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.

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.