The two disciplines are often presented as rivals. They are not. GEO inherits almost everything SEO established about crawlability, structure and authority, then diverges in three specific ways that change what you actually do each week.
1. The unit of optimisation
SEO optimises a page against a query. GEO optimises a passage against a question. In practice that means writing sections that stand alone, front-loading the answer, and resisting the urge to build up to a conclusion — because a retrieval system will take the middle of your article without the run-up.
2. Entities over pages
A search engine can rank a page from a site it knows little about. A language model composing a recommendation is far more conservative — it names brands it can identify confidently and consistently. That makes entity work (consistent naming, description and category across every place you appear, plus presence in sources the model trusts) more decisive in GEO than in classic SEO.
3. Measurement
- SEO: impressions, positions, clicks — instrumented and reliable
- GEO: share of answers where you're named, and in what order — sampled manually
- SEO: attribution to a landing page
- GEO: often no click at all, so brand search volume becomes a proxy
What stays exactly the same
Server-rendered content, fast pages, clean information architecture, internal linking, structured data, genuine expertise and real citations. Every one of those helps in both worlds. If a team has to choose where to start, it is still the technical foundation — a site an assistant cannot retrieve is a site it cannot recommend.
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What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)?
GEO is the practice of getting a brand retrieved, cited and recommended inside AI-generated answers — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews — rather than only in traditional search results.
How LLMs discover and choose which brands to name
Three separate mechanisms decide whether an AI assistant names your brand: what was in training data, what live retrieval surfaces, and how confidently the model can identify you as an entity.