GEO vs SEO: Where the Work Actually Differs

Treat Google's AI features as SEO. Google says the same best practices apply, so your first check is eligibility, not new markup.

Google says SEO best practices remain relevant for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that no additional requirements or special optimizations are needed to appear there.

A page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet to be a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Google adds no other technical requirement.

Google also says you do not need new machine readable files, AI text files or markup. It adds that there is no special schema.org structured data to add.

Google's 2026 guide for marketers says SEO matters for classic results and for AI Overviews and AI Mode alike. Meeting Google's technical requirements covers AI formats too.

The content bar is the same. Google's guide asks for unique, non-commodity content that visitors from Search and your own readers find helpful and satisfying.

Verdict: same work. Your classic SEO checks cover AI Overviews and AI Mode. Put the extra GEO effort into the parts Google does not cover: other assistants' bots and off-site mentions.

A top ranking does not guarantee a citation. Check which pages get cited for your own queries, not only where you rank.

Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use query fan-out. The system issues several related searches across subtopics and data sources to build one response.

One prompt can therefore trigger several retrievals. A page can lose a citation to a page that answers a sub-question your head term never targeted. That point is advice drawn from the mechanism, not a Google claim.

Ahrefs found that 37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also appeared in the first 10 SERP blocks. It found 31.2% ranked 11 to 100, and 31.0% ranked beyond the top 100.

Ahrefs also reports that the share of AI Overview citations drawn from the original SERP fell from about 76% in July 2025 to about 38%. Ahrefs reads this as Google selecting far fewer pages straight from the original SERP. That reading is the author's interpretation, so test it on your own queries.

An older Semrush study, from September 2024, found the top organic result in 46% of desktop and 34% of mobile AI Overviews. The same study put the overlap between AI Overview links and the organic top 10 at 20 to 26%. It used a different year and method, so do not set its figures beside Ahrefs' as a trend.

Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands found that the three strongest correlates of AI Overview brand visibility are all off-site: branded web mentions (0.664), branded anchors (0.527) and branded search volume (0.392). Backlinks correlate at 0.218. The authors warn that correlation is not causation.

A 2024 paper by researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, Allen AI and IIT Delhi, accepted at KDD 2024, tested this on a custom generative engine built on an LLM and on Perplexity.ai. Adding citations, quotations and statistics raised source visibility by over 40% across queries. Keyword stuffing gave little to no improvement.

The same paper's Cite Sources method raised visibility 115.1% for sites ranked fifth, while the top-ranked site's visibility fell 30.3% on average. The authors conclude that these methods help lower-ranked sites. Read these as 2024 results on older engines, and as a lab benchmark, not a forecast for your queries.

The paper also says traditional SEO methods are not directly applicable to generative engines, because those engines are not limited to keyword matching.

Verdict: different selection. Ranking still helps, but the studies above point to two other levers: sourced evidence inside the page, and brand mentions off the site.

Decide per vendor which bot you allow. Google is the exception, because one crawler controls access for both classic results and its AI features.

Googlebot controls access to Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google-Extended covers training and grounding in other Google systems only.

OpenAI splits access into three bots: OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, GPTBot for training, and ChatGPT-User for user actions. A site can allow OAI-SearchBot to appear in search results while it disallows GPTBot.

A site opted out of OAI-SearchBot is not shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it can still appear as a navigational link. OpenAI says a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to take effect for search.

ChatGPT-User handles user-initiated actions, so robots.txt rules may not apply to it. It does not decide whether your content appears in search.

Anthropic runs three bots: ClaudeBot for training, Claude-User for user requests, and Claude-SearchBot for search quality. Blocking Claude-SearchBot may reduce your visibility in user search answers.

Perplexity's PerplexityBot surfaces and links sites in Perplexity search. Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. Perplexity-User covers user actions.

Rendering is a separate check. In Vercel's 2024 analysis, none of the major AI crawlers rendered JavaScript, so content that appears only after scripts run may be invisible to them. Google's Gemini uses Googlebot's infrastructure, which renders JavaScript fully.

Vercel also found that ChatGPT's crawler requested JavaScript files in 11.50% of its requests and Claude's in 23.84%, but did not execute them.

Check each bot name in your robots.txt before you change anything. Then compare the rendered HTML with what a visitor sees, and move key text and links into the HTML itself.

Verdict: new work. It is small and checkable: one list of bots, one allow or block decision for each, and one rendering check per template.

Pick the metric before you pick a tool. A ranking, a click and an AI citation answer three separate questions.

Search Console does not separate AI results. Google reports AI Overview and AI Mode appearances in the Performance report under the Web search type, with no AI filter.

To count citations in Google's AI features, you need an AI tracking tool or manual prompt runs.

Clicks fall when an AI summary appears. In a March 2025 Pew panel of 900 US adults, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits with an AI summary and in 15% of visits without one.

Google says total organic click volume has been relatively stable year over year, while traffic shifts between sites.

Google also says clicks from pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, but it gives no figure for that. Its guide warns marketers against focusing too much on clicks instead of the overall value of their visits from Search.

AI answers change from run to run. SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai ran 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode in 2,961 runs during November and December 2025. The chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI returns the same brand list twice was under 1 in 100. Two lists in the same order appeared in about 1 in 1,000 runs.

The study was run with Gumshoe.ai, which sells AI tracking tools. It was not peer reviewed, so weigh it as a vendor study.

The study's author concludes that visibility percentage across dozens to hundreds of prompts, each run more than once, is a reasonable metric. The author rejects a ranking position in AI as a metric.

Across 142 survey responses, almost no two prompts were similar. The prompt set is the hard part of tracking, so build it once and keep it fixed before you compare results over time.

Track outcomes, not only sessions. On Ahrefs' own site, AI search visitors were 0.5% of visitors but drove 12.1% of signups. That is one site, so do not generalize it.

Bing publishes a first-party AI citation report, which Google does not. Its AI Performance report, in public preview since February 10, 2026, covers Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and select partner integrations.

Total Citations counts citations shown as sources, without placement. Grounding queries show a sample of citation activity. Bing calls the release an early step toward GEO tooling.

Since June 16, 2026, the preview also shows Citation Share: your citations as a percentage of all citations shown for the same grounding query.

Verdict: different measurement. Track visibility percentage over a fixed prompt set for AI answers. Track clicks and conversions for classic and AI-feature traffic. Do not report a ranking position in AI.

Budget prompt tracking as a new line, and compare plans on prompt count first.

Peec AI lists Starter at $95 a month for 50 prompts, Pro at $245 for 150 prompts and Advanced at $495 for 350 prompts.

Its AI answer quota multiplies prompts, models and check frequency. The Starter quota is 4,500 AI answers.

Semrush lists its SEO plan at $139 a month when billed monthly, and that plan includes AI visibility basics that monitor custom prompts. Its SEO + AI Search Starter plan costs $199 a month billed monthly, with 50 prompts tracked daily on one domain. Pro+ costs $299 a month for 100 prompts.

Ahrefs lists its Lite plan at $129 a month, Standard at $249 and Advanced at $449, as shown with monthly billing. Its AI tracking sits in Brand Radar, and the pricing page does not make the Brand Radar add-on price clear. Confirm that line before you budget for it.

Ahrefs also says its Brand Radar prompt tracking shows the fan-out queries AI generates behind the scenes, which helps you find content gaps.

Bing's AI Performance report sits inside Bing Webmaster Tools, and Bing's launch post does not state a price for it. Do not budget it as free.

The lowest-cost route is a fixed prompt list that you run by hand each month and log in a spreadsheet. The GEO tactics page explains that method in full, so use it before you pay for a tool.

Verdict: new budget line. Compare plans on prompt count first, then on what else each plan includes.

Settle who owns AI visibility before you set a budget, because surveys disagree on size and use different bases.

Conductor, a vendor, surveyed more than 250 senior executives who oversee AEO, GEO and SEO at enterprise organizations. It reported that enterprises put an average of 12% of digital marketing budgets into AEO and GEO in 2025, and that 94% plan to increase that investment in 2026.

Digiday reports a survey by Fractl, a content marketing and digital PR agency. SEO teams put 31% of their budgets into AI search visibility, and performance marketing teams put 32%. Content teams put 20%, and brand teams 21%, the lowest shares.

Sefiani, an agency, surveyed 150 senior marketing and communications leaders in Australia. Nearly half put 5% to 10% of their budgets into AI visibility, and a further 30% put as much as 20%. Sefiani says 90% of that spend is reallocated from traditional areas.

The same Sefiani survey found that 84% of Australian leaders disagree on who owns AI visibility. Only 16% say their organization takes an integrated approach. Responsibility sits across data and analytics, communications, brand, and digital or performance teams.

Do not put the 12% figure and the Digiday shares in one chart. Their bases differ, and neither is a benchmark for a small team.

The mention data in the Ahrefs study points the same way. Digital PR, community and brand work may count for more than link building in GEO. That is an inference from the correlation, not a finding of the study.

GEO work crosses PR, content and SEO, so assign it across those skills rather than to one discipline. No dated dataset on GEO job demand is available to cite, so treat skills as advice, not data.

Verdict: new budget line, no settled owner. Start with the team that already runs organic search, give GEO a named budget line inside it, and set the target from your own query data, not from a survey average.

Sort each dimension into one verdict before you plan the work.