What is the difference between SEO and GEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the traditional practice of optimizing your website to rank as high as possible in the familiar list of search results, often called the "blue links."The primary goal of SEO is to drive organic (unpaid) traffic to your website. This is achieved by researching what keywords your customers are using and then improving your site's content, technical performance, and earning backlinks (links from other sites) to prove its relevance and authority.When you do SEO well, a customer searching for your service finds your website link and clicks on it.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is a newer strategy designed for the age of AI. Its goal is not to rank your website link, but to get your brand's information and content featured directly inside the AI-generated answers (like Google's AI Overviews or a ChatGPT response).Instead of aiming for a click, GEO aims for your business to be the source of the answer. This means optimizing for conversational questions, providing clear, direct answers, and building strong signals of real-world expertise and trustworthiness (like reviews and mentions) that an AI model can verify and cite.

For a business owner, the key difference is visibility versus authority. SEO gets a customer to your digital doorstep (your website). GEO establishes you as the expert in the room before the customer even looks for the door. As AI answers more and more questions directly, GEO becomes crucial for building brand trust and capturing "zero-click" searches where the user gets their answer without visiting a site. A complete strategy will soon require both: SEO to capture the click and GEO to be the authoritative source that powers the AI's answer.