SEO and GEO
SEO vs GEO: what changes when AI answers first?
SEO puts your page in the list of results; GEO puts your company in the answer an AI writes above that list, or in place of it. The foundations are shared. The goal, the kind of content that wins and the way you measure success are different, and the gap grows as more searches end without a click.
Written by Hatice Kölmük7 min read
What stays the same?
Every AI answer that cites the web starts with a search. Google says the usual SEO work still counts for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that a page which is not indexed, or not allowed a snippet, never becomes a supporting link. If your site is slow, blocked, thin or confusing to search engines, it is just as invisible to answer engines.
- Technical health: crawlable pages, clean redirects, a sitemap and no accidental blocks. Our technical SEO work covers this.
- Helpful content: pages written for people, by someone who knows the subject.
- Reputation: other sites that mention you, link to you and describe you the same way you describe yourself.
So the first half of any GEO plan is ordinary SEO. Skipping it to chase AI answers is like printing a brochure for a shop with a locked door.
What changes when an AI answers first?
The click is what changes. A month of real browsing from March 2025, studied by Pew Research Center and drawn from 900 adults in the US, shows it. With an AI summary on the page, a regular link got the click in 8 percent of visits. Without the summary, that rose to 15 percent. They clicked a link inside the summary itself in only 1 percent of visits, and 26 percent of those searches ended the browsing session, compared with 16 percent of searches without a summary.
Pew also found that AI summaries appeared on about one in five searches, and much more often on long questions: 60 percent of searches that began with words like “who”, “what” or “why” produced one. The questions buyers ask before picking a supplier are searches of exactly this kind.
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| The goal | Rank high in the results list | Be mentioned or cited in the answer |
| What wins | A page | A passage, a fact, a company name |
| Typical query | Short keywords: “crm software” | Full questions: “which CRM suits a 20-person agency?” |
| What helps most | Relevance, links, page experience | Clear answers, cited sources, facts that match across the web |
| Main measure | Rankings and clicks | Share of answers that name you, plus the clicks that follow |
| Pays off when | People click through to compare | People trust the summary and act on it |
Does a high Google ranking get you into AI answers?
It helps, yet it is its own discipline. Google describes a “query fan-out” technique behind AI Overviews and AI Mode: the system runs several related searches on subtopics and collects supporting pages from each one. A page can be cited for a question it never ranked first for, simply because it answers one part of it well.
Research points the same way. In the GEO paper from Princeton University and IIT Delhi, pages ranked lower in classic results gained far more visibility in generated answers after citing their sources than top-ranked pages did. The reverse also happens: a page can rank well and still be left out of the answer when its useful facts sit under a long introduction, behind tabs or in vague wording that a model can’t quote.
How do you write for both at once?
One page can serve both. The habits that help assistants quote you also make a page easier for a person to scan on a phone.
- Give the answer to each heading’s question in the sentence right under it.
- Keep one topic per section, so each passage makes sense on its own.
- Put numbers, dates and sources in the text, not inside images.
- Name the author and keep an About page that matches your profiles on other sites.
- Use structured data that describes the page accurately. Google is explicit that its AI features ask for no markup of their own.
- Update facts when they change and show the date of the last change.
Write each section as if it will be read alone, out of context, by someone who will never see the rest of the page. That is how an AI assistant reads it.
Where do AI answers find their sources?
Some of it happens on your site, and some wherever else people discuss you. Pew found that Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit were the sites linked most often in Google’s AI summaries, together 15 percent of all the sources listed. Government sites also appeared more often in AI summaries than in regular results.
For a company, that means GEO reaches past your own pages: trade press, directories, review sites, partner pages and the forums your buyers read all shape what an assistant says. Classic link building looked at these places for their links. GEO looks at them for what they say.
Does GEO matter for every kind of business?
It matters most where buyers ask long questions before they decide, but the details differ by type of business.
- Local businesses: people ask assistants for a recommendation nearby. The answer leans on your business profile, your reviews and the same name, address and phone number across directories, so local SEO and GEO overlap almost completely.
- B2B companies: buyers research for weeks and ask comparison questions, such as which supplier fits a company of their size. Clear pages on who you serve, what you cost and how you work decide whether you make the shortlist an assistant writes.
- Online shops: shoppers ask for the best product for a need. Full product data, accurate specifications and reviews, on your site and elsewhere, give an assistant solid facts to repeat.
In all three cases the work is the same in kind: be easy to read, be consistent everywhere and be specific enough to quote.
How does measurement change?
SEO reporting rests on rankings, impressions and clicks. Those numbers still matter, and Google includes traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode in the same Search Console Performance report. What they can’t show is how often an assistant names you without sending anyone to your site.
That takes prompt tracking: a set list of buyer questions put to each assistant on a schedule, with every mention, citation and description logged. Answers shift from run to run, so follow the share over time instead of a single result. Our AI visibility tracking service is built this way.
On click quality
Google says that when people do click from results pages with AI Overviews, the visits tend to be of higher quality, with people spending more time on the site. Check this in your own analytics before you plan around it.
Should budget shift from SEO to GEO?
For most companies the better question is how to split one plan. Technical fixes and strong pages serve both channels. The work that is specific to GEO is smaller: checking AI crawlers, rewriting key pages answer-first, earning mentions on sites assistants read and tracking prompts. A sensible order:
- Fix crawling and indexing problems first; they block both channels.
- Rewrite the ten or twenty pages that answer your buyers’ main questions.
- Get mentioned where assistants look: trade press, directories, review sites and online communities.
- Track prompts monthly and report them next to rankings and clicks, in one report.
We plan and run both from one team. The SEO and GEO page explains the approach, and our SEO agency page covers the classic search side.
Written by Hatice Kölmük
Partner at yop, Tallinn. Who we are
Sources
Where we can help
The services behind this post.
SEO and GEO
SEO and GEO services from yop: rank on Google and get named in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answers, with one plan, one report and one team.
SEO agency
Technical fixes, content and links that lift you on Google.
Technical SEO
Crawling, indexing and speed fixed at the source.
AI visibility tracking
How often AI assistants name you, measured every month.
Your project
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Questions
Asked about SEO and GEO.
Have AI answers killed SEO?
No. Google builds its AI answers from indexed pages and says SEO best practices still apply to them. What is falling is the share of searches that lead to a click, so being named in the answer counts for more than it used to.
What does zero-click search mean?
A search where the person clicks no result, either because the page already answered them or because they searched again. In Pew’s study, about two-thirds of Google searches ended without a click on a result link, with or without an AI summary.
Do I need separate pages for GEO?
Usually not. One page can both rank and be cited when it answers questions directly and supports what it says. Write new pages when buyers ask questions your site leaves unanswered.
Which AI assistants should a business track?
The ones your buyers use. For most companies that means Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, checked in every language and market you sell in.
