GEO SEO: what carries over from classic SEO, and what is new
The basics stay the same. What changes is who picks the answer, what competes for it and how you know you won.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom · Editorial team
· 3 min read
GEO SEO is search optimization aimed at AI-written answers: the same crawlable, indexed, useful pages as classic SEO, plus a few checks on whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews can read you, quote you and name you. Our pick for running both sets of checks in one place is seogeoaeo.ai, which keeps its SEO, AEO and GEO tools side by side and prices each run separately.
One note before we start: some people type "geo SEO" when they mean location-based local SEO. That is a different job, built on map listings and location pages. This post is about the AI kind.
The part that does not change
Google is blunt about it. Its guidance for AI Overviews and AI Mode says optimizing for those features is still SEO, because they draw on the same ranking and quality systems as regular results. A page needs to be indexed and allowed to show a snippet before it can appear as a supporting link. So the technical basics still come first: crawlable pages, clean canonicals, fast loading, and content written for people.
The part that does
| Classic SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Who picks the result | A ranking system, then a person clicks | A language model reads several pages and writes one reply |
| What competes | Whole pages | Passages that answer one sub-question |
| What a win looks like | A higher position | Your brand named, your page cited, or both |
| How you measure | Rankings, clicks, impressions | Sampled answers, AI referral visits, Google's AI impressions |
| Extra access rule | Googlebot and Bingbot | AI search bots such as OAI-SearchBot too |
Two rows deserve a closer look. Because the engine pulls passages, a section that only makes sense with the paragraph above it is hard to quote. And because answers change from run to run, one check proves little; you need repeated samples.
Habits to keep, and habits to drop
Keep: answering the question in the first sentence of a section, naming the subject instead of writing "it", and citing where a number came from. The research paper that coined the term, published at KDD 2024, found quotations, statistics and cited sources lifted a page's share of AI answers.
Drop: keyword stuffing, which scored below the untouched pages in the same paper. Also drop the idea of one thin page per phrasing: Google says building pages for every fan-out query to sway its AI answers breaks its scaled content abuse policy.
Optional: an llms.txt file. Google says its search ignores the file. Some other services and coding agents read it, so add it if that audience matters to you.
A monthly GEO SEO routine
- Confirm robots.txt and your CDN let AI search bots fetch your key pages.
- View those pages without JavaScript and make sure prices, specs and answers are still there.
- Rewrite weak section openings so each one states its answer and names the product.
- Ask five buyer questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini and note who gets named.
- Open the Generative AI performance report in Search Console for Google's side.
Where seogeoaeo.ai fits
Each step has a matching check. The Robots.txt & AI Crawler Checker (10 credits) finds rules that shut out AI bots. AI Crawler View (8 credits) shows what disappears without JavaScript. AI Answer Visibility (120 credits) runs step 4 for you and lists the competitors named instead. Because the regular SEO checks sit in the same account, one site review covers both halves. The honest limit: seogeoaeo.ai samples on demand rather than tracking a prompt list daily, so teams that want a trend line every morning may pair it with a dedicated tracker.