TL;DR
GEO is SEO.
By our estimate, about 80% of it is the same fundamentals: pages Google and AI tools can crawl, content worth citing, and a brand other sites vouch for.
The other 20% is newer work, and every piece of it traces back to one of those fundamentals.
Generative engine optimization is optimizing your website and brand so AI tools mention you in their answers.
That covers Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot.
When someone asks ChatGPT for the best accountant in Denver, GEO is the work that decides whether your name comes back.
You will see the same practice under other names: answer engine optimization (AEO), AI SEO, LLM SEO and AI search optimization.
They are five names for one practice, and the acronym changes every quarter while the work underneath stays put.
Most of the confusion about GEO and SEO comes down to how much of the work is new.
GEO is SEO, and Google now says so in writing.
Google's guide to optimizing for AI features says those features are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems".
The guide, last updated on July 10, 2026, calls optimizing for them "still SEO".
The guide also sets an entry ticket.
To appear in an AI feature, "a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet".
Only a page Google can index, and show with a snippet, appears in its AI answers.
Google has said it on stage too: “Good SEO is good GEO” was a slide at its Search Central Live events:
That is why we put the split at roughly 80/20.
Most of what wins in AI answers is the work that already wins in search. The rest is newer, but every part of it leans on something SEO built first.
The 80% of GEO that stays the same is crawlable pages, content worth citing and a trusted brand.
These are the jobs SEO has always done, and AI tools reward them for the same reasons Google does.
An AI tool can only quote a page it can reach. Crawling, indexing, site speed and clean site structure all still decide whether your content is in the running.
Our own data shows how far the basics carry.
Across the websites in our analytics data, pages with readable URLs earned about 13 times more AI referral visits per page than pages with unreadable ones.
Part of that gap is intent: the unreadable URLs sit mostly on cart and account pages, which nobody asks an AI about.
Google's guide asks for "non-commodity content": expert, first-hand material that goes beyond common knowledge.
An AI tool has already read the generic version of your article a thousand times. It cites the page that adds something.
Links, reviews and mentions tell Google which brands to trust. AI tools read the same signals.
A brand nobody else talks about rarely makes the shortlist an AI gives back.
The new 20% of GEO is a set of jobs that push your brand beyond your own website, and each one traces back to an SEO fundamental.
Digital PR is the one that moves the needle most for our clients, because it earns mentions and builds strong links at the same time. Link building is SEO.
AI answers draw on sources well beyond your website: news sites, YouTube, Reddit, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Instagram, review sites and industry press.
Digital PR is the most reliable way to earn a place in them.
The word that matters is "earned"
Google's guide says chasing "inauthentic mentions" across the web is less helpful than it looks.
Wikipedia is volunteer-edited and removes promotional entries.
Bought mentions get removed, and they do little while they last.
Platforms also shift under you so there's a need to continually create more genuine mentions of your brand.
In August 2026, tracking firm Promptwatch reported Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations falling from about 3.8% to about 0.5% within a week.
The cause is still unconfirmed, and Promptwatch calls the data provisional.
Whatever the cause, a brand spread across several channels rides out one platform's change.
Traces back to: authority and backlinks.
Your social posts already rank in Google.
Since July 2026 you can see how they perform.
Google added platform properties to Search Console in July 2026.
They cover Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube.
We connected our own YouTube channel the week it launched.
Two days of data showed 35,585 impressions, 1,005 queries and 303 page-one rankings. By July 17, our YouTube content had earned 87 clicks from Google Search.
Social content gets seen in Google far more than it gets clicked, so judge it on visibility.
We also found the data is out of reach of every tool, including Google's own Search Console API, so for now it is a manual export. Our guide to ranking social content on Google covers the how.
Traces back to: visibility in search.
Microsoft runs its own index and its own AI answers, its Bing Webmaster Tools now has an AI Performance report that shows how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing's AI answers.
Verify your site there as well as in Search Console.
Traces back to: crawling and indexing.
AI crawlers such as OpenAI's GPTBot and Anthropic's Claude crawler read the HTML a page sends and skip its client-side JavaScript, Search Engine Journal reported in 2025.
If your key content only appears after a script loads, those crawlers see an empty page.
Serve your important text in the HTML, and learn about best practices for Javascript SEO.
Traces back to: technical SEO.
AI tools build their picture of your business from every source they read.
If your website, Google Business Profile and directory listings disagree on your services, locations or prices, the answer they give can be wrong.
Keep the facts consistent across the web.
Traces back to: entity and local SEO.
Rankings show where you sit in search results.
Citations show whether AI answers mention you, track both.
The measurement section below covers the tools.
Traces back to: SEO reporting.
Plenty of what gets sold as GEO is a hack.
The GEO hacks you can skip are the ones Google lists by name. Its guide tells site owners to "Prioritize effective SEO strategies over 'AEO/GEO hacks'", then names them:
StudioHawk publishes an llms.txt file, because some services outside Google read it and Google says it does no harm. We treat it as housekeeping, with no ranking promise attached.
The guide covers Google Search only. ChatGPT, Perplexity and other assistants may weigh signals differently, which is one reason the 20% exists.
With the hacks set aside, the next question is who does the work.
A separate GEO agency is unnecessary: one team covers GEO and SEO, because they are the same work.
Two teams on one website end up doing the same job twice, or undoing each other.
Three warning signs in a GEO pitch:
Whoever does the work, you still need a way to see whether it is working.
You measure GEO with your SEO reports plus a view of AI citations. Four sources cover it:
Analytics only sees the click. A brand can be cited in AI answers every day and barely show up in GA4, so read the four together.
GEO is the same practice as SEO.
Google says optimizing for its AI features is "still SEO", and we put about 80% of GEO down to the same fundamentals.
Your SEO strategy is your GEO strategy. Add the newer 20%, led by digital PR, to the plan you already run.
GEO changes how you write only in the way good SEO already does: answer the question, add something original and show your expertise. Google says writing for your reader is enough.
Optimize for the AI platforms your customers use. In the US that usually means Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot. The same fundamentals serve all of them.
You can measure GEO with Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, GA4 and an AI visibility tool. Track citations alongside rankings, because analytics only records the click.
Our free guide to ranking in AI search shows how to get cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
To have our team do the work, see our AI SEO services.
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