SEO vs GEO: what is the difference?

What stays the same

A page that Google cannot read will not appear in AI Overviews either. Google's condition is that a page is indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet in Search, and it sets no extra technical requirements on top of that. Bing writes something similar: Bing and the search features of Copilot use the same foundation for crawling, indexing and ranking.

So you do not throw your SEO work away. A site with clear pages, good internal links and text that sits directly in the HTML is the starting point for both.

Where they part ways

A high position is less of a sure route to a citation. In March 2026 Ahrefs found across 863,000 search results that 37.9 percent of the pages cited in AI Overviews also appeared in the first 10 results. In July 2025 Ahrefs still arrived at about 76 percent, with a different sample.

The signals are shifting too. Across 75,000 brands, mentions of the brand on the web correlated more strongly with visibility in AI Overviews (Spearman 0.664) than backlinks did (0.218). That is a correlation, so it does not prove that mentions are the cause. It is a reason to look beyond your link profile.

What you measure differently

With SEO you look at positions and clicks per search term. With GEO you put questions to AI tools and note whether your brand is named and whether your site appears as a source. Because those answers vary a lot, a single measurement says little. So measure in series.