The GEO vs. SEO battle isn’t just another marketing rumor—it’s an underlying shift already affecting your web traffic, whether you realize it or not.

Imagine this: you own a bookstore, and you want it to be super easy to find on a busy street. So, you put up a big, clear sign, make sure your window display is attractive, and even list your store in the local directory. Your goal is to get people to turn to your store when they’re looking for a book.

This is search engine optimization (SEO).

Now, you (as a bookseller) must combine your excellent knowledge of books with your charm and wit. So, once a customer steps in, you have a natural and meaningful conversation with them and amaze them with your to-the-point replies instead of beating around the bush. You then recommend the perfect book based on the customer’s preferred genre, past reads, and even their current mood.

This is generative engine optimization (GEO) or large language model optimization (LLMO).

So, SEO gets people to your door, and GEO helps them find exactly what they need and have a memorable experience once they’re inside.

This analogy might puzzle you right now, but stay with me. By the time you’re done reading this article, all confusion will disappear. Let’s hop on!

GEO Vs. SEO: Key Differences

Search Results

For starters, traditional search engines offer users multiple search result options in the form of clickable blue-color links. It’s up to the users to browse the ones that (they believe) might answer their search query most accurately.

Gen AI tools scour through multiple result options, including articles, images, videos, audio, and social media posts. Instead of the dozens of blue links traditional search engines display, AI-enabled search platforms provide one multimodal result that summarizes all the information users need.

Primary Goal

SEO pushes your website’s to the top of traditional search engines like Google and Bing, improving its visibility and clickability/click-through rates. The idea is to remain in search algos’ good books by ticking off their content and technical checkboxes.

GEO helps you optimize digital content for AI-enabled generative engines like Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and  Google AI Overviews. The goal is to ensure that the AI-generated responses include, cite, or synthesize your content, even if people never browse the original website.

Indexing & Ranking Methods

Indexing and ranking factors of both GEO and SEO somehow overlap with each other.

In the case of SEO, you need to:

• Add as many keywords as possible (organically, of course)
• Include internal and external backlinks
• Add suitable meta tags, headers, and sub-headers
• Build relevant and helpful content (articles, social media posts, or landing pages)
• Improve user experience with smooth site loading speeds and mobile friendliness

While you should include the above SEO steps in your GEO rulebook, there are a few unique ones that’ll further boost the chances of your digital content showing up on Gen AI search responses include:

• Creating high-quality, well-structured content
• Being to the point instead of adding unnecessary fluff
• Including structured data like schema markups
• Referencing your facts, claims, and statistics to authentic sources (those with high domain authority)

Type of Content

While keywords, backlinks, and technical elements are crucial, traditional search engines’ algorithms favor informative, well-written, and user-friendly content that truly answers search intent.

This optimized content flashes as a natural response in SERPs to queries containing the keywords. For instance, when someone wants answers to “how does generative ai work,” top SEO-friendly results will have keywords like “what is generative ai.”

Gen AI search tools are built to produce human-like, conversational responses. These large language models rely on users’ prompts to decide the type of content to display. As such, you must nail user intent and context with content that’s conversational, easy-to-understand, and answer-focused to improve GEO.

For instance, let’s say someone is searching for “How to improve content for Gen AI tools?” on Gemini. It’ll search through the data it has access to and analyze how often specific words occur in relevant parts of its dataset. Then, based on this frequency, it predicts the answer most likely to satisfy the search intent.

The following SEO vs. GEO image summarizes their key differences.

GEO Vs. SEO: What Does This Mean for You?

Genuinely speaking, it’s not really a case of picking one over the other. Instead, you must combine the best of both worlds to achieve the same goal: getting your content to the right people. Because now you’re not just optimizing your website content for Google rankings—you’re competing to sneak into AI-generated responses too.

While successful SEO plans remain essential for traditional search engines, GEO is a must-have if you want to stand out in the era of AI-driven search. So, better understand the nuances between these two digital strategies to craft content that’s not only seen but also becomes a go-to information source.