Strategy & Planning · 5 min read · September 24, 2026 · Hafsa Tariq, gaash.ai
SEO vs GEO for someone who already does SEO: what carries over, what changes, and what to stop assuming
If you already do SEO, most of GEO is work you know: crawlability, clean structure, markup, pages that answer a searcher's intent, a site that states one business consistently. What changes is the output and the measurement. The result is a sentence with two or three names in it rather than a ranked list, it differs by run and by assistant, and it is read by several crawlers besides Googlebot. A handful of ranking habits do not carry over.
What carries over unchanged
- Technical crawlability. A page nothing can fetch helps no one, and every assistant with web search fetches pages. Status codes, redirects, canonical pages and what the server sends without scripts matter as much as they ever did.
- Structured data. Business markup with its fields filled describes the business to any parser, and structured data for AI covers which types.
- Search intent. Writing the page for what the person is trying to do, in their words, is the core of both.
- Consistency of the business's details, which local SEO has always cared about.
- Helpful, people-first content, in the sense of Google's own guidance and its self-assessment questions.
For Google's own answers the overlap is nearly complete. Google's page on AI features says AI Overviews and AI Mode need no special markup or file and link to pages that are indexed and eligible for a snippet, and its guide to generative AI search says both rest on its core Search ranking. Good SEO is most of the work there.
What changes shape
| In SEO | In GEO | Why it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Googlebot and Bingbot | A dozen answer-side crawler tokens, each decided on its own | Each assistant fetches through crawlers its operator names, and robots.txt addresses them one at a time |
| Keywords with search volume | A fixed panel of buyers' questions, in whole sentences | People ask an assistant the way they would ask a person |
| A position among ten | Named, recommended or first among two or three | An answer holds a few names and no second page |
| Ranking reports | The same questions every month, with the assistant and the date beside every answer | Answers vary by run and by assistant; one answer is a sample of one |
| Links as a ranking signal | Mentions on pages the answers draw on, linked or not | A name in someone else's text is evidence an answer can use; backlinks vs mentions goes through it |
| Title and meta description | The first sentence under each heading | An answer lifts a passage, not the snippet you wrote for the results page |
| Clicks and sessions | Being named, and the customers who say an assistant sent them | Many answers end without a click; zero-click search explains the gap |
What to stop assuming
- That a first-page ranking means you are in the answer. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity fetch through their own crawlers; a business can rank first on Google and be absent from all three.
- That a directory outranking you means a directory will beat you here. Our audit's probe found the opposite: of every name Claude gave, 99.4% were businesses, and directories or aggregators made up 0.6%.
- That robots.txt is settled. A file written for Googlebot, or a CDN's managed rules, may say something quite different to the assistants' crawlers, and a challenge page can turn them away before the file is read.
- That a volume tool tells you what to measure. The questions that decide a local purchase are often too specific to show volume, and they are the ones worth a place in the panel.
- That a single check is a result. Ask twice and the answer can change.
The work an SEO is best placed to do first
The gaps are mostly on the technical and structural side, which is where SEO skill already lives. In our audit of 9,483 small business websites, 7.2% served our crawler a challenge page instead of the site, 3.0% delivered their content only through JavaScript, 17.8% had no schema.org markup at all, and a further 13.7% had business markup missing the fields that make it usable. And across their own homepage, contact page and about page, 43.1% described who and where the business is in more than one way.
- Audit access for the answer-side tokens, not only Googlebot, with the crawler access check and a fetch from outside the network.
- Fix what the server sends: the facts in the HTML, not in scripts, images or PDFs.
- Settle one identity and describe it in business markup with the fields filled.
- Rewrite the first sentence under each question heading so it answers the question on its own.
- Set up a fixed panel and read it monthly, as setting up prompt monitoring describes.
Reporting GEO to a client who expects SEO reports
The report changes more than the work does. Rankings and sessions become the named, recommended and first rates by question type and assistant, share of voice against the businesses named instead, the wrong facts found, and the state of access. The seven GEO KPIs sets out each number, and GEO reporting for management puts them on one page. Keep the SEO report beside it; they measure different outputs of the same pages.
Common questions
Is GEO just SEO with a new name?
Much of the work is the same, and for Google's own AI features good SEO is most of it. The differences are real, though: more crawlers to let in, an output that is a sentence rather than a list, measurement by asking the same questions monthly, and mentions that matter whether or not they link. Treat it as SEO's work extended to a second kind of reader.
Does page speed matter for AI answers?
Nothing the assistants' operators publish says they use page-speed measures such as Core Web Vitals, and we have not measured it, so we make no claim. Page experience matters to the people who click through from an answer, and to Google Search. For being read by an assistant, what the server sends matters more than how fast it paints.
Should I still build links?
For search, yes; links still carry weight there. For answers, widen the aim to mentions: pages that name the business, linked or not, on sites the answers cite. A well-earned link is usually a mention too, so the two efforts overlap more than they compete.
Which tools carry over?
Crawlers, validators and log analysis carry over directly; point them at the assistants' user agents as well as Googlebot. Rank trackers do not, because there is no rank to track. What replaces them is a panel of questions and a reading of the answers, by hand or with a tool that keeps every answer verbatim.
Sources
The audit and probe figures are this site's own, from the article named below. What Google says of its AI features and of helpful content is from its own pages, linked where used.
Sources: our audit of 9,483 small-business sites, with its method · Google, AI features and your website · Google, creating helpful, reliable, people-first content · Google Search Central, optimizing for generative AI search
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