Is GEO replacing SEO?

No, GEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it. Google's documentation says AI Overviews and AI Mode use the same technical requirements as Search, so a site that fails at SEO fails at Google's AI features too, and Google still sends far more traffic than any AI assistant. What changes is what comes after the foundation. Rankings stop being enough, because most AI citations come from pages outside the top 10 for the query. GEO adds the work that earns citations, such as off-site mentions, intent matching and original research.

What is the difference between SEO and GEO?

SEO earns a position in a list of search results, and GEO earns a mention inside an AI-generated answer. The technical foundation is shared: crawlability, indexing, structured data and page experience serve both. The difference is in selection and measurement. AI engines choose sources across many related sub-queries, so ranking first for one keyword does not guarantee a citation. GEO work focuses on the questions buyers ask AI, presence on the surfaces AI reads, topical depth and original data, and it is measured through AI impressions and citations rather than rankings.

Can my SEO agency do GEO?

Your SEO agency can do GEO if its scope includes the work outside your website. The technical layer is the same, so any competent SEO agency already covers it. The test is whether it also targets the surfaces AI draws from, such as community threads, video and third-party coverage, whether it matches content to the questions buyers ask AI rather than search volume alone, and whether it publishes original research. Ask for its AI visibility reporting as well. A few screenshots of AI answers are not measurement, because the answers change within days.

Who should own Google Search Console if two agencies are involved?

The company should own Google Search Console, and each agency should work on shared access. Search Console is a brand-owned property, like your domain or your analytics account. Since 31 August 2026 it also holds the Search generative AI control, which decides whether your site can appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode at all. An agency that owns the account controls that switch. Giving every agency its own user access keeps the data in one place, lets both teams see the same generative AI performance report, and means nothing is lost if you change agencies.

How do you stop two agencies from cannibalising each other's content?

You stop cannibalisation by making one party responsible for the content plan across both agencies. Cannibalisation happens when two pages on the same site target the same query, so they compete with each other and neither performs. With two agencies it happens easily, because each builds its own plan from its own research. Before either agency publishes, map every planned page to the query it answers and check it against everything already live. Where two briefs overlap, merge them or reassign one. The same rule applies to updates of existing pages.

How do you measure GEO separately from SEO?

You measure GEO through AI impressions, AI citations and prompt tracking over time, not rankings and clicks. Google Search Console's generative AI performance report shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, but not clicks. Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report shows how often Copilot and Bing AI summaries cite your pages, with a sample of the grounding queries behind those citations. For ChatGPT, Perplexity and the other engines, you track a fixed set of buyer questions across engines on a regular schedule. Read the results in aggregate, because single answers change within days.

Educational Content September 10, 20267 min read

SEO and GEO: Do You Need Both, and Where Does the Work Overlap?

SEO and GEO share the same technical foundation, then split. Where the work overlaps, what an SEO retainer misses, and when you don't need two agencies.

Tanissh Amit

By Tanissh Amit

September 10, 2026 · 7 min read

TL;DR: SEO and GEO share the same technical foundation, so you do not need two agencies fixing the same site. Google's own documentation says pages need no additional technical requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The work splits after that: Ahrefs' March 2026 analysis found only about 38% of AI Overview citations came from pages ranking in the top 10 for the query. The work that earns AI citations, meaning other surfaces, intent matching, topical authority and original research, usually sits outside an SEO retainer. You need both kinds of work. Whether you need two agencies depends on whether your current one already does the second kind.

If you already pay an SEO agency and are asking whether you need SEO and GEO, the answer is that the two overlap on the technical layer and split on almost everything else. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of getting a business named and cited inside AI-generated answers from engines such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Gemini. SEO earns a position in a list of links. GEO earns a place in the answer itself.

I run Strategi, and I usually join accounts that already have an SEO partner. This is how I explain the split on first calls.

Where do SEO and GEO do the same work?

SEO and GEO do the same work on technical implementation. Google Search Central states that a page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in Google Search to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that there are no additional technical requirements. Google lists the same fundamentals it recommends for Search: crawl access in robots.txt, internal links, page experience, content in text form, and structured data that matches the visible page.

The other engines follow the same pattern with one extra check. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. That is one more line in the same robots.txt file an SEO agency already maintains, not a separate discipline.

Technical implementation is largely the same for both. If two agencies are each auditing and fixing the same crawl, speed and schema issues, you are paying for that work twice.

Your Search Console account now controls AI eligibility

Since 31 August 2026, Google Search Console has a Search generative AI control under Settings, rolled out to every website. The default includes your site. Switching to exclude removes your links and content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative features in Discover, and Google says you then receive no traffic or impressions from those features. Google says a change generally takes effect within a few days.

That makes Search Console ownership a GEO question, not only an SEO one. Search Console, like any brand-owned property, should belong to the company. Any agency, mine included, should work on shared access, never on an account it owns.

GEO vs SEO: where does the work actually split?

The work splits at selection. A ranking is a position in a list; a citation is a decision an AI system makes about which sources to name. Ahrefs' March 2026 study of 863,000 keyword results found 37.9% of AI Overview citations came from pages in the top 10 for the same query, down from 76.1% in its earlier study, though Ahrefs notes part of that drop comes from improved measurement.

The gap is wider outside Google. In Ahrefs' mid-2025 test of 15,000 prompts, about 12% of citations from ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt, and around 80% did not rank anywhere in Google for that query.

What tracks with AI visibility is different too. Ahrefs' December 2025 study of 75,000 brands found branded web mentions correlated with AI visibility at 0.66 to 0.71 across ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews, while backlink metrics showed very weak correlations. That is correlation, not proof of cause, but it points at work that happens off your website.

Area of work	Typical SEO retainer, in my experience	What AI visibility adds
Technical implementation	Crawl, indexing, speed, schema	Access rules for AI search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot
Keyword targeting	Terms chosen by search volume	Intent matching against the questions buyers ask AI
Content	Pages built to rank	Answers to real human queries, written to be quoted
Authority	Backlinks	Topical authority across a subject
Research	Rarely produced	Original data and research that AI systems cite
Off-site presence	Link building	Mentions on the other surfaces AI draws from
Reporting	Rankings, clicks, Search Console performance	AI impressions, AI citations, prompt tracking across engines

The work that matters for AI visibility, beyond the shared technical layer, is these five things:

Targeting the other surfaces AI picks information up from. AI answers draw on community threads, video, reviews and third-party coverage, not only your site. A June 2026 Semrush survey of 481 marketers found only 11% were actively building external mentions, 9% were managing reviews and 8% were using digital PR.
Intent matching. Search volume tells you what people type into Google. It does not tell you which questions a buyer asks an AI assistant just before choosing a supplier, and those are the questions worth owning.
Answering real human queries. A page written to rank for a keyword and a page written to answer a specific question are different pages. AI systems quote the second kind.
Building topical authority. One page that ranks is not authority. Coverage across the full set of questions in a subject is what makes an engine treat a site as a source.
Publishing original data and research. AI systems cannot generate data, so they cite whoever published it. Research is also one of the few assets a competitor cannot copy.

Why can't SEO reporting tell you whether AI recommends you?

SEO reporting measures rankings and clicks, and AI visibility produces neither in a comparable form. Google's generative AI performance report in Search Console, rolled out to all websites on 31 August 2026, shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, device and date. It does not show clicks or queries.

Microsoft has reported AI citations separately since 10 February 2026, when AI Performance launched in Bing Webmaster Tools as a public preview. It shows citation counts, cited pages and a sample of grounding queries across Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and select partner integrations.

AI answers also move faster than rankings. Ahrefs' November 2025 study of more than 43,000 keywords found AI Overview content lasted 2.15 days on average, and 45.5% of cited sources were new between consecutive checks. A single screenshot of an AI answer proves almost nothing, yet the same Semrush survey found 40% of marketers rely on manually typing prompts into AI tools as their main tracking method.

What does the gap look like on a real account?

One of my current clients is a home services company that already had an SEO partner when I started. The site still had technical gaps, and it collected a lot of impressions but very few clicks, which meant very few leads.

Impressions were never the problem. Intent was. The site ranked for a large number of low-value keywords with no commercial intent, which looked healthy in a report and produced almost nothing for the sales team.

I started by identifying the high-value, commercially relevant queries their ideal customer was asking AI assistants, and built the approach from there. The engagement is ongoing, so I am not putting outcome numbers on it here.

How do an SEO agency and a GEO agency work together?

In most cases I take over and run the work end to end. Where the SEO partner has already done the foundation well, I act as a second opinion instead: I review what exists, fill the gaps and leave the rest alone.

Content coordination is the part that matters most. Two agencies writing separate pages for the same query produce two pages competing with each other, and neither wins. Someone has to own the content plan across both.

Ownership inside companies is rarely clear. In the Semrush survey, no single function owned AI search for more than 18% of respondents: a dedicated AEO or GEO specialist led at 18%, SEO at 16% and content at 15%, and one in ten teams had no owner at all. A June 2026 Minuttia survey of 599 SEO, content and growth professionals found 52.8% said their SEO team runs AI search, which shows how much the answer depends on who you ask.

Friction does happen, though not always. It usually comes from the SEO agency seeing that the AI search scope covers what it does and more.

Should you drop SEO to pay for GEO?

No. Google still sends far more traffic than any AI assistant. Across 76,000 websites in Ahrefs Web Analytics, Google accounted for nearly 40% of traffic and ChatGPT for 0.21%, meaning Google sent 190 times more.

SEO is also the entry condition for Google's own AI features, since a page has to be indexed and snippet-eligible to be cited in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Cutting the foundation to fund the layer on top of it removes both.

When do you not need a separate AI search partner?

You do not need a separate AI search partner in four situations:

Your SEO agency already does the off-site and research work. If it works on Reddit, YouTube and PR, and publishes original data, the second kind of work is already covered. Adding another agency duplicates it.
Your buyers do not research through AI yet. Some categories still buy through referrals, tenders or direct relationships. Check how your buyers actually find suppliers before spending on a channel they do not use.
You cannot fund the work monthly. With nearly half of AI Overview citations changing between checks, a one-off project decays quickly. If the budget only covers a single burst, spend it on SEO fundamentals first.
Your in-house team already tracks and acts on AI visibility. If someone internal measures prompts across engines and changes content and outreach based on what they find, you have the function already. Minuttia found only 2.7% of its respondents outsource AI search to agencies.

If none of those apply, you need both kinds of work, and the question is only who does the second kind.

Frequently asked questions

Is GEO replacing SEO?: No, GEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it. Google's documentation says AI Overviews and AI Mode use the same technical requirements as Search, so a site that fails at SEO fails at Google's AI features too, and Google still sends far more traffic than any AI assistant. What changes is what comes after the foundation. Rankings stop being enough, because most AI citations come from pages outside the top 10 for the query. GEO adds the work that earns citations, such as off-site mentions, intent matching and original research.
What is the difference between SEO and GEO?: SEO earns a position in a list of search results, and GEO earns a mention inside an AI-generated answer. The technical foundation is shared: crawlability, indexing, structured data and page experience serve both. The difference is in selection and measurement. AI engines choose sources across many related sub-queries, so ranking first for one keyword does not guarantee a citation. GEO work focuses on the questions buyers ask AI, presence on the surfaces AI reads, topical depth and original data, and it is measured through AI impressions and citations rather than rankings.
Can my SEO agency do GEO?: Your SEO agency can do GEO if its scope includes the work outside your website. The technical layer is the same, so any competent SEO agency already covers it. The test is whether it also targets the surfaces AI draws from, such as community threads, video and third-party coverage, whether it matches content to the questions buyers ask AI rather than search volume alone, and whether it publishes original research. Ask for its AI visibility reporting as well. A few screenshots of AI answers are not measurement, because the answers change within days.
Who should own Google Search Console if two agencies are involved?: The company should own Google Search Console, and each agency should work on shared access. Search Console is a brand-owned property, like your domain or your analytics account. Since 31 August 2026 it also holds the Search generative AI control, which decides whether your site can appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode at all. An agency that owns the account controls that switch. Giving every agency its own user access keeps the data in one place, lets both teams see the same generative AI performance report, and means nothing is lost if you change agencies.
How do you stop two agencies from cannibalising each other's content?: You stop cannibalisation by making one party responsible for the content plan across both agencies. Cannibalisation happens when two pages on the same site target the same query, so they compete with each other and neither performs. With two agencies it happens easily, because each builds its own plan from its own research. Before either agency publishes, map every planned page to the query it answers and check it against everything already live. Where two briefs overlap, merge them or reassign one. The same rule applies to updates of existing pages.
How do you measure GEO separately from SEO?: You measure GEO through AI impressions, AI citations and prompt tracking over time, not rankings and clicks. Google Search Console's generative AI performance report shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, but not clicks. Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report shows how often Copilot and Bing AI summaries cite your pages, with a sample of the grounding queries behind those citations. For ChatGPT, Perplexity and the other engines, you track a fixed set of buyer questions across engines on a regular schedule. Read the results in aggregate, because single answers change within days.

See where you stand before you decide

If you already have an SEO agency and want to know whether AI answers name your business, I run a free AI visibility audit. It shows where you appear across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews today.

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