GEO vs SEO: It's Mostly the Same Thing (and sellers know it)

If you've been seeing “GEO” everywhere lately, congrats: you just watched the SEO industry reinvent the wheel, give it a new name, and then try to sell it back to you at double the price.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is being positioned like it’s some brand-new discipline that lives outside SEO. In reality, it’s a symptom of one thing: SEO changed, and poor SEO is no longer viable. So people who were selling “easy SEO” needed a new wrapper.

Let me break it down in plain terms, and yes I’m going to be slightly annoyed while doing it.

GEO is a rebrand, not a revolution

The pitch you’ll hear is:

• SEO = ranking in Google
• GEO = getting mentioned in AI answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, etc.)

Sounds clean, sells well in a deck, but it’s missing the part where AI answers still have to pull information from somewhere. Most of the time, that “somewhere” is:

• Pages that already rank (or are heavily referenced) in the SERP
• High-authority publications and lists people actually read
• Brands/entities that show up consistently across related queries

So if an agency tells you “SEO doesn’t matter, GEO is different now”, they’re either confused or they’re marketing.

Why GEO is basically SEO (done properly)

Once LLM's started pulling data from the SERPs, guess which results were favored? The ones already ranking near the top.

Then came query fan-out (the model expanding your question into a bunch of related searches). And guess what happens again? Sources that rank across multiple variations get picked, weighted, and referenced more often.

In our testing, the pattern looks like this:

• If you rank #1–#3 for a key buying query, you’re more likely to be cited in AI answers
• If you show up for multiple adjacent queries, you get “n+ mentions” and start becoming the default reference
• If your brand + entity signals are consistent (same name, same positioning, same category), you get pulled in more often

In other words: a good SEO strategy already puts you in the best position for GEO mentions. The “GEO” part is mostly just making sure your content is easy to extract, summarize, and trust.

If you want the service page version of this: see our AI Search Optimization service.

Why some people insist SEO and GEO are different

Because the SEO industry is full of people who have no intention of doing hard work.

Changing title tags, rewriting meta descriptions, and buying links off Fiverr is NOT a strategy. It’s activity. And that kind of activity won’t move rankings or increase GEO mentions, because the sources being pulled into AI answers are typically:

• stronger brands
• better content
• cited / referenced in the wild
• technically clean enough to be crawled and understood

So for the “easy SEO” crowd, the solution isn’t “do better SEO.” It’s “rename it and resell it.”

The strategy SEO agencies should adopt (if they want results)

This is the part most agencies don’t want to hear: modern SEO is less “deliverables” and more ongoing business work.

Here’s what actually needs to be in the mix.

1) PR management (real PR, not spammy guest posts)

Getting featured in lists of products/services that your customers read. Not “50 DR30 blogs”. Humans + editors, not link farms.

2) Data gathering (original inputs)

Surveys, customer interviews, feedback mining, internal search data, support tickets. Then turning that into:

• case studies
• POV content (with actual experience)
• stats people can cite

This is the stuff AI answers love, because it’s unique and quotable.

3) Content that isn’t AI slop

There is a swathe of AI-generated content out there now. If you’re publishing the same “10 tips” list everyone else has, you’re competing with an infinite content machine.

Content has to be thought through, add value, and include real insight from your industry and from your clients perspective (even if its anonymized).

4) Backlinks that are relevant (and earned)

Backlinks still matter. The difference is how you get them.

Time should be spent reaching out to relevant sites in the actual niche. Relationships, outreach, co-marketing, digital PR — those links perform best and stay safest.

If you want the tactical version, start here: Backlink Building.

5) Social management (yes, this matters now)

Reddit, TikTok, Instagram posts (now indexable), YouTube, newsletters, Telegram channels — these all create signals and references outside your site.

Even if you don’t “rank” from social directly, the mention graph matters, and AI models pick up patterns from what people talk about and cite.

6) Technical audits with proper data aggregation

This is still the base layer. Screaming Frog crawl, top pages export, backlink-by-page download, GSC + GA4 data mapped back to URLs, and then decisions based on:

• low value URLs
• mid value URLs
• high value URLs
• high potential URLs (close to winning)

If you want an agency to start here, we do it as part of our Technical SEO and free SEO review.

Stop selling “3 posts + 5 links + 10 tech hours”

That pattern worked when the SERP was simpler and competition was asleep. It doesn’t satisfy performance anymore.

If the plan is fixed outputs instead of outcomes, you’ll hit a ceiling fast (and then someone will try to upsell you “GEO” lol).

What this means for agencies

• Work will be harder and longer
• Margins will fall (because you can’t template this easily)
• Performance improves, client retention improves too
• You’ll end up acting more like an internal growth team than a vendor

Less client capacity, better results. That trade is real.

What this means for SEO clients

• Costs will likely increase, but not exponentially
• Finding an agency that can actually do the above is annoyingly difficult
• You’ll probably do more work on your side too (surveys, customer feedback, approvals, social engagement monitoring, etc.)

The clients who treat SEO as a “set and forget” channel are going to struggle.

What we’re doing at SEO Turtle

This is the model we’re adopting at SEO Turtle. Client retention is basically 100%, because there’s tangible proof of work and the strategy is aligned with how search actually works now.

The workload is higher, and performance is not “guaranteed” (anyone promising that is lying), but we’ve seen a 67% success rate across the work we ship when the client commits to doing it properly.

If you want to sanity-check where you’re at, book a strategy call or grab a free audit.

Original Reddit post