SEO (search engine optimization) earns your page a place in the list of links a search engine shows. GEO (generative engine optimization) earns your brand a place inside the answer an AI engine writes, in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or a Google AI Overview, the AI-written summary at the top of some Google results. Most of the groundwork is shared, so treat GEO as SEO with a second scoreboard.
The differences are in what counts as a win and how you measure it. In SEO, a win is a ranking and a click. In GEO, a win is a mention: the answer names your brand, ideally near the top, and cites a page that supports you. A citation is a link the AI answer shows as its source. If the term is new to you, start with what GEO is. The table below puts the two side by side.
| Dimension | SEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank a page in the list of search results | Get your brand named inside AI answers |
| Where it shows | Google and Bing results pages | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews |
| How success is measured | Rankings, impressions, clicks | Share of answers that name you, position in the answer, cited pages |
| What earns it | Crawlable pages, relevance to the query, links from other sites | The same, plus facts an engine can quote and mentions on the sites answers cite |
| Time to see change | Varies by site, query and competition | Varies, and answers shift between runs of the same question |
| Tools | Google Search Console, rank trackers | AI visibility trackers that rerun the same questions |
Is GEO replacing SEO?
No. GEO sits on top of SEO, and the clearest evidence comes from Google itself. Its AI features documentation says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, the short text preview under a search result, before it can appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. It also says there are no extra requirements or special optimizations beyond that.
The same page says “all existing SEO fundamentals continue to be worthwhile”. ChatGPT has a similar gate. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot, its search crawler, will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as plain navigational links. A page an engine cannot fetch or index cannot be cited, however good it is.
The change is where some questions now end: inside an answer, with no click to a results page. The crawling and content work is shared, and the metrics differ. You still need pages that rank. You also need to know whether the answer names you.
What is SEO called now with AI?
It is still called SEO. The added work of getting named in AI answers goes by several names that mean close to the same thing: GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization), LLM SEO and AI SEO. An LLM (large language model) is the type of model behind ChatGPT and Gemini.
GEO comes from a research paper. Aggarwal et al. (KDD 2024) named it and found that adding citations, quotations and statistics raised a page’s visibility in AI answers by up to about 40% in a GPT-3.5 test setup. AEO was in use earlier in the SEO industry, for featured snippets (the answer box Google shows above the links) and for voice assistant answers. For how the three terms relate, read AEO vs GEO vs SEO. For the same comparison from the AEO side, read AEO vs SEO.
What stays the same
Four parts of the work carry over from SEO to GEO with little change.
- Crawler access. Search engines and AI engines both need to fetch your pages. Your robots.txt file, the plain text file that tells bots what they may crawl, controls this for both. AI Overviews are built from Google’s search index, so a page blocked from Googlebot is out of both.
- Pages that answer the question. A page that answers a buyer’s question in its first two sentences helps it rank and gives an AI engine a clean passage to quote.
- Reputation on other sites. Links and mentions from sites people trust help rankings. AI answers also cite other websites, so the sites that already cover your category matter for both.
- Consistent facts about your brand. Your name, category, prices and locations should read the same on your site, marketplaces and directories. Search engines use these facts to understand who you are, and AI engines repeat them.
What changes
Five things are new when the goal is a place in the answer.
- The scoreboard moves to mentions. An AI answer can name your brand without sending a click. What you track is how often answers name you, where you appear in the list, and what the answer says about you.
- Cited sources carry weight. An answer that names three competitors may cite a “best of” list article, a forum thread or a marketplace page. Getting onto those pages can matter more than another post on your own site. Citation gap analysis lists the sites that recommend competitors and never mention you.
- Answers vary between runs. Ask the same question twice and the list of brands can change. One reading is a sample of one. You need repeated checks over days before a move means anything.
- Language changes the answer. Many Indian buyers type in Hinglish, which is Hindi and English written in English letters. The same question in Hinglish can get a different list of brands, as the example below shows.
- The bot list is longer. Next to Googlebot there are AI crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and others, some collecting training data and some fetching pages to answer a question now. The AI crawlers guide explains which is which. Google says its AI features need no special AI text files or markup, so an llms.txt file, a plain text summary of your site for AI tools, is optional.
How to measure GEO alongside SEO
Use two scoreboards. For SEO, Google Search Console shows impressions, clicks and average position. Google counts AI Overview and AI Mode appearances inside the Web search numbers there, with no separate breakdown, so Search Console cannot tell you whether an AI Overview named your brand.
For GEO, you ask the questions your buyers ask and read the answers. These tracked questions are called prompts. Try it by hand with 10 prompts and the problem shows up fast: answers change between runs, engines disagree, and a number only means something across many answers.
Depra’s AI visibility tracking does this for you. It asks your prompts to ChatGPT with web search, Gemini and Google AI Overviews every day and to Perplexity every week, from inside your chosen country. It records whether each answer named you, in what position, in what tone, and which pages it cited. The Google AI Overview tracker also records whether an Overview appeared at all.
- SEO metrics: impressions, clicks, average position and indexed pages, from Search Console.
- GEO metrics: visibility (the share of answers that name you), position in the answer, sentiment, cited domains, and share of voice, which is your mentions as a share of all tracked brand mentions. Every term is defined in the AI search glossary.
Example: an Indian buyer question
Take a buying question from our study, in English: “Which face wash should I buy for oily skin in India under ₹500?” A Hinglish buyer types: “India mein oily skin ke liye 500 rupees ke andar konsa face wash kharidna chahiye?”
For SEO, you would check where your product or category page ranks for each phrasing. For GEO, the language changes the answer itself. In our Hinglish vs English study, 480 answers to 10 buying questions asked from India, Gemini cited sources in 90.0% of English answers and 41.3% of Hinglish answers. On Perplexity, the overlap in brands named was 23.4 points lower across languages than between two runs in the same language.
A brand that tracks only English questions misses what Hinglish buyers see. Depra suggests a Hinglish version of each question when India is one of your markets, on every plan, and your report shows the split.