GEO vs SEO: What’s The Difference?

If you’ve noticed competitors turning up in the AI summaries at the top of Google, you’ve probably started looking into what it takes to get there too. That search usually ends in a pile of acronyms: GEO, AEO, sometimes AIO. They all sound like variations on a theme, so where do you start? There’s a reason they sound alike. In May 2026, Google published its first proper guidance on how to show up in AI answers, and its position was blunt: this is all still SEO.

That settles a lot of the argument for anything happening inside Google, including those AI summaries. It also means plenty of the advice written about these acronyms in 2025 is out of date. What it doesn’t cover is everywhere else. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude choose their sources differently to Google, and that’s where the real new work is.

So the useful question isn’t GEO vs SEO, or which acronym comes out on top. It’s knowing what actually changes about your content when people get their answers from AI instead of clicking through to your site. That’s why more businesses are exploring AI SEO services to help their content perform across both traditional search results and AI-driven platforms. 

What is SEO? (Search Engine Optimisation)

SEO is the process of improving your website so that it ranks higher in traditional search engines like Google and Bing. The goal is for your site to appear when someone types a question or keyword into the search bar, whether they’re looking for a product, a service, or an answer.

At its core, SEO is built around three main pillars:

• Technical SEO – making sure your site runs smoothly, loads fast and works well on all devices.
• On-Page SEO – optimising your content for the keywords your audience is searching for, and making it easy to read and navigate.
• Off-Page SEO – building authority through backlinks and mentions across trusted websites.

By driving consistent, relevant traffic from search engines to your site, SEO will support turning those visitors into customers. Good SEO brings the right people at the right time. 

How Traditional SEO Feeds AI Answers

Technical, on-page and off-page SEO all still work the way they always have. What’s changed is what they feed into. The same well-built site, useful pages and credible mentions that earn you a place in the list of results are what get your content pulled into AI answers too. Google has been explicit about this: its AI features run on the same ranking and quality systems as the rest of Search, so a page that can’t rank isn’t going to get cited either.

When people talk about SEO vs GEO, that’s the shift they’re describing, not two separate jobs.

What is GEO? (Generative Engine Optimisation)

If you ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude a question, you don’t get a list of ten links. You get a written answer, stitched together from a handful of sources the tool has picked. GEO is all about getting your business mentioned, quoted or linked in the answers these AI tools write for people.

These tools are large language models (LLMs), and the answers they write are what people mean by generative AI. They answer the question, rather than pointing at pages that might, so have earned the term answer engines rather than search engines.

How GEO Results Are Put Together

The mechanics are less mysterious than the acronym makes them sound. Behind a single question, these tools run a batch of their own searches, collect the pages that come back, and write an answer from what they find. Google works the same way for its AI summaries, and for AI Mode, its chat-style version of Search. That’s the reason Google’s guidance says the route in is ordinary SEO. Your page has to be in Google’s index and ranking well enough to get pulled into the mix before anything else matters.

What GEO does add is a change in what success looks like. Your business can be part of an answer without anyone landing on your site, so being mentioned starts to matter as much as being clicked.

What is AEO? (Answer Engine Optimisation)

AEO is the narrower version of the same idea: writing content so a search engine can lift a clean, direct answer straight out of it. A prime example is the box at the top of Google that answers your question before you’ve clicked anything.

The Difference Between GEO and AEO

In practice, people use GEO and AEO loosely, and there’s no agreed line between them. Some use AEO for answers shown inside Google and GEO for being cited by chatbots. Others treat GEO as the umbrella and AEO as the part dealing with short, liftable answers. So if you’ve been reading about SEO vs AEO vs GEO and come away unsure which is which, that’s why. The industry hasn’t settled it either.

The practical upshot is the same either way. Neither replaces SEO. Both describe an extra thing to think about once the SEO is working.

Are AIO and GEO the same thing?

Just to make things more confusing, AIO (AI Optimisation) is another label for the same work, and you’ll see it used interchangeably with both AEO and GEO. Google’s own guidance says optimising for its AI answers is still SEO, and that there’s no special code to add or separate setup to build before you’re eligible.

Where the labels do earn their keep is off Google. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude pick their sources their own way, and they lean more on what other websites say about you than Google does. Reviews, directories, forums, YouTube and digital PR all feed into it, which is work that sits outside your own website entirely.

Why SEO and GEO Matter for UK Businesses Now

Most businesses are already investing in SEO. The reason to pay attention to the rest is that UK search behaviour has moved, and quickly:

• 54% of UK adults now use AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, up from 31% in 2024. As AI becomes embedded in everyday services and tools, its adoption is likely to become even more normalised.
• AI overviews appear on roughly 30% of queries, although this varies by industry. For business, education and food and beverage, this can be as high as 46-61%. 53% of adults say they see AI overviews often, even if they aren’t looking for them. This means you can’t afford for your products or services not to show up.
• ChatGPT took 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million in the same period the year before.
• AI overviews show up most when someone’s trying to learn something, and least when they’re trying to buy something. Ahrefs found they appear on around 43% of health and science searches, but only 3% of shopping ones. That’s why blogs have taken the hit. If your ‘how to do X’ posts used to bring people in and you converted some of them, Google is now answering those questions itself. Plenty of businesses have watched that traffic slide and assumed they’d been penalised or made a mistake somewhere, when the question was simply being answered before anyone got as far as the links.
• The buying searches are next. Semrush found that at the start of 2025, around nine in ten searches showing an AI overview were people looking for information. By October, it was closer to six in ten, as product and shopping searches started getting them too.

How to Start Optimising for GEO and SEO

You don’t need to rebuild your SEO strategy from scratch. But if you want your content to show up in AI-generated answers, summaries, and search tools, it needs to be structured and written for how those platforms understand and surface information.

Write for User Intent

When people are shopping online or looking for a service using AI tools, they don’t type exact keywords like “eCommerce SEO strategy.” They ask things like:

• “Which Shopify apps help boost product page conversions?”
• “How do I improve search rankings for my online store without ads?”
• “Why isn’t my product showing up in AI shopping results?”

Your content should include these kinds of natural, question-based phrases across your site, as AI overviews appear on 46% of searches of seven words or more, and on 57.9% of all question searches. However, don’t feel you have to keyword stuff every variation of a phrase into your site. Google has been clear that its AI systems understand synonyms and general meanings, so you don’t need to capture every long-tail variation or write in a particular way to be picked up. 

You can find long tail keywords using tools like Ahrefs, Semrush or Answer The Public for keyword research to work out content clusters that support your main services or products. Then you should use on-page SEO best practices to cover each topic in depth. 

Say Something Only You Can Say

AI answers are assembled from whatever’s available, so if your page says what forty other pages already say, there’s no reason to pick yours. Google’s own guidance singles this out, contrasting a generic “7 tips for first-time buyers” post with one that tells you what actually happened when the writer waived a survey and what it cost them.

You can make the content unique by using your own numbers, your own client results, the mistake you watched a customer make twice, or the thing everyone in your trade knows that nobody has written down. If you’re using AI to help draft, make sure you humanise the output so it’s grounded in real knowledge rather than padded out with clichés.

Make Your Answers Easy to Find

AI tools (and users) are looking for fast, structured answers. Your content should:

• Use headings that match the questions people ask.
• Answer the question near the top, before the context and the caveats.
• Break long explanations into short paragraphs, lists or tables.
• Include FAQs that reflect real questions, and answer them without the fluff.

Keep Your Content Fresh

AI tools want the latest information to pull from, so outdated posts are more likely to be ignored or pushed down. Make sure to:

• Replace broken links.
• Update old stats and references. Using credible data and expert insights gives your copy authority.
• Refresh “last updated” dates on blogs.
• Archive or rewrite underperforming content that’s no longer accurate.

Grow Your LinkedIn, TikTok & Reddit Presence

Platforms like ChatGPT already pull results from TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, and other social sources. That means:

• Using keywords in video titles, post captions, and alt text.
• Adding timestamps, summaries, or descriptions that match common questions.
• Treating social posts like micro-content hubs. You can repurpose content for social media from your site to make things quicker.

The more relevant and structured your public content is, the more likely it is to appear when AI tools generate an answer.

Add Structured Data

Structured data (also called schema markup) is code that tells search engines what each page actually is: a product with a price, a business with opening hours, an article with an author. It makes you eligible for rich results, the extra detail like star ratings and prices that shows under a listing.

Be clear on why you’re adding it, though. Google has confirmed structured data isn’t required to appear in AI answers, and there’s no AI-specific markup available. Schema earns its place in ordinary search, and that’s reason enough.

• Local businesses: use schema on your homepage, service and location pages to highlight your services, location and opening hours.
• eCommerce: use product and review schema on product pages to draw attention to pricing and ratings directly in search results.
• Blogs and guides: article schema is the one worth having. Skip FAQ schema if you’re adding it for the rich result, because Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026. The markup causes no harm, though nothing will display.

Get Your Technical SEO Right

Even the best-written content can be overlooked if your site doesn’t perform well behind the scenes. AI tools and traditional search engines still rely on the same technical signals to crawl, interpret and rank your content. To lay the right foundations, make sure to:

• Check out your site speed, as slow-loading pages are less likely to be surfaced by search engines or AI tools.
• Make sure your site is fully responsive on mobile, as most AI platforms prioritise mobile-first content.
• Look at crawlability and indexing using tools like Google Search Console to make sure your content can be discovered.
• Build internal links strategically so AI tools (and users) can easily find related pages. 

A clean, well-structured site makes it easier for AI to understand your content and surface the right pages when people are searching for answers.

Putting It into Practice: AI SEO Example for eCommerce

Let’s say you run an eCommerce store that sells skincare products, and you publish a blog comparing two popular items: “Vitamin C Serum vs Retinol: Which One Should You Use First?”

To optimise that page for AI-powered search, you’d:

• Include a question-based H1 like “How does Vitamin C compare to Retinol?”
• Add a clear, direct answer near the top:
  “Vitamin C is generally used in the morning to brighten skin, while Retinol is applied at night to support cell turnover. Both can be used in the same routine with care.”
• Add an internal link to your product pages
• Include structured FAQs like:
  • “Can you use Vitamin C and Retinol together?”
  • “What’s better for acne: Retinol or Vitamin C?”
• Make sure the post has a recent publish date, valid sources, and working links
• Share a YouTube video comparing the two, using the same keywords and linking back to the full guide.

This optimised content will be more likely to appear in Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT answers, and even YouTube search results.

Keep Up with the Future of Search Optimisation

Search isn’t static. What worked five years ago, or even one year ago, doesn’t guarantee results today.

SEO still matters. But so does how your content answers questions and how it’s interpreted by AI. These aren’t trends. These are permanent shifts in how people discover information and how platforms decide what to surface. 

If you’re not sure where to start or you’re struggling to adapt your content for these new search behaviours, get in touch to work with us. We’ll help you build a future-ready strategy that works across traditional search and AI platforms.

FAQS About SEO, GEO & AEO