GEO vs SEO: what's the difference, and do you actually need both?

People keep asking me whether GEO is going to kill SEO, like one has to win. It’s the wrong question. Here’s the right one: where is your next customer actually looking, and are you there?

SEO gets your business ranked in traditional search results, the blue links on Google. GEO gets your business named inside the AI answers that tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews write back. They run on most of the same foundations, so for nearly every small business the honest answer to “which one?” is both, and you build them from one pile of work, not two.

Search has quietly grown a second front door. One is the old list of links. The other is a written answer that often never sends anyone to a website at all. Optimise for one and ignore the other, and you’re invisible to half your market.

What SEO does

SEO decides where you land in the list of results. Someone types “plumber near me”, and SEO is what determines whether your page, your map listing, or your competitor’s shows up near the top.

It rewards the unglamorous stuff:

• Pages that genuinely match what people search for
• A fast, mobile-friendly site
• Trust signals: real reviews, links from other sites, consistent business details
• The technical basics done right, titles, headings, internal links

It’s been around 20-odd years and it isn’t going anywhere, because billions of people still click links every day.

What GEO does

GEO decides whether you get mentioned inside the AI’s answer. Ask ChatGPT “who’s a good accountant in Leeds?” and GEO is what influences whether your name comes up.

AI pulls from content it can read, trust and summarise quickly. So it rewards:

• Plain, factual writing that answers the actual question
• Schema that spells out who you are and what you do
• An llms.txt file and crawler access, so the AI can read you at all
• Genuine reviews and details that match everywhere they appear

The mental shift: in AI search you win by being the answer, not by being a link someone has to click.

Side by side

Look at the “core work” row. That’s the whole point: clean content, accurate details, schema and real reviews feed both columns. You’re rarely choosing between two separate projects, you’re doing one job that pays out twice.

So do you need both?

For almost every small business, yes. Treat SEO as the foundation and GEO as the upgrade that rides on the same fundamentals. A few situations change the emphasis, though:

1. Local trades, clinics, salons: nail local SEO and your Google Business Profile first, then layer GEO on top.
2. Consultants, agencies, advice-led businesses: GEO matters sooner, because your customers literally ask AI for recommendations.
3. Brand-new website: get the SEO basics solid before chasing advanced GEO. AI struggles to cite a site that’s thin or unclear.

Which one matters more for your business

The split depends on how people decide to use you. Three quick scenarios from the kind of clients we see:

• A drainage firm covering three towns. Customers Google “blocked drain near me” in a panic and click the first trustworthy result. Here SEO and the Google Business Profile do almost all the heavy lifting. GEO is a nice-to-have, not the priority. Spend the money on local rankings, reviews and a fast site.
• A bookkeeping practice. People don’t panic-search a bookkeeper, they research. They ask ChatGPT “what should I look for in a bookkeeper for a limited company?” and read the answer. If your site explains exactly that, in plain factual language, you can get named in the answer before they’ve even opened Google. GEO earns its keep early here.
• A new bakery with a six-week-old website. Neither channel works yet, because there’s barely anything to rank or quote. The job is foundations first: clear pages, real photos, consistent details, a handful of genuine reviews. Do that and you feed both channels at once.

The pattern: the more your customers research before they buy, the sooner GEO pays off. The more they buy on impulse or in an emergency, the more it’s SEO and your Google profile that win the job.

The mistakes that waste the most money

I see the same three over and over:

1. Chasing GEO with a thin site. AI can’t quote what isn’t there. If your pages don’t actually answer questions, no amount of llms.txt or schema saves you. Write the content first.
2. Treating them as two separate budgets. They share 80% of the work. Paying one agency for “SEO” and another for “GEO” usually means paying twice for the same content and schema. Joined-up is cheaper and better.
3. Believing the guarantees. See the warning below. If someone promises a ranking or a citation, that’s the tell they don’t understand how either works.

My honest take

You don’t need two teams or two budgets, and you should be suspicious of anyone who tells you that you do. A sensible order looks like: make every key page answer one real question completely, add schema, keep your details consistent across your site and Google, let the AI crawlers in, publish an llms.txt, and keep earning reviews and the odd genuinely useful article.

That joined-up approach is exactly what we handle for clients as a managed online presence, rather than selling GEO and SEO as separate bolt-ons. You can see how it’s priced on our pricing page.

If you want to go deeper on the AI side, read what GEO is and why it matters, or see how all three fit together in AEO vs GEO vs SEO. The future of getting found isn’t links or answers. It’s both, built once.