Onkar Kailas Shankarpelli · Founder, Growth Sequences
Search engine optimisation (SEO) gets a page ranked by Google. Generative engine optimisation (GEO) gets a business understood, trusted and cited by AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode. They share foundations but reward different things, and the overlap between them has collapsed: in mid-2025, 76% of pages cited in Google AI Overviews also ranked in the top ten; by 2026 that was 38% (Ahrefs), and across the major AI assistants only about 12% of cited URLs rank in the top ten for the same question (Ahrefs, May 2026). Ranking is still worth having. It no longer guarantees you're in the answer.
What changed, and when?
Two things.
Buyers moved. Half of B2B software buyers now start research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% a year earlier (G2, 2026). AI Overviews now appear on 82% of B2B technology queries, up from 36% the year before (BrightEdge, February 2026). And 68% of US Google searches end without a click (2026), because the answer was on the page.
Google changed how AI Overviews choose sources. In late January 2026 Google moved AI Overviews to a newer model and to a process called query fan-out: a single question is split into several related sub-questions, each is searched, and the sources that appear across the most sub-questions get cited. So a page that ranks first for the exact phrase can lose the citation to a page that covers the topic's neighbouring questions better. That's why the top-ten overlap halved in a year.
The open-web assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini) were never tightly tied to Google rankings in the first place. Their overlap with the top ten runs from roughly one in three for Perplexity down to single digits for ChatGPT.
What's the actual difference?
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank on the results page | Be cited or recommended inside the answer |
| Unit of success | Position for a keyword | Presence and accuracy in a response to a prompt |
| What it rewards | Relevance, authority, technical health, backlinks | Clear entity definition, direct answers, sourced statistics, topical breadth, consistency across the web |
| Content shape | Comprehensive pages, keyword-targeted | Self-contained paragraphs, definitions, tables, FAQs, question headings |
| Trust signals | Backlinks, domain authority | Reviews, directories, third-party mentions, structured data, being cited by others |
| Where it's decided | Mostly on your site | Your site plus everything the web says about you |
| How you measure it | Rankings, clicks, Search Console | Citation share, brand mentions in AI answers, accuracy of how you're described |
| Failure mode | You don't rank | You rank, but the AI describes your competitor |
The shared foundation is real: both reward clear structure, real expertise, fast and crawlable pages, and content people actually find useful. A site with good SEO fundamentals has a head start on GEO. But the head start is shorter than it used to be.
Why do AI systems cite different pages?
Because they're answering a different question. Google ranks pages that are relevant to a query. An AI system assembles an answer, and it cites the sources that helped it do that. Those are pages that:
State things plainly. A paragraph that can be lifted out of context and still make sense is citable. A paragraph that depends on the three before it isn't.
Define the entity. "Company X is a Pune-based firm that does Y for Z" is something an AI can use. A homepage that opens with "Reimagine what's possible" gives it nothing.
Bring numbers with names attached. Statistics with a source get extracted. "Industry-leading" gets ignored.
Cover the neighbourhood. Because of fan-out, a page that answers the question and the four questions next to it beats a page that answers only the exact phrase.
Agree with the rest of the web. AI systems cross-check. If your site says one thing and your directory listings, reviews and LinkedIn say another, confidence drops and the citation goes elsewhere.
Can be crawled. Content that only renders with JavaScript, or sits behind an interaction, or is on a site that blocks AI crawlers, doesn't exist to these systems. A surprising number of sites block them by default through their CDN or firewall settings and don't know it.
None of this is exotic. Most of it is structural, and most of it is invisible on a site that looks perfectly good to a human.
Does this mean SEO is dead?
No, and anyone who says so is selling something.
Google still sends the overwhelming majority of search traffic. AI search accounts for under 2% of B2B search sessions; organic search is above 96% (Octane11, Q2 2026). SEO fundamentals are also the foundation GEO sits on: a site that's slow, thin or technically broken won't be cited either.
What's changed is that SEO has stopped being sufficient. A business can hold position one and be absent from the AI answer that most of its buyers read first. The influence of AI is in the shortlist, not the traffic: seven in ten B2B buyers chose a different vendor than planned because of AI guidance (G2, 2026). Being missing from that conversation is a cost that doesn't show up in your rankings report.
What should you do?
Six things, roughly in order.
- Ask the AI systems about your business. Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Ask "what is [your company]?" and "who are the best [your category] companies in [your market]?" Note what's wrong, what's vague and who's there instead of you. This is your baseline.
- Put an entity statement on your homepage and About page. One plain paragraph: what the business is, what it does, who for, where. If an AI can't find that sentence, it'll make one up from what others say.
- Restructure your most important pages for extraction. Direct answer near the top. Question-style headings. Self-contained paragraphs. A table where there's a comparison. An FAQ with short answers. Schema markup.
- Put sources on your statistics, or remove them. Every number should have a name and a link next to it. Unsourced claims are invisible to AI and increasingly to people.
- Fix your footprint. Make sure your name, description and claims are consistent across your site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories and review sites. Then build the third-party layer: real reviews, listings, mentions.
- Check you're not blocking the crawlers. Review robots.txt and your CDN or firewall rules for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and the rest. Decide deliberately.
Then measure. Track citation share and how you're described, not just rankings, and re-check quarterly, because the sources AI systems cite change fast.
If you're building or rebuilding a website, all of this is far cheaper to design in than to retrofit. That's the case for doing SEO and GEO as one discipline from the start, which is how we work.
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