SEO vs GEO: Which one should I invest in?

Search used to mean one thing: get your page onto page one and hope for the click. That's still part of the job, but it's no longer the whole job. A growing share of searches now get answered before anyone reaches a results page at all, by ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's own AI Overviews pulling together an answer from several sources at once. Whether your content gets used in that answer and named while it's being used, is a different game to ranking.

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the discipline of getting a page found and clicked. GEO (generative engine optimisation) is the newer discipline of getting a page cited inside an AI-generated answer or recommendation, sometimes with no click involved at all. The term comes from a 2023 Princeton-led research paper that tested how content could be adjusted to earn more visibility inside AI-generated responses and found some genuinely large swings depending on what the content included.

Why it matters now: Ofcom's 2025 Online Nation report, the regulator's annual look at how the UK actually uses the internet, found that 30% of Google keyword searches now return an AI-generated overview and 53% of UK adults say they see AI summaries regularly when they search. Most people aren't seeking these out, Ofcom notes, they're getting them by default from a search engine they already use and the effect on click-through is stark. UK publishers submitted research to the Competition and Markets Authority as part of a formal complaint against Google, showing that when an AI Overview appears, click-through rates drop by 47.5% on desktop and 37.7% on mobile. Separately, Reuters Institute data found Google search traffic to publishers had fallen 17% across Europe in the year to November, against a steeper 38% drop in the US, so the UK is feeling this later and more slowly than America, but the direction is the same.

What's out for old-hat SEO in 2026

Some of this has been dead for years in the world of SEO but some of it is the newer version of the same instinct, dressed up for the AI era.

• Keyword stuffing. Repeating a phrase unnaturally to try and signal relevance. Google's own spam policy calls this out by name and it's now worse for GEO too: early research into AI-generated answers found stuffed content actually performed worse there, not just in classic search.
• Doorway pages. Building near-identical pages to catch slightly different search terms, all funnelling to the same place. Google has been explicit that flooding a site with pages to catch every possible AI query variation carries the same risk under its scaled content abuse policy.
• Exploiting expired domains for borrowed authority instead of building something genuine.
• Hidden text, cloaking and link manipulation aimed at the engine rather than the reader.
• Treating AI visibility as a hack to be gamed. Google's own May 2026 guidance is direct about this: there's no special markup, no AI-specific file, no secret formatting that unlocks inclusion in an AI answer. Chasing tricks instead of substance is itself now a flag.

What's in and still relevant for SEO

The foundations of SEO are still firmly in place and if anything, they matter more because they're now essential to both search and AI-generated answers.

Technical health. A page still has to be indexed and eligible to show a normal snippet in Google Search before it can be pulled into an AI Overview or AI Mode answer. Crawlability, site speed, mobile usability and clean structured data are the basic requirements for both SEO and GEO. If a Googlebot can't reliably find and render a page, it doesn't matter how well the content answers the query: it's simply not in the running to be ranked by Google, let alone cited by AI. This is why sites chasing "AI visibility" without first sorting their technical basics tend to see nothing change.

E-E-A-T. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust remain the framework Google's own quality raters use to judge content. Experience carries particular weight: Google's own example is a product review written by someone who's actually used the product, against one written by someone who hasn't. Trust sits at the centre of the framework, and this plays out visibly in the UK. Research from the thinktank IPPR analysed over 2,500 links across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity in response to UK news queries, and found Google's AI Overviews cited the BBC in 41% of responses, with the Guardian leading on ChatGPT and Gemini. Trust and authority visibly decides who gets quoted.

Helpful, people-first content. Google states plainly that the same best practices apply to AI features as to classic search: build for the reader, not the algorithm. Content written to satisfy a keyword count tends to read that way, and both classic ranking systems and AI summary models are increasingly good at spotting the difference. Answering real questions in plain English with the detail they need is essential. 

Alt tagged images and video. Still a legitimate entry point into an AI-generated answer, not a separate AI-only tactic. Descriptive alt text has always helped accessibility and image search and that same descriptive detail is now part of what AI systems parse when deciding what to include in a generated answer. The same goes for video: transcripts, captions and clear on-page context around embedded video give AI models something to work with, rather than a black box they can't summarise. Skipping this just leaves information on the table that a competitor's page is providing.

What to now include to optimise for GEO

This is where the newer research adds a new element to your current strategy. Treat it as a working checklist:

• Specific statistics and data points. Numbers, dates, percentages. Content with concrete figures was cited more often than vaguer equivalents.
• Direct, attributable quotations from credible sources
• Clear inline citation of claims. Content that shows its working, where a fact came from, was consistently rewarded.
• Structure a machine can lift cleanly. Clear headings and logically ordered paragraphs, written for a human reader, not restructured around guessed AI preferences. Google is explicit that rewriting content to chase AI phrasing is unnecessary, and can tip into the same scaled content abuse problem as old-school keyword stuffing.
• Test your key services in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode to see whether you're mentioned and who is mentioned instead.
• Track AI referral traffic separately in GA4 so you can measure change over time.
• Add author bios with real credentials to your expert content.
• Check that your content adds value and says things that a competitor couldn't.
• Check robots.txt and make sure you aren't blocking AI crawlers you want visibility from.

The common thread: content that reads like something a knowledgeable person actually wrote and can back up, rather than content optimised purely to rank.

Kyanah, SEO Executive at Serenity further explains: "SEO optimises to rank and GEO optimises to get your content cited. Traditional SEO gets your page into search results, but winning AI answers requires a different approach. Some techniques I like to use include: self contained answer blocks, structured data, topical authority, off-page validation and up to date facts. Just because you rank #1 in search results doesn't mean you will automatically get cited, you have to optimise for both. One client saw revenue from AI sources up 505%, contributing to an overall revenue increase of 42% so it is definitely worth prioritising."

Our insight: alongside the checklist above, make sure your content aligns to the E-E-A-T framework, backed by technically sound site infrastructure.

Summary

SEO and GEO aren't two competing strategies to choose between; Google itself treats GEO as a variation on SEO, not a replacement for it. The businesses that do well from here are the ones already doing SEO fundamentals properly: fast, indexable, well-structured pages, written by people with real expertise, backed up with real numbers and real sources.

If you want a second opinion on how your content stands against these guidelines, drop us a line, it's a conversation we enjoy having.