GEO (generative engine optimization, also called AEO) is the work of getting your brand mentioned, cited, and recommended inside AI answers. SEO is the work of ranking pages in a list of links. They share foundations, they are measured on different layers with different signals, and most brands that care about one end up needing both.
Published 30 July 2026 by Creative Data Engineers.
GEO is the craft of making a brand appear inside AI-generated answers from products such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. It is measured on the answer layer: how often those answers mention, cite, or recommend the brand across a fixed set of buyer questions, tracked per market and per model.
SEO is the older, adjacent craft: earning positions in the ranked list of links a search engine returns. The two meet underneath, because AI answers are assembled from sources that already rank. A brand can rank well and still be absent from AI answers, and that gap is exactly what GEO measures and works on. The mechanics of how an answer gets assembled are on our how it works page.
The foundation is identical, which is why good SEO work is never wasted on the AI side. Both crafts need:
If your SEO house is in order, you start GEO from a better position. If it is a mess, the AI layer inherits the mess.
Four differences carry most of the distinction. Each one changes what you measure and what you do about it.
SEO reports a position in a list of links. GEO reads the answer itself: is the brand present, in what role, and with what wording. A #1 ranking and an absent mention can describe the same page.
SEO is paid out in clicks and impressions. GEO is paid out in mention rate, citation rate, and recommendation rate: the brand enters the consideration set inside the answer, often before any website gets a visit.
SEO targets keywords a page should rank for. GEO needs the brand itself to be unambiguous: one consistent name and description, a wired schema entity graph, and profiles that confirm who is behind the site.
SEO plans against keyword volumes. GEO measures against a fixed set of buyer questions, re-run on a schedule against the same models, because a trend only exists when the questions stay comparable between runs.
Most brands do. SEO keeps your pages ranked in the indexes that AI answers read from; GEO turns that presence into mentions and citations inside the answers buyers now read first. Dropping either weakens the other: without ranking, the AI has nothing of yours to read; without answer-layer work, your rankings feed answers that name your competitors.
In practice the two come from different teams, because the signal sets and the day-to-day work differ. Keyword research, link building, and ranking work belong to an SEO team or agency. Question-set measurement, entity and schema work, answer-first content, and citation-gap coverage belong to the AI-visibility side. One partner claiming to do both equally well deserves the same three-question filter as anyone else: do they measure before they recommend, do they publish their method, and do they deliver work your team can ship.
We do the AI-visibility side. A measured baseline across the AI products your buyers use, a fix list ordered by impact, and the fixes delivered ready to implement: answer-first copy, FAQ sections with matching schema, and JSON-LD your team pastes in. We never touch your CMS, and we re-run the scan after changes go live so the dashboard trend shows what moved.
We are not an SEO agency. No keyword research, no link building, no page-one-ranking work; when a brief is about ranking higher on Google, we say so and point to the right kind of partner. And we make no ranking or mention guarantees, because AI products change weekly and nobody honest can promise a fixed outcome inside them. The commitment is the measurement, the delivered fixes, and the trend.
The technical half of the owned work, what your site itself must get right, is covered in what your website needs to appear in AI answers.
GEO, also called AEO (answer engine optimization), is the craft of making a brand appear inside AI-generated answers from products such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. It is measured on the answer layer: how often those answers mention, cite, or recommend the brand across a fixed set of buyer questions. The levers are crawler-readable content, structured data, entity clarity, and coverage in the third-party sources the answers are built from.
No. AI answers are built on top of the existing search indexes, so pages still need to be crawlable, indexed, and good enough to rank among the sources an answer draws from. GEO adds a second layer of work on top: winning the mention inside the answer rather than the click from the list. The two run in parallel, and neglecting either weakens the other.
Most brands do. SEO keeps your pages ranked in the indexes AI answers read from; GEO turns that presence into mentions and citations inside the answers. They are separate crafts with different signal sets, and in practice they usually come from different teams. We do the AI-visibility side and we are not an SEO agency: if your brief is to rank higher on Google, an SEO agency is the right partner for that half.
No, and nobody honestly can: AI products change weekly. What we commit to is a measured baseline, fixes prioritized by impact and delivered ready to implement, and a dashboard trend that shows whether mention, citation, and recommendation rates moved. Every answer is stored verbatim with its timestamp and model version, so the numbers can be re-checked.
Keep reading: what your website needs to appear in AI answers is the technical checklist for the owned half, and the tools vs consultant buyer's guide compares the software route with hiring a consultant, prices included.
The Baseline Audit measures your mention, citation, and recommendation rates across the AI surfaces your buyers use, with the fixes drafted ready to publish. From €4,900, two weeks from kickoff to dashboard.