison
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank in a list of links | Be named or cited inside an answer |
| Google's rule | Indexed, shown with a snippet | The same rule for AI Overviews and AI Mode |
| Who reads your site | Googlebot, Bingbot | Also OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot |
| Keyword stuffing | Against Google's spam policies | “Little to no improvement” in the GEO paper |
| Measuring | Rank and clicks, fairly stable | Answers change between runs: count k of n |
| Third-party sites | Links help | Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube and media are cited directly |
SEO
Getting your pages to rank in search results like Google and Bing.
GEO
Generative engine optimization: being named or cited in AI answers. From a 2023 research paper.
AEO
Answer engine optimization. No single official definition: snippets, voice and AI answers.
What Google says about AI Overviews and SEO
“There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.”
“The best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search.”
A page also “must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet” to be a supporting link. And both features may use “query fan-out”: many related searches on subtopics to build one answer. So for Google, GEO is SEO.
Does ranking in Google mean being cited?
Less than it did a year ago. Two Ahrefs studies on Google AI Overviews:
76%
of cited pages ranked in the top 10 for the same query. July 2025, 1.9 million citations.
Ahrefs. Source
38%
in the 2026 update, from 863,000 keywords and 4 million cited URLs.
Search Engine Journal on Ahrefs. Source
Ahrefs says the method changed too, so it isn't a clean trend. It points to fan-out as one reason: a page can be cited because it ranks for a subtopic, not the main question. Pages that answer one narrow question well gain.
What the GEO paper found
The original GEO paper tested 9 ways of rewriting pages on 10,000 questions, in its own test engine:
40%
the most visibility gained, at best ('up to 40%'). Citing sources, quotes and statistics worked best.
Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024. Source
115%
more visibility from citing sources, for sites ranked fifth. The top site lost 30% on average.
Same paper, table 2. Source
An authoritative tone gave “no significant improvement”, keyword stuffing “little to no improvement”. It's a lab test from 2023 and 2024, not today's ChatGPT. Read it as direction: be specific, cite sources, use real numbers.
Where GEO is different from SEO
Other crawlers read your site
| Bot | What it does |
|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBotOpenAI | Finds pages for ChatGPT search. Blocked sites “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers” (OpenAI) |
| GPTBotOpenAI | Crawls content “that may be used in training” OpenAI's models (OpenAI) |
| PerplexityBotPerplexity | Shows and links websites “in search results on Perplexity” (Perplexity) |
Third-party sites carry more weight
60% → 10%
ChatGPT answers citing Reddit: early August to mid-September 2025. Sources move fast.
Semrush, 230,000 prompts, 13 weeks. Source
49 → 0
YouTube citations: our English baseline vs 67 answers to Ukrainian questions. Sources don't carry across markets.
Our measurements, 2026.
Reddit and LinkedIn were in the top 5 cited domains on ChatGPT search, Google AI Mode and Perplexity in Semrush's study.
Measuring is harder
A rank is one number. An AI answer changes between runs, between the app and the API, and between logged in and out. See how LLM SEO tools measure.
What to do
- 1Keep doing SEO. For Google's AI answers it is the same work.
- 2Allow OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot in robots.txt.
- 3Keep your site in Bing Webmaster Tools.
- 4Write one clear page per buyer question, with sources.
- 5Get mentioned honestly on Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube and media.
- 6Measure AI answers with several runs, not one screenshot.
Want this done for you? See what SEO automation can do.
Questions
No. Google says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and a page must be indexed in Google Search to be cited there. GEO adds work on top of SEO: other engines' crawlers, measuring answers, and being mentioned on the sites AI answers read.
GEO, generative engine optimization, has a clear source: a 2023 research paper about being visible in AI-generated answers. AEO, answer engine optimization, has no single official definition. People use it for featured snippets, voice answers and AI answers. In practice the two words describe the same work today.
You need a few separate checks, not a separate strategy. Allow the AI search crawlers, measure AI answers with several runs, and build mentions on third-party sites. The pages themselves are the same pages you write for SEO.
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