What is the difference between SEO and GEO?

In brief

• SEO and GEO answer different jobs: being found in a search engine is not the same as being cited in a generative answer.
• For Google, optimizing for AI features in Search is still SEO — no special markup and no llms.txt requirement.
• The GEO paper’s “up to 40%” gain is a lab result, not a public ranking.
• A citation is not a click: CTR falls when an AI summary appears, and llms.txt has no demonstrated correlation with being cited.

Two jobs, two names

SEO, in the classic sense, is about being discovered: crawling, indexing, and eligibility in search results. GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — began as an academic term for optimizing content for visibility in systems that retrieve information and synthesize answers with attribution. The paper that defined the term describes generative engines as retrieval followed by synthesis, with inline citations. [1]

The market sells both names as if they were a new marketing-only discipline. Separate the academic method — which exists, with lab limits — from the pitch that promises to “rank in ChatGPT” without showing how to measure it.

What Google says

For the Google ecosystem, the official answer is direct: optimizing for generative AI features in Search is optimizing for the Search experience. The guide lists myths to avoid: llms.txt, special AI markup, splitting content into “chunks” for AI, and rewriting text only for agents. [3] [4] John Mueller (May 2025) extends the usual advice — people-first content, page experience, crawlability and indexation — to AI Overviews and AI Mode. [5]

Search Console now offers performance reports for generative AI features (impressions by page, country, device, and date) — official visibility, not a third-party “citation” scoreboard. [7]

GEO with a method — and “up to 40%”

The GEO paper reports a relative visibility gain “of up to 40%” on the authors’ own benchmark (GEO-bench, about 10,000 queries), with Google’s top 5 reprocessed through a GPT-3.5-style pipeline. It is not a public ChatGPT ranking API, and it does not automatically repeat in production. [1] Treating that as a business target is the most common error.

A citation is not a click

Pew Research Center found an organic-link click rate of about 8% when an AI summary appeared, versus about 15% when it did not; about 1% of users clicked a link inside the summary itself. [8]

Two vendor studies reinforce skepticism about llms.txt: Ahrefs, across about 137,000 sites, found that 97% of published files received no requests in the measured month; SE Ranking, across about 300,000 domains, found no observable correlation between publishing llms.txt and being cited by LLMs. [12] [13]

Uncertainties

There is no public list of the exact signals Google uses to choose supporting pages in AI Overviews. It is unknown whether GEO-bench transfers to ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude in production. There is no public study that converts “AI mention” into clicks or revenue.

Read the Dossier

Method, myths, and what to measure are in Web agent-ready — discovery vs citation: SEO, GEO, and evidence.

References

1. Aggarwal et al. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. arXiv. Accessed August 07, 2026.
2. Google Search Central — Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. Google. Accessed August 07, 2026.
3. Google Search Central — AI features and your website. Google. Accessed August 07, 2026.
4. Google Search Central Blog — Succeeding in AI search. Google. Accessed August 07, 2026.
5. Google Search Central Blog — New Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console. Google. Accessed August 07, 2026.
6. Pew Research Center — Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. Pew Research Center. Accessed August 07, 2026.
7. Ahrefs — We Analyzed 137K Sites: 97% of llms.txt Files Never Get Read. Ahrefs. Accessed August 07, 2026.
8. SE Ranking — llms.txt vs LLM citations analysis. SE Ranking. Accessed August 07, 2026.