SEO vs. GEO: From Links to Logic

Imagine walking into a massive library with a specific, complex question.

You approach the first librarian. They nod, walk to a shelf, pull down ten books, and hand them to you in a stack. “The answer is likely in one of these,” they say. “Good luck finding it.”

You approach the second librarian. They pause for a moment, speed-read the five most relevant chapters from the best books on the shelf, synthesize the information, and recite the exact answer to you, citing the specific authors who provided the data.

Plot twist: The first librarian is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The second librarian is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).

For the last twenty years, digital marketers have taken their cues from that first librarian, ensuring they optimized headers, built backlinks, and sped up servers so their book made the cut.

But if the second librarian can do what the first librarian did — only faster, with more precision and accuracy, and less effort, how do marketers get into its good books?

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at these two marketing disciplines to assess their similarities, differences, and what this change means for digital marketing. 

SEO vs. GEO: Understanding the New Search Landscape 

Search engine optimization is so essential that it’s now a foundational building block of online marketing strategies. 

That means AI search and its SEO analogue, generative engine optimization, stand on the shoulders of this robust base and advance the overall mission of organic search. This naturally evolving relationship is why we need to understand how GEO influences different stages of the buyer journey today. 

Understanding the similarities and differences between SEO and GEO is critical because search is constantly evolving. But, before we get into it, here’s a quick refresh.

SEO: 

• Is the strategic practice of optimizing your website to rank higher on traditional search engines like Google and Bing. 
• Centers on keywords, quality backlinks, and technical performance to help your pages surface in search results. 
• Is measured through familiar metrics such as click-through rates, bounce rates, and time on page.
• Results in a linear user journey — search → click → evaluate — with the competitive landscape shifting predictably based on four to five major algorithm updates per year.

GEO:

• Gets content cited within AI-generated responses from platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. 
• Focuses on strategies and techniques that would inform an answer.
• Requires integrative content that’s rich with citations, statistics, and contextual depth that AI models can synthesize. 
• Results in a dramatically compressed user path: prompt → AI selects solution → confirm → buy.

We’re witnessing the decoupling of search behaviour and search engines. 

In other words, people are using various tools, including increasingly AI-driven platforms, to find the information they need.

According to recent data from Ahrefs, traditional organic search traffic dropped 21% last year for the average website. Meanwhile, traffic referred by AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini increased 9.7 times over the same period.

On the surface, this appears to be a crisis. But the volume of human curiosity hasn’t decreased; it’s simply migrated from a mechanism of retrieval (finding links) to a mechanism of synthesis (finding answers).

SEO and Traditional Search: The “Top of Funnel” Awareness Engine

Let’s be clear: SEO is not dead. If you’re abandoning traditional search, you’re abandoning the single largest source of discovery on the internet.

Despite the explosive growth of LLMs, Google still refers 210x more raw traffic to the open web than the “Big Three” AI platforms combined. If your goal is to achieve mass awareness, fill your retargeting pool, or capture users in the early “browsing” phase, traditional SEO remains the most efficient engine for volume.

However, the click-through rate impact is real. With the maturity of Google’s AI Overviews (AIO), the “easy” clicks — definitions, quick facts, simple comparisons — are being satisfied directly on the SERP. The clicks that remain are harder to earn.

GEO and AI Search: The “Bottom of Funnel” Decision Engine

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of creating and structuring content to maximize visibility, citations, and positive sentiment within the outputs of Generative AI.

While SEO focuses on ranking a URL, GEO focuses on informing an answer across tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. This demands content that integrates credible sources, hard data, and real context in ways AI systems can reliably interpret and reuse.

“SEO is your space: your website, blog, technical optimization, etc. GEO is all that stuff plus external influences. We don’t really optimize for generative engines; we influence them. A successful GEO strategy shapes the data layer that trains and informs large language models.”

James Scherer, VP of Strategy at Foundation

AI is accelerating the zero-click phenomenon that’s plagued SEOs and digital marketers for years. A successful GEO outcome might mean a user asks ChatGPT about your brand, gets a perfect answer, and decides to buy — without ever visiting your blog.

So, how should businesses weigh their investment in these two disciplines? The answer lies in conversion economics.

How Should Businesses Think About SEO vs GEO?

For C-Suites that have historically been quick to cut marketing budgets, the hesitation to invest in GEO often comes down to one question: “If AI sends less traffic, why should I invest budget into it?”

The answer lies in an emerging paradox between search volume and search value.

The Conversion Paradox: Volume vs. Value

While AI platforms send significantly less traffic than Google, data suggests that the traffic they do send is superior.

In a study, Ahrefs analyzed their own data and found a stunning efficiency gap. AI search accounted for only 0.5% of their total traffic — a rounding error by traditional standards. But that tiny sliver of traffic drove 12.1% of all new signups.

Now, will that 23x increase in the AI conversion rate over traditional search visitors apply to everyone? Unlikely. As Ahrefs’ own Ryan Law says, “These CTRs are probably the highest they’ll ever be,” and that’s thanks to the novelty of AI search formats. 

Yet, with Microsoft, Semrush, and others also reporting higher CTRs, there’s clearly something about the AI search format that compels users toward its adoption. And it all comes down to intent. 

When a user types “CRM software” into Google, they’re starting a research project. They’re opening five tabs, reading headlines, and browsing.

When a user prompts ChatGPT with “Compare Salesforce vs. HubSpot for a 50-person startup focused on outbound sales,” they’re asking for more than outputting results — they’re looking for AI to support their decision-making by providing the answer:

“Pick Hubspot if…”

“Pick Salesforce if…”

LLMs go beyond traditional search intent behaviour because they return highly specific contexts and then help users draw a clear conclusion.

The AI processes the features, pricing, and reviews, and delivers information that leads users to a logical conclusion. While users can click any of the citation links in that response, the LLM has also analyzed these highly specific recommendations and serves them up on a platter.

Of course, getting your brand mentioned in an LLM response starts long before the answer is generated — by consistently investing in content across key channels like the web, Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

For the enterprise leader, the math is simple (though you do need to shift your approach to tracking and measurement): You can afford to lose 20% of your low-intent generic traffic if you gain 5% of this high-intent AI traffic.

The New Metrics of Success

The biggest barrier to GEO adoption is the breakdown of traditional attribution models. 

Your CFO still wants to see multi-touch attribution in Google Analytics. Now that was already difficult to prove in SEO. To prove the ROI of GEO, you need to do the legwork across each and every channel and platform cited by AI.

As James Scherer notes: “Multi-touch attribution breaks down when the ‘touch’ happens outside your ecosystem. GEO operates in zero-click environments like ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Reddit threads. You can’t track user behaviour on platforms you don’t own, but that doesn’t mean the influence isn’t real.”

If Slack DMs, WhatsApp groups, and other referrals that are often misattributed count as “dark” social, then GEO is “dark search”. To track and harness it for marketing strategies, brands need fresh, innovative ways of measuring GEO performance.

1. Visibility (“Do they see me?”): 

• Share of model (SoM): The percentage of times your brand appears in responses to category prompts (e.g., “Best Enterprise ERP”).
• Generative position: Are you the first recommendation, or are you listed in the “Other Options” footer?
• Query coverage: Do you appear for the long-tail “fan-out” queries the AI generates?

2. Trust (“Do they cite me?”)

• Citation frequency: How often is your domain linked as the source of truth?
• Source authority: Is the AI citing your website, or is it citing a G2 review about you?

3. Sentiment (“Do they like me?”)

• Sentiment score: Is the context positive (“Best value”) or negative (“Expensive and buggy”)?
• Hallucination rate: Is the AI inventing fake pricing or features? (This is a critical brand safety metric.)

If the upside isn’t enough to motivate investment, think about the opportunity cost of your brand being months (or years) behind competitors in creating content that drives AI visibility.

Ross Simmonds, our fearless leader here at Foundation, frames GEO as an infrastructure investment: 

“Think of GEO as building ‘GEO-aware infrastructure.’ It requires accepting that influence can’t always be measured in dollars, but absence will definitely be felt in decline. If you aren’t one of the trusted sources, you’re invisible in this new search ecosystem.”

If your competitor becomes the default answer in ChatGPT for your category, how many leads will you lose before the buyer even realizes you exist?

The Mechanics of Influence: How to Show Up in the AI 

The economics are clear, but how do we actually move the needle? How do we convince a probabilistic model to cite our brand?

The Science of Citation: How LLMs Choose Winners

Unlike Google, which uses PageRank and backlinks as proxies for authority, LLMs look for information gain and consensus.

A study from Princeton and the Allen Institute for AI analyzed nine different optimization tactics to determine what factors influence LLM outputs. They found that keyword stuffing had almost zero impact.

However, content that utilized citations, direct quotations, and statistics improved visibility by up to 40%.

The “Citation Flattening” Effect

This leads to one of the most encouraging findings for challenger brands. In traditional SEO, the winner takes all. The #1 result captures 30% of the clicks, while the #10 result starves at just 2%.

In GEO, the curve flattens.

Data from Profound shows that a page ranking in position 10 on the Google SERP often has a 4% citation rate in ChatGPT, which is higher than the human click-through rate for that position.

This means you do not need to fight the never-ending battle for the spot of #1 keyword ranking. 

You do need to strategize for the recognition of “Best Structured Answer” by the LLM.

Optimizing for the Data Layer

To win at GEO, you must stop thinking about your website as the center of the universe. In the eyes of an LLM, your website is just one node in a massive data layer.

To dominate “Share of Model,” you must take a structured approach that optimizes three distinct layers of data.

1) The Authenticity Layer (Reddit & Forums)

This is the most significant shift in search behaviour in a decade. LLMs have been trained to view User-Generated Content (UGC) as a proxy for “authentic human experience.”

• The Data: According to SimilarWeb, Reddit is now the #1 source of citations for Perplexity and the #2 source for ChatGPT.
• The Implication: You can’t ignore Reddit. If you aren’t there, the AI assumes you aren’t relevant.

Case Study: A Foundation client in the Financial Services sector realized that competitors were dominating the “kingmaker” threads (the Reddit threads that rank #1 on Google for their keywords). By implementing a strategy to authentically engage in these threads — answering questions, correcting data, and providing value — they increased their mention rate from 12% to 73% in three months.

The Tactics:

1. Identify the “Kingmaker” threads for your keywords.
2. Do not use bots or marketing speak.
3. Have subject matter experts engage to answer questions.
4. The goal is not a link; the goal is to be part of the text corpus.

2) The Reference Layer (Media & Reviews)

LLMs rely heavily on “consensus.” If your website claims you are the best, but G2 and Capterra rate you as mediocre, the AI will likely cite the reviews.

• The Strategy: Digital PR for GEO is not about getting a link from the New York Times. It is about getting cited in the “Best Of” listicles that currently rank in the top 10 results.
• The Tactics: Use tools like Semrush or Profound to identify which third-party URLs are feeding the AI for your keywords. Reach out to those publishers to update your pricing, features, or positioning.

3) Owned Media Layer (The Source of Truth)

Finally, you need to optimize your own domain. This is the stage that fits most closely with the SEO your brand is already doing, just with a few adjustments. 

If your content is structured with clearer data, better schema, and more direct logic than the #1 result, the AI is likely to extract your answer over theirs.

Ross Simmonds explains the necessary pivot: “What’s winning in SEO today isn’t automatically winning in AI search. AI doesn’t reward the mystery and the fluff. It rewards content that’s clear, structured, and gives direct answers upfront. You need to write for how AI reads.”

One method Ross recommends for improved AI visibility is the “Inverted Pyramid” Writing Framework:

1. The Direct Answer: The first 50 words of any “Money Page” must directly answer the core user query. No fluff.
2. The Data Sandwich: Immediately follow the answer with a table, list, or hard statistic. This acts as a “trust anchor” for the model.
3. The Context: Only after the answer and data are established should you provide the methodology and storytelling.

Evolving Your SEO Strategy for GEO-Readiness

Understanding the theory is one thing. Building the machine to execute it is another.

For enterprise leaders looking to operationalize this quickly, here’s a 90-day implementation plan to update your SEO strategy for the GEO era. 

Month 1: Audit & Baseline

• Define Golden Prompts: Identify the top 20 questions your high-intent buyers ask. Focus on “Bottom of Funnel” modifiers (Best, Top, Vs, Alternatives).
• The Incognito Test: Run these prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Establish your baseline Share of Model (SoM).
• Schema Audit: Ensure your Organization and Product schema are error-free.

Month 2: Restructure & Fix

• Money Page Optimization: Rewrite the introductions of your top 10 converting pages using the “Inverted Pyramid” framework.
• Hallucination Cleanup: Identify where the AI is citing incorrect pricing or features. Use Schema and Digital PR to correct the record.

Month 3: Expand & Influence

• Launch Authenticity Strategy: Begin engagement on high-priority Reddit threads.
• Digital PR Wave: Target the top 50 third-party URLs that are driving citations in your category. Update your presence there.

During this time, you also need to determine which marketing function is responsible for GEO. As you’ve learned throughout this post, it sits at the intersection of SEO, Content, and Public Relations.

If you’re hiring or issuing a GEO RFP for an agency, look for these specific roles:

• The Strategist: Owns the metrics (SoM, Sentiment). Understands that “rankings” don’t matter if the AI hallucinates the price.
• The Technical Lead: A master of Entity SEO and Schema Markup.
• The Community Manager: Someone who understands the culture of Reddit and can engage without damaging the brand.

While we’re on the subject, a word of warning: avoid agencies that promise “Guaranteed AI Rankings.” The volatility of AI models (with a 40–60% monthly citation drift, as Profound data shows) makes such guarantees meaningless. Look for partners who track trends in visibility, not static positions.

The Future of Search Is “Hybrid”: Start Influencing It Now

The rise of Generative AI does not mean the death of SEO. It means the maturation of it.

We’re entering a hybrid future.

• SEO captures the browser looking for options.
• GEO captures the buyer looking for answers.

The teams who win in 2026 won’t be the ones who choose one over the other. They’ll be the ones who build a robust knowledge infrastructure that serves both.

As Ross Simmonds summarized: “Don’t just build content for people; start marketing to the machines that decide for them.”

Search is becoming increasingly fragmented. Strategize and become a part of the consensus, or remain invisible and become obsolete. The choice is yours.

Ready to audit your visibility in the age of AI? Get in touch with the leading AI search and GEO agency today.