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AI Search & GEO/AEO

Is GEO different from SEO, and do I need both?

Short answer

GEO and SEO share the same foundation: pages that can be crawled, indexed and trusted. SEO targets rankings in search results; GEO targets being named or cited inside AI answers. Most brands need both, because AI assistants often retrieve from search indexes and the open web, so weak SEO usually means weak AI visibility too.

The full answer

Google has said that, for Google Search, optimizing for generative AI features is still SEO: the same technical requirements and people-first content apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode. So if your aim is Google's AI features, strong SEO is the main lever.

The differences show up beyond Google:

  • ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude use their own crawlers. Blocking them in robots.txt, or at your firewall, can keep you out of their answers even if you rank well on Google.
  • AI answers often name several brands without sending a click, so being mentioned on review sites, in comparisons and in community discussions can matter as much as your own pages.
  • Success is measured differently: your share of mentions across a set of prompts, not only positions and clicks.

A sensible order for most businesses is to fix technical SEO and content quality first, then check AI crawler access, then work on the third-party mentions and prompt tracking that are specific to AI assistants. If you already rank well, GEO is often an incremental step rather than a new programme.

Sources

Published by Vidern, founded and led by Malhar Shah. Updated .

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