GEO vs SEO: what changes and what stays the same
Search engine optimization (SEO) works to rank a page in a list of results; generative engine optimization (GEO) works to get an entity named or cited inside a generated answer. This page is written by Dmitry (Dee) Kargaev, who maintains Awesome GEO and wrote the SEO-to-GEO Gap working paper.
What the founding GEO paper found
The founding GEO paper, a 2023 research paper from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi, is where the term “generative engine optimization” entered the vocabulary, according to Hybrid Ranking. It reported that some changes to a page could raise its visibility in AI-generated answers by up to 40%. The same account says adding quotations, statistics and cited sources raised visibility and keyword stuffing lowered it by 9%.
TechTarget, in a feature published on 22 July 2025, calls it a 2024 Princeton University study and repeats the up to 40% figure. It says the study suggests brands use quotes and statistics from reputable sources to receive more citations in generated responses. Both are reports of the paper, not the paper itself.
What the SEO-to-GEO Gap paper found
The 2026 working paper “The SEO-to-GEO Gap: Quantifying Ranking Factor Divergence Between Traditional and Generative Search” concludes that the change from SEO to GEO is a reweighting rather than a replacement. It is an exploratory comparative synthesis of direct SEO and GEO studies, with a second layer of market, overlap and citation-behavior sources. It reports three provisional findings.
First, visibility in generative search appears more tightly associated with entity and brand prominence than with classic link-proxy measures. Second, adding citations and statistics to content produces substantial gains in the GEO benchmark, which suggests generative systems reward evidence-bearing, citation-ready content more directly than traditional SEO studies capture. Third, the overlap literature indicates that GEO still operates on top of organic search rather than replacing SEO outright.
The reweighting model says familiar factor families persist, new generative-facing signals emerge, and some headline claims about SEO-to-GEO disruption are stronger than the evidence supports.
How SEO and GEO compare
SEO and GEO differ in the unit they work on, what counts as visible, which signals weigh more and how success is counted. Ahrefs puts the visibility difference as a link against a mention: in SEO your website appears as a link in search results, in GEO your information or brand appears directly inside the AI’s answer.
| Attribute | SEO | GEO | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unit of work | The whole page | A passage or fact from a page | Hybrid Ranking |
| What counts as visible | Your site appearing as a link in search results | Your information or brand appearing directly inside the AI’s answer | Ahrefs |
| Signals that weigh more | Keywords early in titles and summaries, subhead structure, topic depth, backlinks | Statistics, quotes, conversational language, FAQ sections; entity and brand prominence (provisional) | TechTarget; SEO-to-GEO Gap working paper |
| How it is measured | Keyword rankings, backlinks, organic traffic, organic share of voice | Brand mentions in AI answers, citations, AI referral traffic, AI share of voice | Ahrefs |
TechTarget adds that even the most effective GEO strategies won’t generate as much web traffic as SEO, and that brands might begin to treat GEO as a way to build awareness and SEO as a way to generate traffic. A practical addition: Hybrid Ranking notes that AI search engines use their own crawlers, such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, which robots.txt has to allow.
Clicks are where the change shows in the data. In a Pew Research study of 68,879 Google searches, reported by Hybrid Ranking, users clicked a result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared and on 15% when it did not. Google disputed the study.
How other guides define the difference
Other guides define GEO in their own words. Semrush says SEO helps your content rank in Google’s search results, and GEO helps it appear and get cited in AI answers from tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
Geolix defines GEO as optimizing a brand’s entity, content evidence, trusted sources and coverage of user intent, to increase the likelihood that the brand is mentioned, recommended, cited and accurately described in AI-generated answers. Aurora describes it as preparing a site so generative engines pull your information and name you as a source when they answer, and notes the informal name SEO for AI.
What stays the same
Two things carry over from SEO to GEO, according to the SEO-to-GEO Gap paper: authority, which appears broadly persistent under its provisional Divergence Index, and the organic-search base that GEO still operates on top of.
Google’s AI features documentation, as quoted by Hybrid Ranking, says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond a page being indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. Ahrefs advises starting with good SEO and then adding GEO tactics: more original data, up-to-date key content and more brand mentions across the web. Semrush lists shared ground in quality standards, structured content, topical authority, original research and clear answers.
What is not known
The sources state several limits. The SEO-to-GEO Gap paper says its Divergence Index covers only the factor families that could be matched between SEO and GEO, and that the divergence in content quality depends heavily on how the SEO-side measure is mapped. TechTarget describes GEO as still in its infancy and lacking a proven track record. Hybrid Ranking lists measurement as less stable in GEO: the same prompt can return different sources each time, while rankings move over days and weeks.
Whether a citation brings clicks is not settled. Seer Interactive, as reported by Hybrid Ranking, measured a click-through rate of 0.70% for pages cited in an AI Overview against 0.52% for pages that were not, and notes that it “cannot definitively prove that citation causes higher CTRs.”
The overlap between AI citations and top rankings is measured elsewhere too. Ahrefs data, as reported by Hybrid Ranking, put the share of URLs cited in AI Overviews that ranked in Google’s top 10 for the query at 76.1% in July 2025 and 37.9% in March 2026, with 31.0% of citations coming from pages outside the top 100.