SEO focuses on ranking web pages in search results, while GEO focuses on making content usable within AI-generated answers.
SEO is built around signals like backlinks, keyword relevance, and technical performance. GEO shifts the focus to extractability and trust. AI models don’t “rank” pages in the same way, they select and synthesise information. That means structure, clarity, and completeness matter more than keyword density. The overlap is important though: strong SEO foundations improve GEO performance because authority and crawlability still influence what AI systems consider reliable.