TL;DR: SEO is about ranking a page in a list of search results, and GEO (generative engine optimization) is about getting your brand named inside an answer that an AI engine writes. The groundwork is similar, but the sites ChatGPT cites are mostly not the sites Google ranks for the same question.
The short version
"SEO" (search engine optimization) is the work of getting a page to rank in Google. "GEO" is the work of getting a brand mentioned in the answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and similar engines. It goes by other names too, like AI SEO and LLM SEO. If you want the longer version of that naming, LLM SEO explained covers it.
GEO is also quite similar to traditional SEO, with a spin. Making sure your pages are crawlable, making sure the content matches what people actually ask (keywords in SEO become questions in GEO), and building your external reputation (backlinks in SEO become mentions in GEO) all carry over. There are some nuances, covered below.
GEO vs SEO comparison
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Target | A URL's position in a list | Your brand's presence in an answer |
| Unit of demand | Keywords | Questions |
| Primary off-site lever | Backlinks | Mentions on sources the engines retrieve, reviews |
| Content optimised for | Depth and coverage | Extraction and directness |
| Number of winners | Roughly one per result | Three to five brands per answer |
| Main failure mode | Ranking for nothing that converts | Publishing for questions nothing retrieves |
Several brands share every AI answer, so a small brand has a realistic way in. The post on answer engine optimization versus SEO goes through the same split in more detail, and the three-way comparison covers where the third acronym fits.
How much do ChatGPT and Google overlap?
This section uses one study. Peak Answer collected ChatGPT answers through DataForSEO in October 2026 for 198 questions across 30 niches. Each question was matched against Google organic results for the same question. Everything below is descriptive. It shows what the two sets of sites look like side by side and says nothing about why.
The questions fall into 3 bands by how specific they are: 69 general, 45 medium and 84 specific. They also split by sector, 112 tech and 86 non-tech.
Overlap is measured per question at the domain level, then averaged across questions. "Cited" means the pages the ChatGPT answer cited. The table shows how many questions were usable in each row (some questions had no cited domains or no Google results, so they are skipped).
| Group | Questions (used / in group) | Jaccard overlap | ChatGPT domains also in Google | Google top 10 domains cited by ChatGPT |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | 195 / 198 | 0.047 | 13.5% | 6.8% |
| General | 68 / 69 | 0.056 | 16.1% | 8.5% |
| Medium | 44 / 45 | 0.064 | 19.2% | 8.8% |
| Specific | 83 / 84 | 0.031 | 8.5% | 4.3% |
Jaccard overlap is the shared domains divided by all domains across both lists, where 1.0 would be identical lists. At 0.047 the lists are mostly different. On average, 13.5% of the domains ChatGPT cited also showed up somewhere in Google's results for that question. Adding up all domains across all questions instead of averaging gives 11.5% (114 of 989 cited domains).
The band pattern
Overlap was highest for medium questions (19.2%), a bit lower for general ones (16.1%), and lowest for specific ones (8.5%). Tech questions averaged 15.0% and non-tech 11.6%. Inside the non-tech sector, the medium and specific cells were the lowest in the study, at 7.9% and 6.1%.
Cited versus retrieved
The table above counts only pages ChatGPT cited. The report also ran a wider version that counts every page the model retrieved, which is cited pages plus the other sources it looked at. ChatGPT cited 5.05 distinct domains per question on average and retrieved 12.17. Google had 8.57.
| Measure (all questions) | Cited (n=195) | Retrieved (n=196) |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT domains also in Google | 13.5% | 9.1% |
| Google top 10 domains covered by ChatGPT | 6.8% | 10.3% |
| Jaccard overlap | 0.047 | 0.050 |
The retrieved set covers more of Google's top 10, and it is also about 2.4 times larger, with most of the extra domains missing from Google's list.
Small brand websites
The report also looked at the websites of small providers on their own. Across the 3 bands, ChatGPT cited 493 of these domains and Google listed 637. Only 36 appeared on both sides, a Jaccard of 0.033. Counting the full retrieved set, ChatGPT had 1,361 of them, with 55 shared and a Jaccard of 0.028.
Caveats
- Google returned fewer than 10 results for most queries (an average of 8.76), so "top 10" is usually the whole list.
- The report flags any cell with fewer than 10 questions. The list of domains cited by both engines is made up of small counts, mostly under 10 questions per domain, so it reads as a list and not as rates.
- Answers were collected from a US perspective. 10 of the 198 answers mention a non-US place or currency, and none read as geolocated outside the US.
What this means for your work
Ranking well in Google and being named by ChatGPT are 2 separate results. Some sites do land in both. A few domains appeared on both sides for many questions, including directories, review sites and large vendors, but most cited sites never showed up in Google's results for the same question.
Start with the parts that transfer. Check that AI crawlers can read your site with the AI crawler checker. Then run the AEO checker to see how ready a page is to be quoted by AI engines, or the AI visibility audit to see what the engines say about you today. To follow your own numbers over time, the tracker records which questions name you.
Peak Answer runs real buying questions on the AI engines, records who gets named, and tells you what to change.
FAQs
SEO ranks a page in a list of search results. GEO gets your brand named inside an answer that an AI engine writes. The technical groundwork overlaps, and the targets and off-site levers are different.
Yes. A page that a crawler cannot read is invisible to Google and to AI engines alike, so crawlability, clear content and good structure help both. Google AI Overviews also draw on organic results.
Mostly no. In a study of 198 questions, 13.5% of the domains ChatGPT cited also appeared in Google's results for the same question, on average per question. The study is descriptive, and the overlap was lowest for specific questions.
Yes, they are basically the same. GEO, AI SEO and LLM SEO all describe getting your brand mentioned in AI-generated answers.