What’s the difference between SEO and GEO?

Recently, you might have spotted a new acronym floating around when looking at anything marketing or digital related: GEO. This stands for ‘generative engine optimisation’ and is becoming one of the most talked about shifts within search. Largely thanks to the rise of AI-driven tools.

 For years, our focus has been on SEO (search engine optimisation), but as AI-integrated search becomes mainstream, marketers need to think beyond Google and consider how their content is represented in generative environments.

Quick Recap of What SEO Is:

SEO has been the backbone of digital visibility for decades. We optimise for Google by focusing on things such as relevant keywords, strong backlink profiles, technical health and high-quality, helpful content.

Ultimately, SEO is about ranking well in traditional search engines so users can find you.

Introducing GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation

 The rise of generative models means people aren’t always typing queries into Google anymore. In fact, they’re asking AI assistants who respond with summarised answers sourced from across the web. This is where GEO comes in.

GEO focuses on how your content shows up within AI-driven search results. This could be through tools such as ChatGPT, or through Google’s AI Overviews for example.

Instead of keywords and rankings, GEO prioritises credibility, structured data and citation quality. If AI engines can’t reliably understand or trust your content, they’re unlikely to surface it in their answers, even if you rank well on Google.

What’s the difference between SEO and GEO?

Both approaches aim to increase visibility, but they do it in different ways:

• SEO improves your position on search results pages.
• GEO improves your position inside AI-generated responses.

SEO tells Google you’re relevant. GEO tells AI assistants you’re credible, factual, and safe to cite.

This shift means marketers can’t rely solely on keyword strategies anymore. We need to ensure the information we publish is structured, verifiable, and backed by strong signals of authority.

Users are expecting quick, conversational answers without digging through pages of results. So whilst SEO isn’t irrelevant (it’s still very important for your website!), we do need to look at adapting our content to GEO too.

Practical steps you can take now:

• Strengthen your brand’s credibility: Clear authorship, expertise and transparency matter.
• Use structured data: Schema markup helps AI understand what your content actually means.
• Create clear, factual content: Generative engines prefer information that’s easy to cite and verify.
• Back up claims with sources: High-quality citations help build trust.

The goal is to make your content irresistibly clear – not just for humans, but for machines too.