GEO vs SEO: what actually changes, and what an AI SEO agency does

SEO optimises a page to rank in a list of links. GEO, short for generative engine optimization, optimises a page to be quoted inside the answer an engine writes. Same web, same index, different target.

That difference matters because of how a growing share of questions now get answered. Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude assemble a reply and put a few citations underneath it. Ranking third for a term is worth much less if the person never scrolls to the results, and worth quite a lot if you are the source the answer was built from.

AI SEO is the same idea sold under a different name. Here is what is actually involved, minus the mystique.

What is the difference between GEO and SEO?

SEO wants a rank and a click. GEO wants a citation. The uncomfortable truth for anyone selling either as a new speciality is that most of the work is identical, and most of it is SEO done properly.

Answer engines mostly read the same web everyone else does. ChatGPT's search is built on Bing's index. Google's AI Overviews sit on Google's index, and Google's own guidance for AI features says the same technical basics apply: crawlable pages, useful content, no special markup required. If your pages are slow, thin, uncrawlable or unremarkable, no amount of AI-specific tactics will help, because the engine never had a good reason to pick you up in the first place.

What differs is emphasis, and emphasis changes which parts of a page carry the weight.

Is GEO replacing SEO?

No. Answer engines are built on top of search indexes rather than beside them, so the foundation is shared. ChatGPT's search runs on Bing's index. Google's AI Overviews run on Google's. A page that cannot be crawled, or that was never worth ranking, does not get quoted either.

What has actually changed is the target. It moved from a position in a list to a sentence in an answer, and the work that earns you one mostly earns you the other. Treating GEO as a separate discipline with its own retainer is a pricing decision rather than a technical one.

There is a third acronym in circulation, AEO, for answer engine optimization. It predates AI and refers to the direct answer box and featured snippets. It sits in the same overlap.

What actually makes a page quotable?

Four things matter much more than they used to.

Answer the question in the first 40 words

An engine extracting an answer takes the shortest passage that resolves the question. If your page opens with two paragraphs of preamble about how the digital landscape is evolving, there is nothing to extract.

Write H2s as the actual question someone types, then put the direct answer immediately underneath, before any elaboration. Everything after that first passage is for the human reader.

Be specific, especially about money

Vague pages do not get quoted, because there is nothing quotable in them.

"Pricing depends on your needs" cannot appear in a generated answer. "$200 a month" can. Same for timelines, counts, and any concrete constraint. Engines reach for specifics because specifics are what the asker wanted.

This is why we publish our prices on the pricing page instead of behind a form. We made that call for conversion reasons, and the citation benefit was a second argument for it.

Structure the page for a machine that is skimming

• Real headings, in a sensible hierarchy
• Short paragraphs
• Genuine lists and tables rather than lists faked with line breaks
• FAQPage schema on your FAQ, Article with author and dates on posts, Organization with sameAs links to your profiles. Google's structured data documentation lists which types it actually supports.
• An llms.txt at the root, describing plainly what the site offers

None of this is exotic. Most sites simply do not bother.

Get mentioned somewhere that isn't your own site

This is the part most people skip, and it is doing more work than the rest combined.

Answer engines gain confidence from corroboration. If your site says you do X, and three other independent sources also say you do X, the engine will state it. If only your own site says it, the engine hedges or omits you.

So: real reviews on Google and Trustpilot, and listings in the directories your industry actually uses. Which directories matters more than how many. For a law firm that means the legal directories; for a dental practice it is the practice listings; for a SaaS founder it is the review sites buyers already check before a trial. Consistent name, description and contact details everywhere, because mismatches read as uncertainty.

We learned this one the hard way on our own domain. It carried an agency site before this one, and for weeks after we replaced it Google's AI answer still described the old business, sourced from the old homepage and about page. Changing the pages started the clock. It did not reset it.

What does an AI SEO agency actually do?

Content restructured so answers are extractable, schema markup, an llms.txt file, third-party presence so the engines see the same facts in more than one place, and some method of tracking whether you get cited. That is the whole list. Anything beyond it is either normal SEO under a new label or a claim nobody can support.

Reasonable questions to ask any provider:

1. Which questions are we targeting? They should have a list, tied to what your buyers actually ask.
2. How will you measure a citation? There is no dashboard. The honest answer involves putting those questions to each engine on a schedule and logging the results.
3. What are you changing on the site? Structure, schema, specificity. If the answer is only "content", ask what about the content.
4. What are you doing off-site? If nothing, they are ignoring the highest-leverage part.

And one answer that should end the conversation: anyone guaranteeing you a citation is guaranteeing something they do not control. There is no submission process, no paid placement, and no lever to pull. You can make yourself the obvious source and wait.

How long does AI SEO take to work?

• Live-browsing queries. A page you change today can be quoted within days.
• Google's AI Overviews. These follow the classic index, so weeks.
• Anything answered from a training snapshot. Months, and there is no way to force it.

That last one catches people out. If an engine has already formed a view of your business, changing your site starts the clock on correcting it, but does not correct it instantly.

How do you know if you are being cited?

There is no Search Console for this, so the honest method is manual and takes about twenty minutes a month.

1. Write down ten questions your buyers actually ask. Not keywords. The sentence a person would type or say. "How much does social media management cost" is a question. "social media pricing" is a keyword.
2. Put each one to every engine you care about, on the same day each month. Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot.
3. Log three things: were you named, was anything said about you wrong, and who was named instead.
4. Read the third column hardest. Whoever gets cited where you do not is showing you the page you are missing.

The competitor list is the useful output. Citations move slowly, but the set of sources an engine reaches for is stable enough that you can see the gap and go fill it.

One warning worth having in advance: an engine that already has a view of your business will keep repeating it for a while after you change the page. That is not a failure of the work. It is covered in the timeline above.

Why is this window unusual?

The commercial terms around AI search are cheap to rank for and expensive to advertise on at the same time. Checked again on 24 August 2026: ai seo services runs about 1,000 searches a month at a keyword difficulty of 2, with advertisers bidding $78.77 a click. ai seo agency runs about 1,300 a month on low competition at $29.36, and it is up more than sixfold on a year ago. The pages ranking for both are backed by roughly ten to seventeen referring domains, which is a link bar almost any real business can clear.

That combination means advertisers have proven the terms convert and almost nobody has built a page worth ranking. Classic SEO terms stopped looking like that around fifteen years ago.

The comparison terms tell the same story from the other side. geo vs seo runs about 2,900 searches a month at a difficulty of 9, while ai seo itself runs 8,100 at a difficulty of 52 against pages carrying an average of 372 referring domains. The head term is already gone. The questions around it are not.

Gaps like that close as soon as enough people notice, so the practical advice is to write the pages now rather than after the difficulty scores catch up.