GEO vs SEO

GEO

The GEO paper by Aggarwal and colleagues, accepted to KDD 2024, defines GEO as a way to help content creators improve how visible their content is in generative engine responses. Generative engines answer queries by gathering information from multiple sources and summarizing it with large language models.

SEO

Google's SEO Starter Guide defines SEO as helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and decide whether to visit it through a search engine.

GEO

Google says AEO and GEO describe work focused on visibility in AI search experiences. From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for search, and so it is still SEO. Google tells site owners to check third-party GEO advice against its guidance on evaluating SEO advice.

SEO

Google says SEO best practices stay relevant for generative AI search, because its AI features are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems. They retrieve pages from the Search index to ground their answers.

GEO

Content appears inside a synthesized answer. The GEO paper notes that creators have little to no control over when and how their content is displayed. Google says its AI features show prominent, clickable links to the pages that support a response.

SEO

Content appears as a search result. Google's guide focuses on the title link and the snippet because they are the most visually significant parts of a result, and says a good title is unique to the page, clear and concise, and accurately describes its contents.

GEO

To be eligible for Google's generative AI features, a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. The site must also be included in Search generative AI features in Search Console. Google adds that it never promises indexing or serving.

SEO

Google says most sites are found automatically by its crawlers, mainly through links from other pages. You can check whether you are indexed with the site: operator. Submitting a sitemap is optional.

GEO

Google says unique, non-commodity content will likely influence presence in generative AI search more than any other suggestion. Its example of such content is a first-hand review rather than a summary of what is already published.

SEO

Google says compelling, useful content will likely influence search presence more than any other suggestion. It describes such content as easy to read, unique, up to date, helpful and reliable.

GEO

Google says you do not need to rewrite content for AI or chase every long-tail variation, because its AI systems understand synonyms. It warns that creating separate pages for fan-out queries mainly to manipulate AI responses violates its scaled content abuse spam policy.

SEO

Google suggests thinking about the words readers use, such as charcuterie versus cheese board. It also says not to worry about every variation, because its language matching can relate a page to queries that use other words.

GEO

For Google Search, Google says you can ignore llms.txt files and other special AI markup, breaking content into small chunks, special schema for AI, and seeking inauthentic mentions. It says Google Search ignores llms.txt.

SEO

Google's SEO guide says there are no secrets that will automatically rank a site first. It also says many suggestions, such as reorganizing URLs or canonicalizing duplicates, are helpful but not urgent.

GEO

Google points to the Generative AI performance report in Search Console. It warns that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems. In the GEO paper's own benchmark, GEO-bench, its methods raised visibility by up to 40 percent, and results varied by domain.

SEO

Google says some changes take effect within hours and others take months. It suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether a change helped, and using the URL Inspection Tool to see a page as Google sees it.