What is the difference between GEO and SEO?

SEO tries to rank a URL on a results page. GEO tries to get a fact or brand mentioned inside an AI answer. You still need a crawlable page — an engine cannot quote what it cannot fetch — but the winning unit is the answer block, not the blog post. That single difference changes how you write, how long the page is, and how you measure success.

Side by side

What still carries over

• — Crawlability. If a page is blocked, slow, or client-rendered with no server HTML, no engine can use it.
• — Clear titles and headings. Both systems read them.
• — Real expertise and a named author. Both systems reward it, for different reasons.
• — Internal links, which help both crawlers and retrieval systems understand what a site is about.

What changes

In SEO you often write around a keyword and let the answer emerge. In GEO you write the answer first and let everything else support it. In SEO a longer page can outrank a shorter one. In GEO a longer page frequently loses to a short one that states the fact plainly with a source next to it.

Measurement changes the most. Keyword rank tells you nothing about whether Perplexity named you. The practical replacement is a fixed prompt set: fifteen questions, run in each engine, scored the same way every time.

How we score a snapshot

1. 0 — not mentioned, and no page from your site is cited.
2. 1 — your site is cited or paraphrased, but the business is not named as the recommendation.
3. 2 — the business is named in the answer body.

Fifteen prompts across four engines gives sixty data points and a maximum score of 120. Most small sites start between 0 and 8. The number matters less than the direction it moves after the pages ship.

Who should do which

• — If organic traffic is your main channel and it still converts, keep doing SEO and add GEO pages on top.
• — If you sell a considered local service and customers now ask an assistant first, GEO is the cheaper lever.
• — If you have no indexed site at all, fix hosting and indexing before either.

Sources

Ranking behavior claims should come from Google Search Central. Answer-assembly behavior should come from OpenAI, xAI, and Perplexity documentation. We do not treat third-party ranking studies as evidence of how a model chooses citations.

A worked example

Take a septic company asking about SEO. The SEO version writes "Septic Pumping Services in Ulster County," targets a head term, and fights three directories for position four. The GEO version writes "How much does emergency septic pumping cost on a weekend in Ulster County?", answers with a price band and a response window in the first eighty words, cites the county health department page for permit rules, and closes with four questions the office answers by phone every week. The first page competes for a slot. The second page is the easiest correct thing for an engine to quote. Running both is normal, and the GEO page frequently ends up ranking too, because it matches how people now type.