GEO vs SEO
what actually changed, and what the category is selling you

Fourteen tactics below, each sorted into a box, each box carrying the source that puts it there.

What is generative engine optimization?

Generative engine optimization is the practice of making a page retrievable and quotable by systems that answer a question instead of returning a list of links. The work is getting fetched, getting read, and having something worth lifting.

What is answer engine optimization, and is it a different thing?

Answer engine optimization is the same discipline under a different name, and the terms are used interchangeably. Where a distinction gets drawn, AEO describes extraction into a direct answer and GEO describes synthesis into a generated one. Nobody applies that split consistently, and no platform uses either term in its own documentation. A proposal treating them as two services with two scopes is making a pricing decision, not a technical one.

Is GEO just SEO with a new name?

Substantially yes is not entirely yes, and the honest answer sorts every tactic into three boxes: same as SEO, genuinely new, and sold anyway.

Which GEO tactics are the same as SEO?

Everything that decides whether you are eligible at all. Google states it plainly: to be shown in generative AI features a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet, and there are no additional technical requirements.

The content half is the same too, and it is the half teams skip because it is harder. Google asks for content a generative model could not easily have produced itself, which is why original data beats commentary.

Here is what that looks like on this site. On 6 August 2026 the parent domain's homepage returned 5,179 bytes to GPTBot against an empty shell measured at 5,179 bytes on the same domain the same day, which is no body copy at all, while its blog index returned 34,123 bytes. Denominator in the sentence, instrument named, date attached. A model cannot synthesise those figures because they exist in one place, so anything needing them has to name the source. The adjectives around them could have come from anywhere. The numbers could not. The group's campaign figures work the same way and live on the properties that own them, which is why they are not restated here.

The consequence for our own commercial position is that a company already server rendered, indexed and publishing things nobody else has has very little GEO work left. We would rather write that than sell a retainer against it.

Which two things are genuinely new?

Two, and only two of them change what you do. The first is rendering, the only binary item in this field.

The AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript and Googlebot does. GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot read only the HTML in the first response, so a client rendered React or Vue site serves them an empty root element. The same site can pass every classic SEO check and be blank to ChatGPT.

Two smaller things are real and lower leverage. Per engine measurement, because citation sets barely overlap between surfaces and there is no single lever to pull. And entity corroboration, because retrieval resolves companies by agreement across sources rather than by reading your about page.

Which GEO tactics are sold without evidence?

The ones with a multiplier attached and no published method, plus four that platform documentation contradicts.

Will AI search reduce B2B organic traffic?

For some query types yes, for considered B2B purchases much less, and anyone showing you a clean traffic impact number is showing you a model, not a measurement. An informational query with a one line answer loses the click. A considered purchase evaluation starts at the assistant's answer rather than ending there.

No first party referral reporting exists for ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, and native app traffic frequently sends no referrer header, so those sessions land in analytics as direct. The number you can see is a floor.

One question this page deliberately does not answer is how to split budget between demand capture and demand generation. That is go to market math, not retrieval, and it belongs to the group's allbound strategy property. Two sentences is the whole of what we will say about it here, on purpose, because the fastest way to make four properties indistinguishable is to let each one drift into the others' subject.

Do you need a GEO agency?

Often not. Three cases where the answer is no, and this is the section that costs us money.

You are already server rendered, indexed, and publishing specific things. What remains is a day of schema and an afternoon of restructuring headings.

Your budget would buy one original dataset instead. One number nobody else has, published with its denominator and its method, outperforms twelve optimized articles.

Two cases where it is yes. You are failing gate one at scale with nobody in house owning the build path, which is a project with a deadline instead of a retainer. Or you need someone to hold the measurement discipline: a frozen query panel, the free Bing and Search Console reports switched on, and a refusal to report a number that moved for reasons nobody can name.

That second one matters to me because of where I learned it. On the outbound side every campaign runs against thresholds fixed before launch and expressed as positive replies divided by emails sent, so nobody has to argue about whether a thing is working after the fact. Those thresholds and their denominators are published by the group property that owns rate definitions. I have wanted the equivalent number for AI search visibility for a year and it does not exist, because nobody can measure citation against a denominator anyone agrees on. That absence is the single most important fact in this category and almost every proposal you receive will be written as though it were not true.

General SEO is not our category. Keyword research, backlink acquisition, local and ecommerce search are a different competitive set, and we stop here rather than gesturing at the boundary.

What would change our mind about any of this?

Two findings, named so you can hold this page to them. The rendering conclusion rests on one measurement, the Vercel and MERJ server log study from December 2024, which most 2026 sources re-cite instead of re-running. If a rigorous public re-test showed the major AI crawlers now execute JavaScript, box two item one collapses and this page changes within a week.