You’ve probably heard the term “GEO” thrown around a lot recently – usually right next to “SEO,” as if the two are interchangeable.
They’re not. And if you’re currently trying to work out whether you need an SEO agency, a GEO agency, or something else entirely, the confusion is understandable. Most agencies haven’t caught up either.
Here’s the short version: SEO gets you found on Google. GEO gets you recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. In fact, 61% of buyers now use AI search alongside Google in tandem – so increasingly, businesses need both. But not every agency actually knows how to deliver both, and not every business is at the stage where both matter equally yet.
This guide breaks down exactly what separates an SEO agency from a GEO agency, where the lines blur, what real results from doing both properly look like, and how to work out which one (or both) your business actually needs right now.
| Quick tip SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) improves a website’s visibility in Google’s organic results. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) improves a brand’s visibility and citation rate inside AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. SEO earns a place in a list of results; GEO earns a mention inside a generated answer. Most growing businesses now need both, delivered by a team that can prove results in each. |
What this guide covers:
- The real difference between SEO and GEO – and why ranking on Google no longer guarantees you show up in ChatGPT or AI Overviews
- What actually separates an SEO agency, a GEO agency, and an AEO agency (the labels are messy – the substance isn’t)
- A 60-second self-assessment to work out whether you need SEO, GEO, or both right now
- Real results from an integrated SEO + GEO programme – named clients, specific numbers, not anonymised case studies
- Five practical questions (plus one technical check) to ask before hiring any agency claiming to do GEO work
- How to get cited in AI overviews, ChatGPT, and other AI channels
- How Burst Digital can help you achieve your SEO and GEO goals
- Answers to the most common questions people ask about SEO vs. GEO
| Not sure if you need SEO or GEO? We’ll check both – your Google rankings and your AI search visibility – in one free review. → Get My Free Review |
What Is GEO? (Generative Engine Optimisation)
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation – sometimes called AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) or AI Search Optimisation, depending on who you ask.
They all describe roughly the same thing: the practice of making your brand visible and quotable inside AI-generated answers, rather than just visible in a list of blue links.
When someone asks ChatGPT “what’s the best CRM for a small sales team,” or asks Google’s AI Overview “how much does a website redesign cost,” an AI model generates a direct answer – often without the person ever clicking through to a website.
GEO is about making sure your business is one of the sources that answer draws from, and ideally, one of the names it actually mentions.
Traditional SEO was built around a different idea: rank a page highly enough on Google’s results page that a human clicks it.
GEO assumes the human might never click anything at all – the AI has already done the summarising for them. If your brand isn’t part of what the AI already “knows” and trusts, you don’t get a mention, no matter how well you’d have ranked on page one five years ago.
This is a genuinely new discipline, not a rebrand of SEO. It involves things classic SEO never had to think about: how consistently your brand is described across the web (your website, Wikipedia, review sites, directories), whether AI systems can find clean, quotable facts about you, and how often independent sources back up what you say about yourself.
We’ve gone deeper into the specific tactics that move the needle in how to get cited in AI search – worth a read if you want the practical playbook rather than just the theory.
SEO vs. GEO: What’s Actually Different
It’s easiest to see the difference side by side.
| Metric | SEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank highly in Google’s organic results | Get cited or recommended inside AI-generated answers |
| Success metric | Rankings, organic clicks, traffic | AI mentions, citation rate, share of voice in AI answers |
| Core mechanic | Keywords, backlinks, on-page optimisation, technical crawlability | Consistent facts, structured content, third-party validation, being “quotable” |
| Where it shows up | Google, Bing search results pages | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini |
| Content style that wins | Comprehensive, keyword-targeted, well-linked | Clear, direct, fact-dense, easy to extract and summarise |
| Timeframe to see results | Weeks to months | Can shift faster, but is less stable and harder to measure |
The two aren’t in competition – they’re solving different problems that happen to look similar from a distance. SEO is about earning a place in a list. GEO is about earning a place in a sentence. They work hand-in-hand: GEO cannot exist without a foundation of SEO.
Here’s the part that surprises most people: you can rank on page one of Google and still be completely invisible in AI search.
The overlap between the two has been shrinking. A page that satisfies Google’s ranking algorithm doesn’t automatically satisfy what an AI model needs to trust and cite it. That gap is exactly why “SEO agency” and “GEO agency” have started to mean genuinely different things, even when the same team is capable of both.
SEO Agency vs. GEO Agency vs. AEO Agency: How to Tell Them Apart
The terminology hasn’t settled yet, and that’s part of why this space feels confusing. Here’s what you’re actually looking at when you see each label:
- An SEO agency focuses on traditional organic search: keyword research, technical audits, content optimisation, link building, and improving your Google rankings over time. This is mature, well-understood work with established best practices.
- A GEO agency focuses specifically on AI search platforms – ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews. The work looks different: auditing how consistently your brand is described across the web, structuring content so it’s easy for an AI to extract and quote, and monitoring whether you’re actually showing up when someone asks an AI a question relevant to your business.
- An AEO agency (“Answer Engine Optimisation”) is essentially describing the same territory as GEO – the terms are used almost interchangeably right now, though AEO sometimes leans slightly more toward optimising for direct-answer features like featured snippets and voice search, while GEO leans toward the newer generative AI platforms specifically.
In practice, the safest way to evaluate any agency using these labels is to ignore the label and ask what they actually measure. If an agency can only show you Google rankings and traffic, they’re an SEO agency – useful, but not equipped for the AI search side of things. If they can show you actual citation checks across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, they’re doing real GEO work, whatever they call themselves.
See how Burst Digital has helped brands with SEO and GEO →
Do You Need an SEO Agency, a GEO Agency, or Both? A 60-Second Self-Assessment
This is genuinely the question that matters, and the honest answer depends on where your business is right now. Run through the checklists below – whichever one you tick the most boxes in tells you where to start.
You probably need SEO first if:
- You don’t yet rank for your core commercial terms on Google
- Most of your traffic and leads still don’t come from organic search clicks
- You haven’t built the foundational content and technical base a site needs
You probably need GEO now, alongside SEO, if:
- Your buyers are the kind of people who ask ChatGPT or Perplexity research questions before they ever open Google
- You’re in a B2B or considered-purchase category where AI-assisted research is already common – this is especially true if you’re targeting other businesses; we’ve written specifically about SEO for B2B Businesses if that’s your situation, since B2B buying cycles are exactly where AI-assisted research has taken hold fastest
- You’ve noticed competitors getting mentioned by name when you ask AI tools about your own category, and you aren’t
You need both, done well, if:
You’re a growing business that wants to compete for both today’s Google traffic and tomorrow’s AI-driven recommendations – which, realistically, describes most businesses, regardless of industry. The two disciplines share a foundation (clear, well-structured, genuinely useful content) but diverge in execution. An agency that only understands one half of that is only solving half the problem.
What Integrated SEO + GEO Actually Delivers – Real Results by Burst Digital
Generic case studies are worse than useless because they describe outcomes without context. Here are two real ones.
Artisan – B2B SaaS / AI Technology
Challenge: build a digital presence capable of supporting a $11.5M Series A fundraise and the enterprise sales process that followed. Not a traffic exercise – a commercial infrastructure build. View Artisan case study →
Approach: brand identity, web design, SEO, GEO, social media, and pitch deck design delivered under one strategy. The GEO layer was built from the ground up – entity signals, structured content, AI crawler access, and a prompt tracking programme across seven platforms to monitor and improve citation frequency.
Result: Artisan grew from $11.5M Series A to a $150M valuation. 10,000+ AI mentions generated. 636 AI-indexed pages. Consistent ChatGPT visibility for target category queries – the company appears when buyers ask AI for recommendations in their market.
Cogency Global – B2B Legal & Corporate Services
Challenge: build an inbound pipeline through organic search for corporate compliance and legal services across 50 US states. High-value, long sales cycle, technically complex subject matter. View Cogency Global case study →
Approach: SEO, GEO, and social media strategy designed specifically to generate qualified inbound leads from legal and compliance professionals. Content architecture mapped to the buyer journey across all 50 state markets. Technical foundations built for both Google and AI platform visibility.
Result: 594% increase in conversions. Organic traffic became a primary pipeline channel rather than a vanity metric.
How to Choose the Right SEO or GEO Agency
A few practical questions worth asking before you commit to any agency, regardless of which label they use:
- Can they show you real evidence of AI citations, not just Google rankings? Ask them to demonstrate – live, on the call – whether a client of theirs shows up when you ask ChatGPT or Perplexity a relevant question. If they can’t do this, they’re not actually doing GEO work yet, whatever’s on their homepage.
- Do they understand your industry’s actual buyer behaviour? A generic “we do SEO and GEO” pitch is worth less than an agency that can speak specifically to how people in your category actually search and research.
- Are they measuring the right things? Traffic and rankings alone won’t tell you anything about AI visibility. Ask what they track for citation rate, mention frequency, and accuracy of how AI systems describe your business.
- Do they have a broader view of the market, not just their own service? If you’re still weighing up options, it’s worth looking at a wider set of agencies before deciding – we’ve rounded up some of the Best Digital Marketing Agencies in the UK if you want a broader comparison beyond SEO/GEO specialists specifically.
- Will they tell you if you don’t need GEO yet? This matters more than it sounds. If your business doesn’t have the SEO foundation in place, an agency pushing you straight into GEO work before you’ve earned basic Google visibility is prioritising the sale over your actual results.
| Quick technical check: can AI even see your site? Before you hire anyone, check your own robots.txt file. If GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot are blocked, ChatGPT and Perplexity cannot crawl, cite, or recommend you – no matter how good the content is. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt and search for those names. If there’s a Disallow rule against any of them, that’s the fix to make before any content work starts. Sound too complicated? We can do this for you. |
Working With a Specialist
If you’ve read this far, you understand the shape of the decision: SEO earns you a place in Google’s results, GEO earns you a mention inside AI-generated answers, and most growing businesses need a plan for both – not a choice between them.
Burst Digital is a research-led digital marketing agency in London and New York. What we do differently from a standard SEO retainer:
- Integrated SEO + GEO delivery – the same senior team runs the technical audit, the content strategy, and the AI citation tracking. No handoff between three separate specialists.
- Prompt tracking across seven AI platforms – we measure your AI citation frequency as a primary metric alongside traditional rankings, so you can see your visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews improving month by month.
- Named results, not anonymised case studies – not “a B2B SaaS client” but Artisan, $11.5M to a $150M valuation. Not “a professional services firm” but Cogency Global, a 594% increase in conversions.
- Senior team throughout – the same people who audit your site write the content and present the results. No handoff to a junior team after sign-off.
Find out whether you need SEO, GEO, or both.
Start with a free marketing review → – we’ll audit your current rankings and your AI search visibility, and give you a clear, honest answer. No commitment, no pitch deck.
Frequently Asked Questions
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the practice of improving a website’s visibility in traditional search engine results, like Google. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the practice of improving a brand’s visibility and citation rate inside AI-generated answers, like those from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. SEO earns you a place in a list of results; GEO earns you a mention inside a generated answer.
No. GEO is a complementary discipline, not a replacement. Google search still drives significant traffic for most businesses, and the two disciplines share a lot of the same foundational work – clear, well-structured, trustworthy content. The businesses winning right now are the ones treating GEO as an addition to SEO, not a substitute for it.
Not exactly – think of GEO as a new, related discipline that’s grown alongside SEO rather than replaced it. The skills overlap, but the tactics, platforms, and success metrics are different enough that they need to be treated as two distinct (if connected) areas of expertise.
In this context, GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation – not to be confused with “geo-targeting” or geographic SEO, which is an unrelated, older use of the same acronym. Context usually makes it clear which one is meant, but it’s a common source of confusion when researching the term.
Not necessarily. Some agencies genuinely do both well – the key is verifying that any agency claiming to do GEO can actually demonstrate real AI citation results, not just Google rankings. If an agency can only speak to traditional SEO metrics, you may need a specialist GEO partner alongside them, at least until the wider industry catches up.
The most direct method is to manually search your brand and your core service queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini – for example, “best [your service] agency in [your city].” Note whether you appear, and who does instead. Also check your robots.txt file to confirm GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot aren’t blocked – if they are, you’re invisible in AI search regardless of how good your content is.
