GEO vs SEO: what overlaps and what's different

Most of GEO is SEO. If your pages are crawlable, indexed, fast and clearly written, you have done most of the work for AI search too, and Google says outright that its AI features need nothing extra.

The rest is where sites get caught out: AI engines use their own crawlers, which robots.txt rules and firewalls treat separately, they may not run your JavaScript, and they quote passages instead of ranking pages. This post covers what overlaps, where the two differ, and what to check if your SEO is already in good shape.

What is SEO, and what is GEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the work of getting pages crawled, indexed and ranked in a list of search results, mostly on Google and Bing. Success is a position on a results page and the clicks that follow.

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of making pages easy for AI answer engines such as ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot to fetch, read and cite. The output is a written answer with a few source links, so the question becomes whether your page is one of the sources. Our GEO basics post covers the basics in more detail.

How much of GEO is plain SEO?

We went through our own ruleset to put a number on it. Georate's score (ruleset 2026.10) has 58 scored checks. We marked each one that a standard SEO audit for Google and Bing wouldn't cover. That left 14: robots.txt and firewall access for the AI-specific crawlers, content that has to be in the raw HTML, and passage-level writing (question-style headings, a direct answer at the start of each section, passages that stand alone, a definition near the top).

Weighted the way the score weights them, those 14 checks are worth about 31% of the total. The other 69% is indexability, canonical URLs, sitemaps, titles, structured data, dates and trust signals, which an SEO already checks. The split is our judgement, and it assumes every check applies to the page (product checks don't apply to an article, for example), so take it as a rough proportion rather than a precise figure.

Google's own position goes further. Its guide to AI features says there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode": a page has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet, and you don't need new machine-readable files or special schema.org markup. That is true for Google. The other engines run their own crawlers, which is where the gap opens.

GEO vs SEO at a glance

Where GEO and SEO differ

AI engines use crawlers that SEO never had to think about

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode come from the normal Google index, so Googlebot is the crawler that matters there. Google says robots.txt rules for Googlebot are the control for Search, including its AI features, and that Google-Extended covers training and grounding in Google's other systems, not Search. Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Guidelines likewise cover Bing search, Copilot and grounding results together, all built on bingbot.

ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Claude run their own search crawlers. As of October 2026, OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and that its settings are independent of GPTBot, the training crawler. A site that only ever tuned robots.txt for Google can block these crawlers without anyone noticing, because no SEO tool reports on them.

The usual way this happens is a bot-protection rule. A firewall or CDN setting that blocks "AI bots" or anything that isn't a known search engine returns 403 to OAI-SearchBot while Googlebot gets through, and robots.txt still looks fine.

A named robots.txt group replaces the * group

This one catches people when they add AI crawlers to an existing robots.txt. Under the robots.txt standard, RFC 9309, a crawler follows the group that names it and only falls back to User-agent: * when no group matches. So in this file, the /account/ rule no longer applies to OAI-SearchBot:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /account/

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

We checked it with the robots.txt parser our checks use: /account/settings comes back allowed for OAI-SearchBot and blocked for Googlebot. Any rule you want every crawler to follow has to be repeated in each named group. Our own robots.txt repeats Disallow: /report/ in every group for this reason. Here is a template to adapt:

# Template: allow AI search crawlers, keep private paths private for everyone
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
User-agent: PerplexityBot
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /
Disallow: /account/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /account/

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Listing several User-agent lines above one set of rules is valid and keeps the file short. The Robots.txt Checker shows which line each crawler matches, which is the quickest way to catch this.

Google runs your JavaScript; AI crawlers may not

A site that renders its content in the browser can still rank in Google, because Google renders JavaScript before indexing. The AI-specific crawlers mostly don't document whether they run JavaScript, and Bing's guidelines warn against hiding critical content behind client-side rendering.

So a page that's fine for SEO can be an empty <div id="root"></div> to an AI crawler. Check what arrives without JavaScript:

curl -s -A "OAI-SearchBot" https://example.com/ | grep -ic "<h1"

A count of 0 means the heading only appears after JavaScript runs. Server-side rendering or static generation fixes it for every crawler at once, Google included.

SEO ranks pages; AI answers quote passages

A results page shows your title and a snippet, and the reader clicks through to the whole page. An AI answer pulls one or two passages into its own text and links to the source. That changes what good writing looks like at the section level.

• Phrase headings the way people ask, so a section matches a question.
• Answer in the first sentence or two of the section, then give the detail.
• Avoid sections that depend on the previous one ("as mentioned above"), since they read badly when quoted alone.
• Use specific facts, numbers and dates, which are easier to attribute than general claims.

None of this hurts SEO, and most of it is good writing anyway. It's also where we're least able to show cause and effect: nobody outside the AI companies knows exactly how they choose passages, so treat it as making a page easy to quote, not as a way to get quoted.

The opt-out controls are different

SEO has noindex and nosnippet. For Google, those also cover AI Overviews and AI Mode: a page needs to be snippet-eligible to appear, so nosnippet or max-snippet:0 keeps it out, and data-nosnippet keeps a single section out.

Bing adds controls that matter only for AI. Its guidelines say noarchive keeps content out of Copilot answers and grounding results, and nocache limits Copilot to the URL, title and snippet. Microsoft's 2023 announcement says pages with either tag still appear in normal Bing results. That makes noarchive, often added years ago to hide cached copies, a tag worth checking if Copilot never cites you.

Rankings are measurable; citations mostly aren't

SEO has decades of tooling for rankings and clicks. For AI answers there is much less. Google counts traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode inside the "Web" search type in Search Console, together with the rest of your search traffic. Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report showing which pages Copilot cites. We don't know of an equivalent from OpenAI, Perplexity or Anthropic as of October 2026.

That's also why Georate's score is a diagnostic: it tells you whether a page can be fetched, read and quoted, not whether it has been.

If your SEO is already good, check these four things

• AI search crawlers get a 200. Look for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot in robots.txt, and test the firewall too, since a 403 there doesn't show in the file.
• Named groups repeat your private rules. Every Disallow in User-agent: * that should apply to everyone is repeated in each named group.
• The content is in the raw HTML. Run the curl command above on your key templates, not just the home page.
• No leftover opt-outs. Look for nosnippet, max-snippet:0 and Bing's noarchive or nocache on pages you want cited.

If you want to block AI training without leaving AI search, that's possible with most vendors. Disallow GPTBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended and keep the search crawlers allowed; the GEO basics post has the full list by purpose.

Next step

Start with crawler access, since it's the part SEO tools don't look at. The AI Crawler Checker sends a request as each AI search crawler and reports what came back, including firewall blocks. To see the whole picture for one page, SEO overlap included, run the full Georate check.

If you've measured something that contradicts this post, write to contact@georate.me.