What is the difference between GEO and SEO?
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SEO, or search engine optimization, seeks to place a page at the top of a list of results. GEO, for Generative Engine Optimization, seeks to have a page referenced in the response written by an AI like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Yet, the difference between GEO and SEO is slimmer than the vocabulary suggests: Google considers that optimization for its AI answers is still SEO. What really changes is the unit: the page is no longer ranked, a passage is selected, by a model that writes its own searches and never gives the same answer twice.
For what type of question? It all depends on what you mean by GEO. In marketing, the word also refers to geographic targeting: ChatGPT itself verified this meaning before answering. This page is about optimization for generative engines.
Where the word GEO comes from
The term Generative Engine Optimization comes from a research paper published in November 2023 and accepted at the KDD conference in 2024. Its authors present it as a new approach to help content creators improve the visibility of their pages in generative engine responses, meaning in the text written by the AI rather than in a list of links.
The paper reports a visibility boost of up to 40%, measured in a simulated engine where GPT-3.5 writes the response from provided sources. Adding citations and statistics helped, while keyword stuffing yielded almost nothing. This figure measures the share of a page in a response, not its chances of being found: it says nothing about the search that precedes it.
What Google says: GEO and SEO, the same job
Google directly answers the question in its guide on optimization for its generative AI features, updated on July 10, 2026. From its perspective, optimizing for generative AI search amounts to optimizing for the search experience, and therefore remains SEO. It presents GEO and AEO, for Answer Engine Optimization, as terms used to designate the work dedicated to visibility in AI search, and recommends prioritizing effective SEO strategies rather than 'AEO/GEO' tricks.
For Google, conditions do not change: a page must be indexed and able to be displayed with a snippet, SEO best practices remain relevant, and no specific markup or file is required. This position holds for Google Search. ChatGPT and Claude go through other search engines and apply their own selection rules.
What really changes: search, passage, frequency
First difference, the search is no longer that of the user. An AI reformulates the question into multiple searches: on our questions from September 15, 2026, a median of ten per response for ChatGPT, three for Gemini, two for Claude, often in English. A page is found on words that no one typed. Second difference, the AI does not cite an entire page but a passage: on Claude, a paragraph that contains at least one-third of the words from the model's search is cited 5 to 8 times more often than a paragraph that contains none.
Third difference, there is no longer a stable position. Asking the same questions again about one hour later, only a median of 21 to 25% of the cited pages were cited again by the AI. And the three AIs do not read the same web: only 1.8% of the domains cited across our five corpora combined were cited by all three. SEO is measured by a rank; AI visibility is measured by a frequency, AI by AI.
What the AIs did with this question
On the question 'What is the difference between GEO and SEO?', Claude launched only one search, 'difference GEO SEO', and cited almost all the pages it brought back: agency and marketing media websites. ChatGPT checked if GEO referred to geographic targeting, searched for the original paper and Google's guide, and cited Search Engine Land, Google's documentation, Ahrefs, and Wikipedia.
Gemini searched in English in particular, 'Generative Engine Optimization vs SEO', and cited several Polish sites for a question asked in French. Three AIs, three readings of the same subject: Claude sticks to the words of the question, ChatGPT goes back to primary sources, Gemini broadens the language. This is the most concrete difference between GEO and SEO: there is no longer a single search results page to conquer, but three ways of searching.
What this changes for a business
Do not pit GEO against SEO. The foundations are shared: an indexed website accessible to bots, fast pages, comprehensive content that answers your clients' real questions. An agency offering GEO without SEO is selling the roof without the walls.
Add what is specific to AI: fully developed paragraphs that carry the vocabulary with which AIs search, versions in the languages in which they search, a presence in the sources they cite, and a frequency measurement across multiple AIs rather than rank tracking.
What we do not know
Our measurements are based on the API of GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Gemini 3.5 Flash with web search, not on their applications. The 40% gain in the original article was measured in a simulated engine; we have not tested any optimization recipe on a page.
Sources
- Aggarwal et al. — "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization", KDD 2024, .
- Google Search Central — "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search", .
- FaireDuBruit measurements, from September 4 to 16, 2026 — see "How we measured".