GEO vs SEO: why GEO is an extension of SEO

What GEO means

GEO stands for generative engine optimisation: the work that makes AI answers more likely to use your pages and cite them. You will also read AEO (answer engine optimisation), LLMO or simply AI SEO, and in French référencement IA. Google lists AEO and GEO as "terms you may see used to describe work" on its own guide. They all point at the same thing.

The answers in question come from two kinds of products. Search engines that now write a summary above or instead of the links: Google with AI Overviews and AI Mode, Bing with Copilot. And assistants people open to ask a question: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok. Most of them search the web before they answer and show the pages they used.

Why it is one job, not two

Google answers the question directly. Its guide to generative AI features says optimising for them "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO", and its page on AI features and your website adds: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." A page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet, the same condition as for a classic result.

Microsoft says the same from the Bing side. Its advice on AI search answers opens its checklist with "Traditional SEO is still essential", naming crawlability, metadata and internal links as "the baseline".

The one survey we found on the question points the same way. In Semrush's 2026 AI Visibility Index, 81% of organisations that run SEO and AI visibility as one workflow reported more traffic or leads from AI platforms, against 36% of those that manage the two separately. It is a vendor's survey of its own market, so take it as a direction rather than a rule.

This is how we work too. GEO is part of our normal SEO work, with no separate budget line: the same pages, checked for one more place where they can appear.

What GEO adds to the SEO you already do

The assistants, one by one

Each one finds its sources in its own way, and only two of them tell site owners anything. This table gathers what each company documents.

Which ones matter in Morocco? Statcounter tracks where the visits to the websites it measures come from. For Morocco in October 2026, its figures split the visits sent by AI assistants as follows: ChatGPT 47.7%, Gemini 40.4%, Perplexity 8%, Claude 2.8%, Copilot 1.1%. Seen against everything else, assistants sent 0.13% of the visits that came from search engines, social networks and assistants together, and search engines 84.8%. AI Overviews and AI Mode are not in the assistants' share: they sit inside Google Search, where our study of 70 searches found an AI Overview first on 69.

What stays exactly the same

• Pages Google can crawl and index. Nothing reaches an AI answer from a page the engine cannot read.
• Content worth citing. Google's guide asks for "non-commodity" content: first-hand facts, figures and experience a summary cannot find elsewhere.
• Text, not images. Google asks that important content be "available in textual form", and Microsoft lists key information hidden in images, tabs or PDFs among the mistakes.
• Your Business Profile and Merchant Center. Google names both as sources to keep up to date.
• Reputation. Links and mentions from real sites, earned rather than bought.

What you do not need

• An llms.txt file for Google. Google writes that "Google Search itself doesn't use them" and that adding one "will neither harm nor help". Some audit tools flag a missing one. It costs little to add, but it is not where results come from.
• Special markup. In Google's words, "there's no special schema.org markup you need to add". Structured data still helps when it matches what the page shows.
• Pages cut into chunks for machines. Google's mythbusting section lists chunking and AI-specific rewriting among the things you can skip. Write for the reader.
• Pages written by the hundred with AI. Google's spam policies treat mass-produced pages made to rank as scaled content abuse.
• A guaranteed place in ChatGPT. Nobody owns the answers, so nobody can sell a place in them.

Where to start

1. Check the doors. Your robots.txt, your firewall and your host should let in Googlebot, Bing and the search crawlers above. In Search Console, the new Search generative AI control (Settings, then Search generative AI) should stay on include, the default. Excluding a site removes it from AI Overviews and AI Mode.
2. Put the facts in plain text. Services, cities, hours, delays and what a client receives, with the answer in the first lines of each section.
3. Keep them the same everywhere. Your site, your Business Profile and your directory profiles should agree on names, addresses and services.
4. Earn mentions. Directories of your sector, partners, the local press. Assistants weigh what others say about you.
5. Measure what can be measured. The generative AI report in Search Console, AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, and visits from the assistants in Analytics.

Our free audit includes a first look at this: whether AI crawlers can read your site, and whether AI answers mention your business today.