Is GEO a real discipline or SEO with a new name?
It is mostly SEO with a few new tasks, and how much is new depends on which AI tool you care about. Google is clear about its own products. Its guide to optimising for generative AI features, last updated 10 July 2026, says GEO and AEO are terms for work aimed at AI search, and that from Google Search's perspective, "optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."
Practitioners lean the same way. At BrightonSEO San Diego on 15 September 2026, Nicolas Rabouille, CEO of Rablab, had a talk billed with the claim that 95% of GEO is recycled SEO, with a short list of things worth reprioritising. In a September 2026 r/SEO thread from an intern asking whether SEO and GEO are worth learning in 2026, one commenter said in three separate replies that GEO is SEO from 2012. The Australian agency Dejan AI argues the term rests largely on one research paper and that SEO already covers the job.
Google's guide only speaks for Google. ChatGPT and Perplexity pick their own sources, and the data below shows they behave differently.
What did the 2023 GEO paper actually test?
The paper that named GEO tested small edits to pages that were already in a search engine's top five. GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Pranjal Aggarwal and five co-authors was first posted on 16 November 2023 and published in the KDD 2024 conference proceedings. The team built GEO-bench, 10,000 queries, and a test engine that fetched the top five Google results for each query and had GPT-3.5-turbo write an answer from them. They then rewrote one of those five sources at a time and measured how visible it became in the answer.
| Method | Overall position-adjusted word count (Table 1) | Change vs no edits, our arithmetic |
|---|---|---|
| No optimisation | 19.3 | baseline |
| Keyword stuffing | 17.7 | -8.3% |
| Authoritative tone | 21.3 | +10.4% |
| Fluency | 24.7 | +28.0% |
| Cite sources | 24.6 | +27.5% |
| Statistics addition | 25.2 | +30.6% |
| Quotation addition | 27.2 | +40.9% |
Three findings matter for the "is it just SEO" question:
- Keyword stuffing failed. Keyword stuffing did not help, and on Perplexity.ai it performed 10% worse than the baseline, the authors report.
- The winning edits are good editing. Adding sources, statistics and quotations is what a careful editor already asks for.
- Gains went to lower-ranked pages. Citing sources raised visibility 115.1% for the fifth-ranked result and cut it 30.3% for the top-ranked one.
The limit is in the setup: every page tested was already retrieved from Google's top five. The paper shows how to win inside an answer once you're in the source set. Getting into the set is still retrieval, which is SEO. The tests also used GPT-3.5-turbo and an earlier version of Perplexity, not today's ChatGPT.
How closely do Google rankings predict AI citations?
Closely for Google's AI Overviews, loosely for ChatGPT. Ahrefs has measured both:
| AI surface | Cited pages in Google's top 10 | Study |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | 76.10% (86% within the top 100) | 1.9 million citations from 1 million AI Overviews, July 2025 |
| Perplexity | 28.6% | 15,000 long-tail prompts, August 2025 |
| ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot | Around 8%; Ahrefs' 12% headline is the average across all four assistants, Perplexity included | Same 15,000 prompts |
The AI Overview study found the primary cited URL had a median Google rank of 2. The assistant study, published 11 August 2025 and updated in May 2026, compared citations with Google's top 10 for the user's original prompt. Ahrefs' explanation is query fan-out: assistants search several variations of the question, so cited pages often rank for queries the user never typed.
OpenAI describes the same mechanism. Its help page on ChatGPT search says ChatGPT typically rewrites a question into one or more targeted queries sent to search partners. So when ChatGPT searches, it still works from search results. It searches different strings from the ones in your rank tracker.
A practical check for one buyer question: run it in ChatGPT with search on, open each cited page, and note the topic its title targets. If those topics are shorter or narrower than the keywords you track, add them to your keyword list. That is ordinary keyword research, pointed at the queries an assistant runs instead of the ones a person types.
What is actually new in GEO?
Four tasks are new or carry new weight. In our view each is worth about an hour a month for a small team:
Prompt testing instead of rank tracking
No assistant publishes a ranking. You ask the questions buyers ask, several times, and log who gets named and which URLs are cited. Our prompt test for getting onto ChatGPT's shortlist has eight prompts to copy.
Covering the questions behind the question
Fan-out means a page can be cited for a sub-question. Answer the sub-questions on the pages you already have. Google's guide warns against creating separate content for every fan-out variation mainly to manipulate rankings or AI answers.
Third-party mentions
When an assistant builds a shortlist, it often cites other sites' lists. In Overthink Group's June 2026 test of 1,263 B2B software prompts, 70.8% of citations had best, top or similar in the title. Being named on those lists is closer to PR than to on-page SEO.
Checking each engine separately
Ahrefs' numbers above differ by assistant: Perplexity's 28.6% is more than three times the roughly 8% Ahrefs reports for the other assistants. Report each tool on its own line.
One technical item also changed. Each AI company runs its own crawler. OpenAI's crawler page says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and that this setting is separate from GPTBot, which covers training.
Which GEO tactics are just SEO, or not needed?
Most of what is sold as GEO is either standard SEO or, for Google at least, unnecessary. Google's guide has a section called mythbusting that lists what you don't need to do. Set against common GEO advice:
| GEO advice | Google's July 2026 guide, in short | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Add an llms.txt file | Google Search ignores it; it neither helps nor harms | Skip for Google |
| Chunk content into small pieces | No requirement; Google can understand multiple topics on a page | Write for readers |
| Rewrite pages in a special AI style | Not needed; AI systems understand synonyms and meaning | Skip |
| Add special schema for AI | Structured data isn't required and there's no special markup, but keep using it for SEO | Plain SEO |
| Buy or seed mentions | Seeking inauthentic mentions isn't as helpful as it might seem | Earn real ones |
| Write unique, first-hand content | Likely to matter more than anything else in the guide | Plain SEO, and the most useful |
The guide also says pages must be indexed and eligible for a snippet to appear in Google's AI features, and points site owners to a Generative AI performance report in Search Console to measure them. Our evidence review of llms.txt covers the file in more detail, including the cases where it is useful outside Google.
How should a small team split its time between SEO and GEO?
Keep most of the time on SEO and add a short monthly GEO routine on top. That split is our suggestion, based on the evidence above: Google's AI answers mostly cite pages that already rank, and ChatGPT's answers draw on search results for related queries.
| Task | Bucket | When |
|---|---|---|
| Write pages with first-hand detail, sources and numbers | SEO (and the GEO paper's winning edits) | Every page |
| Fix indexing, crawl and snippet eligibility | SEO | Monthly check in Search Console |
| Run 8 buyer prompts three times in ChatGPT and Perplexity | GEO | Monthly |
| Add answers to sub-questions the prompt test surfaces | GEO | Monthly |
| Ask list authors to include you | GEO (PR) | When the test shows a gap |
| Check AI referral traffic and signups | Both | Monthly |
The last row matters most. In a September 2026 r/SEO thread, a poster with close to 15 years in the industry said clients were getting more exposure in AI responses and search results but close to zero conversions. Visibility you can't tie to signups is hard to justify. Our guide to tracking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude traffic in GA4 shows how to separate it.
For the writing itself, Siela's SEO Blog Writer checks search volume, cost per click, the top 10 Google results and People Also Ask before it drafts, so each post starts from what already ranks.
Frequently asked questions
Does Google treat GEO differently from SEO?
No. Google's guide to its generative AI features, last updated 10 July 2026, says optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience and is still SEO. It says pages need to be indexed and eligible for a snippet, and that llms.txt files, chunking and special schema are not needed for Google's AI features.
Who wrote the original GEO paper?
Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande. It was first posted to arXiv on 16 November 2023, revised in June 2024, and appeared at the KDD conference in August 2024. It introduced GEO-bench, a set of 10,000 queries, and tested edits such as adding quotations, statistics and sources.
Does ranking first on Google get me cited by ChatGPT?
It helps less than it does for Google's own AI Overviews. In Ahrefs' study of 15,000 prompts, around 8% of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt (12% across four assistants, Perplexity included), while 76.10% of AI Overview citations came from top-10 pages in a separate Ahrefs study of 1.9 million citations.
Does keyword stuffing work for AI search?
Not in the GEO paper's tests. Adding more keywords lowered a page's position-adjusted visibility from 19.3 to 17.7 on the authors' benchmark, and on Perplexity.ai it performed 10% worse than doing nothing. Quotation and statistics additions did best in the authors' own test engine, about 41% and 31% above the no-edit baseline in Table 1, with cited sources and fluency edits close behind at about 28%.
Is it worth paying for a GEO agency?
Check what the retainer covers first. If most of it is llms.txt files, chunking or special schema, Google says it doesn't need those for its AI features. Useful GEO work looks like a fixed prompt test across several AI tools, a log of cited URLs, outreach to the sites that get cited, and better pages on topics you already rank for.
Sources
- Google Search Central: Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search (last updated 10 Jul 2026)
- BrightonSEO San Diego 2026: Your ranking socks, 95% of GEO is recycled SEO (Nicolas Rabouille) (talk on 15 Sep 2026, checked 24 Oct 2026)
- r/SEO: Is it worth it to start learning SEO/GEO 2026? (16 Sep 2026, read via archive 24 Oct 2026)
- Dejan AI: What is GEO? (checked 24 Oct 2026)
- Aggarwal et al.: GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (arXiv 2311.09735v3) (first posted 16 Nov 2023, v3 28 Jun 2024)
- Ahrefs: 76% of AI Overview citations pull from the top 10 (21 Jul 2025, updated 2 Jul 2026)
- Ahrefs: Only 12% of AI cited URLs rank in Google's top 10 for the original prompt (11 Aug 2025, updated 31 May 2026)
- OpenAI Help: Searching the web with ChatGPT (checked 24 Oct 2026)
- OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers (checked 24 Oct 2026)
- r/SEO: DAE feel like SEO/GEO/AEO is slowly just becoming theatrics at this point? (29 Sep 2026, read via archive 24 Oct 2026)
- Overthink Group: We analyzed 1,260 prompts to see who's winning AEO in B2B SaaS (14 Jul 2026)