Is SEO the same as GEO?

No. SEO and GEO overlap, but they are different games. In Ghostart's comparison of 21 things that get a business found, 11 work for both Google and AI answer engines, and the other ten pull in different directions. Ghostart is an AI visibility platform, and this page sets out where the two disciplines meet and where they split.

Key facts

• What: a lever-by-lever comparison of SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), covering 21 levers
• Who it's for: business owners, consultancies, specialist service firms and their marketing leads
• Where it applies: Google Search, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity
• Full version: the complete matrix is free to download from this page

How much of SEO also works for AI visibility?

About half. Of the 21 levers, a large share serve both engines, so the work only has to be done once.

Group	Number of levers	Examples
Shared by SEO and GEO	11	Answer-first structure, third-party brand mentions
Google rewards, AI ignores	4	Backlink building, rank tracking
AI rewards, Google never did	4	AI-crawler access, named people publishing
Lean one way	2	Detailed in the full matrix

The shared levers include content quality and topical authority, answer-first structure, a clear entity (who you are and who you help), and fresh dated content. They also cover third-party brand mentions, earned coverage, original data built to be quoted, server-side rendering, crawlable and indexed pages, and local presence through Google Business Profile, Yelp and reviews.

Credibility is the one signal that Google's E-E-A-T and a language model read the same way.

What does Google reward that AI answers don't?

Four levers: backlink building, technical plumbing, on-page keyword optimisation, and rank tracking with Search Console.

• Backlinks are a ranking-authority lever. Language models lean on mentions instead.
• Technical plumbing (speed, canonicals, sitemaps, internal linking) is foundational for Google and indirect at best for AI.
• Keyword optimisation matters less because language models match meaning. Keyword stuffing lowered visibility in the Princeton GEO experiments (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024), while adding statistics, quotations and cited sources raised it.
• Rank tracking and Search Console measure Google, including its AI surfaces. They can't see ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity.

All four are worth keeping if Google matters to your business, but they won't move an AI answer.

What do AI engines reward that Google never did?

Four levers, and none of them showed up in a Google ranking report.

• AI-crawler access. OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot are separate from the bots that gather training data. Block them and you can vanish from answers while Google is unaffected.
• Named people publishing under their own names. First-person expert content is increasingly cited. This area is still emerging.
• Consistency across your whole web footprint. AI synthesises across many sources, so consistent mentions everywhere can outweigh one high-ranking page.
• Citation monitoring across engines. This is the AI-era equivalent of rank tracking.

SEO was a game you could play alone. AI visibility needs other people to vouch for you.

Does ranking on Google get you cited by AI?

On Google's own AI, partly. Everywhere else, barely.

Ahrefs found that 38% of Google AI Overview citations rank in the organic top 10 (863,000 keywords, March 2026). In a separate Ahrefs study of 15,000 prompts (August 2025), only 12% of URLs cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt.

Perplexity was the outlier at 28.6%. Page one is still worth having, but it's a weak predictor of whether an assistant will name you.

Are brand mentions more useful than backlinks?

For AI Overviews, the correlation points that way. Ahrefs measured 0.664 for brand mentions against 0.218 for backlinks, as correlations with AI Overview visibility across 75,000 brands (brands filtered to DR 40+). That is correlation, not proof of cause.

Intent changes the picture too. In a University of Toronto study of consumer-electronics queries (300 queries, 100 per intent), 59–86% of cited sources were third-party for consideration queries such as "who should I use for X". For transactional queries, 52–68% were brand-owned.

Your own pages carry weight when someone is ready to buy, and other people's words carry it while they are still choosing.

Which common SEO beliefs did the evidence overturn?

Three, and each one moved a row in our matrix.

Local presence counts for AI. BrightLocal's analysis of 1,355 locations and 1.97 million citations (August 2026) found Google Business Profile supplies 28.5% of all local AI citations, and Yelp appears in 80% of ChatGPT's local answers.

Rendering matters. According to Vercel's "The rise of the AI crawler" (December 2024), GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot fetch your JavaScript and don't run it. Content that only appears after client-side rendering is invisible to them.

Schema markup is not a citation lever. In an Ahrefs controlled test (May 2026), 1,885 pages added JSON-LD and AI citations moved about 2%. Google says none is required for AI Overviews or AI Mode.

Why can't you check one AI answer and call it a measurement?

Because the answers move. Schulte, Bleeker and Kaufmann (University of St. Gallen) found only 34–42% of cited sources overlap between consecutive days. Kevin Indig's "The Consensus Gap" (Growth Memo, 11 May 2026) found only 2.37% of cited URLs appear across all three engines tested for the same prompt.

That's why Ghostart samples repeatedly instead of taking a snapshot. Every paid plan asks each tracked question in three different phrasings, rotated weekly, so a result isn't the luck of one wording.

How does Ghostart help with GEO?

We show you where ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Answers recommend your business, and where they don't. Then we build you a plan, create content to fill the gaps, and help you build your AI visibility.

The people who can fix your visibility already work in your business, so the content we draft is written for them to publish. Ghostart publishes to LinkedIn, WordPress, Ghost and your own site blog.

When you get cited for a question, we propose three to five adjacent questions to track next. Nothing is added until a person approves it, so your map of questions grows as you win. We then re-check the answers to see what changed.

Download the full matrix to see all 21 levers scored for SEO, for GEO and for crossover, with the reason and source for each row.

Sources and further reading

• Ahrefs, AI Overview brand visibility factors (May 2025): brand mentions correlate at 0.664 and backlinks at 0.218 with AI Overview visibility across 75,000 brands.
• Ahrefs, 863,000-keyword study (March 2026): 38% of Google AI Overview citations rank in the organic top 10.
• Ahrefs, 15,000-prompt study (August 2025): 12% of URLs cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot rank in Google's top 10 for the same prompt.
• Ahrefs, controlled schema test (May 2026): 1,885 pages added JSON-LD and AI citations moved about 2%.
• BrightLocal, local AI citations analysis (August 2026): 1,355 locations and 1.97 million citations.
• Vercel, "The rise of the AI crawler" (December 2024).
• Aggarwal et al. (Princeton / IIT Delhi), GEO, KDD 2024: arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735
• Chen, Wang, Chen and Koudas (University of Toronto), January 2026: arxiv.org/abs/2601.16858
• Schulte, Bleeker and Kaufmann (University of St. Gallen): arxiv.org/abs/2604.07585
• Kevin Indig, "The Consensus Gap", Growth Memo, 11 May 2026: growth-memo.com/p/the-consensus-gap