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SEO vs. GEO: 5 Key Differences Despite the Similarities

SEO vs. GEO: 5 Key Differences Despite the Similarities

In 30 seconds, here’s what you need to know about the differences between SEO and GEO:

  • SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Getting your website to show up in Google searches. Goal: Get people to click your link.
  • GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Getting AI chatbots like ChatGPT to mention your brand or information. Goal: Get AI to quote and mention you.
  • Main differences: SEO brings visitors to your website. GEO puts your brand or content directly in AI answers (no click needed). SEO brings high-volume traffic that explores your site. GEO will bring less traffic to your site directly, but these visitors may be more likely to convert.
  • What to do: Start with good SEO (it’s still essential), then add GEO tactics like including more original data, keeping your most important content up-to-date, or getting your brand mentioned more across the web.
  • Bottom line: You need both. Think of SEO as your foundation and GEO as future-proofing your online presence.

Want the full story? Read on.

Keywords research: Finding and using the words and phrases your customers actually search for.
  • On-page SEO: Creating helpful, detailed information that answers search intent.
  • Off-page SEO: Getting other reputable websites to link to yours.
  • Technical SEO: Making your site free from critical SEO errors. Mostly: making your site easy for search engines to crawl, safe for users, simple to navigate, fast to load, and mobile-friendly.

    • Further reading

    Generative Engine Optimization (also known as AEO or LLMO), is the process of getting your brand mentioned, cited, and accurately represented in AI-generated answers. That includes results from AI assistants like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Google’s AI Mode.

    In other words, GEO is SEO for AI search.

    How AI search works

    With ChatGPT, the way it responds depends on whether it uses web browsing (also called grounding) to find the answer:

    • No browsing: It generates answers from patterns it learned during training. It doesn’t pull from a live product database, just from its frozen knowledge (up to August 2023).
    • With browsing: It searches the web, picks useful pages, and summarizes them so the answer is based on fresh information.

    Key GEO tactics

    All of these are covered in detail in our GEO guide, but here’s the quick version:

    • Third-party mentions: Get your brand mentioned across industry sites, “best of” lists, and review platforms (most AI citations come from other sites, not yours).
    • AI-preferred content: Create how-to guides, comparison pages (“X vs Y”), data studies, and “best of” lists – these get the highest AI traffic.
    • Facts and statistics: Include specific, verifiable numbers and data that AI can confidently cite.
    • Multi-platform presence: Build visibility on YouTube (2nd most cited by AI Overviews) and Reddit (3rd most cited).
    • Structured Information: Use clear headings, Q&A formats, bullet points, and schema markup for machine readability.
    • Fresh content: Keep information updated regularly – AI prefers citing newer content over older pages.

    Further reading

    PEW Research Center recently studied how searches interact with Google’s AI Overviews, proving the “zero click” phenomenon.

    They found that users click on search results only 8% of the time when AI summaries appear vs 15% without them – that’s nearly 50% fewer clicks. Only 1% of users click on sources cited in the AI summary itself. What’s more, 26% of users end their session completely after seeing an AI summary (vs 16% for traditional search).

    A bar chart from the Pew Research Center titled "Google users are less likely to click on a link when they encounter search pages with AI summaries." The chart compares user actions on pages with and without AI summaries, showing that pages with AI have fewer clicks and more users ending their browsing session.
    keyword rankings, backlinks, organic traffic, and organic share of voice. This is part of the “click economics,” because your results depend on convincing people to click through to your site.

    By contrast, success in GEO is measured with metrics like brand mentions in AI answers, citations when your content is referenced, AI referral traffic, and AI share of voice. This is “visibility economics,” where the more often your brand appears in AI responses, the more likely users are to trust and choose you, even if they never click.

    Here’s what a GEO dashboard looks like, a screenshot from Ahrefs’ Brand Radar. The core difference is that there are no keyword rankings. Instead, you see how popular a brand is within a specific AI’s responses, and how that popularity changes over time.

    A screenshot of the Ahrefs Brand Radar dashboard. It shows a line graph and bar charts tracking the "AI Share of Voice" for brands like Mailchimp and Constant Contact across platforms such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity over time.

    Further reading

    Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and look at the AI citation count in the Overview report:

    A screenshot of the Ahrefs Site Explorer overview for ahrefs.com. The "AI citations" section is highlighted, showing the number of times the domain has been cited by AI Overview, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot.
    source).

    AI search also drives users to homepages, product pages, and tools more often than organic search, while organic search brings more traffic to international pages.

    A pie chart illustrating the "Percentage of visitors by page type from AI Assistants." The chart shows that the majority of AI-driven traffic goes to "Free Tool" (36.45%), "Product page" (23.12%), and "Homepage" (20.41%) pages.

    Most importantly, AI traffic can convert at a much higher rate. In the case of Ahrefs, it was 23x more than organic search; despite being just 0.5% of traffic, it generates over 12% of signups.

    That said, conversion rates will vary by site. As this recent study from Amsive shows, not every website sees the same uplift from LLM-driven traffic.

    Further reading

    topical authority. At the end of the day, search engines and AI tools are designed to bring people the information they’re looking for. The key difference is in how the answer is delivered: search engines point you to links, while AI often gives you the answer directly.

    Case in point, Ahrefs’ content and product pages were mentioned 7,470 times across 2,309 pages without any special effort to optimize for AI. That’s because new search technologies still rely on the same foundation: quality, useful content.

    A screenshot of the Ahrefs Site Explorer overview, highlighting the "AI citations" module. It shows that ahrefs.com has 4.6K citations from AI Overview and 1.1K from ChatGPT, illustrating that quality content earns AI mentions.
    search intent).

    Whether someone searches Google for “best project management software” or asks ChatGPT something more specific like “What’s the best project management tool for a team of 30 under $50?”, the intent doesn’t change. They’re looking for the top options, the reasons behind those recommendations, and a clear comparison to help them decide.

    Tip

    Use Ahrefs’ AI Content Helper to take the guesswork out of content planning. Find the main topics (not just keywords) for your keyword by analyzing top-ranking pages. As you write, see your content rated in real time and adjust instantly.

    A screenshot of the Ahrefs AI Content Helper tool. It shows a content editor on the left and a sidebar on the right that provides a "Content score" and analyzes the text for key topics to include, helping to optimize the article for search intent.

    Create new articles or update old ones with ease. When search results mix different intents, simply pick the intent you want to optimize for and let the tool guide you.

    correlation of 0.664). Furthermore, brands in the top 25% for web mentions earn over 10x more AI Overview placements than the next tier down.

    A bar chart titled "Factors that correlate with brand appearance in AI overviews." The chart shows that "Branded web mentions" has the highest Spearman correlation (0.664), followed by "Branded anchors" and "Branded search volume."

    And that’s not just true for AI Overviews. AI Assistants also lean heavily on well-known sources. The main difference is that they tend to cite a slightly different set of sites.

    A Venn diagram showing the overlap of the top 50 most cited brands across three AI platforms: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. It lists well-known brands like Johns Hopkins, Wikipedia, and The New York Times, illustrating which sources each AI tends to trust.

    Simply put, the more people talk about your brand online, the more likely AI is to feature you.

    Ahrefs’ Site Audit. It monitors your site on autopilot for over 170 SEO issues, showing where exactly they happen and suggesting how to fix them. Free in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

    A screenshot of the Ahrefs Site Audit dashboard. It displays a "Health Score" of 94 (Excellent) and several donut charts showing the distribution of crawled URLs, crawl status of links found, and error distribution.

    Adobe’s recent study found that three in 10 U.S. respondents trust ChatGPT more than other search engines, and 36% of the people surveyed discovered a new product or brand through ChatGPT.

    If you’re curious about the global traffic shift, check out our AI vs. Search Traffic Analysis dashboard, which pulls data from over 50,000 sites. For instance, from January to August 2025, Google held a 41.13% traffic share, while ChatGPT accounted for 0.21%.

    AI vs Search Traffic Analysis Dashboard.
    LinkedIn.

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