GEO vs SEO: what is actually different

GEO and SEO are not two disciplines competing for your budget. They are one body of work with a new label attached to the part of it aimed at AI answers, and Google says so in writing.

The confusion comes from mixing up two different lists. Search surfaces are places people go. Optimization disciplines are work you do. SEO is not one of the surfaces. Web search is the surface, and SEO is the work that wins it.

The disciplines aimed at those surfaces overlap heavily, and most of what is sold as new is one of them with a different label on it. I say that as somebody who spends most of his working week on the AI surface specifically.

What Google actually says

Google’s guidance addresses the acronyms in one paragraph and then declines to adopt any of them. It defines AEO as answer engine optimization and GEO as generative engine optimization, notes they describe work focused on visibility in AI search experiences, and concludes that from Google Search’s perspective optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO. It then points you at its guidance on evaluating third-party SEO advice, which is not subtle.

The distinction worth keeping

I would still use the words, and here is the line I hold.

SEO is the work of being discoverable, understandable and worth selecting, and web search is where most of it lands. AI SEO is the part of that work aimed at a surface where the output is a synthesis rather than a list, which changes what you write and completely changes what you measure. GEO and AEO are those same activities with a different label, usually attached to a product.

One qualifier: there is no shared index

AI search systems do not share one index. Google says its core Search ranking systems and its Search index are foundational to AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that is a statement about Google. OpenAI runs a separate crawler, OAI-SearchBot, specifically for whether you appear in ChatGPT search answers, and Perplexity runs PerplexityBot for its own.

What they share is the foundations: crawlable pages, useful content, verifiable authority and information a machine can actually read. Crawlable is the one people skip, and it is a structural problem rather than a writing one - site architecture is where it gets fixed.

The test for anyone selling you GEO

The practical test for anyone selling you GEO as a separate service with a separate retainer is unchanged. Ask which of their deliverables would not also improve your web search visibility. If the answer is “none”, you are paying twice for one thing.

If you want the deeper version of the mechanism underneath the AI surface, I wrote up why query fan-out is a passage problem rather than a page-length problem.

For where all of this sits in a wider picture of where people actually search, start at search everywhere optimization, step one of the SEO roadmap.