In order to survive the ever-changing digital marketing landscape, one must keep up or risk falling behind. It may sound ominous and scary, but it is true. The world does not stop for anyone—it keeps moving. So, what should we do? The answer is simple: keep up with the world. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the latest shift in the marketing world. It is nothing short of a revolution, changing how people search for and interact with information on the internet. Today, many digital marketers are worried that this new innovation may make their existing knowledge obsolete. In this article, we aim to ease such fears and explain the basics clearly.

In this article you will learn the following things:

• What is GEO?
• How does it gather information and deliver the result?
• What makes it different from SEO?
• Are SEO tactics useful for GEO?

What Is GEO?

GEO stands for “Generative Engine Optimization,” which basically means you optimize your content to gain visibility in AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc. So, whenever someone looks for any query—for example, “bakery in Vijayawada”—you can get a list of agencies. Pretty cool, right? While it won’t show more details than Google, it is still a good thing because these LLMs are only going to get more popular over time.

How does it gather information and deliver the result?

AI bots do not browse the web like humans. When you type a query such as “Best beauty parlor in Vijayawada,” the AI first analyzes your text to understand your intent. It identifies key phrases—like “best parlor in Vijayawada”—and interprets the context. Based on this understanding, GPT generates a response using its trained knowledge or, if connected to external tools, can fetch structured information from search engines. The result often appears in a concise, snippet-like format, making it easy to read and understand.

The structured data returned includes:

• Title: Name of the company or website
• URL: Direct link to the website
• Description/snippet: Short text extracted from the page
• Extra metadata: Ratings, reviews, opening hours, address (if available)

Once the AI bot receives raw snippet data, it performs data cleaning and parsing. This means it extracts key and relevant details such as company name, location, rating, and URL. It filters out duplicate or irrelevant data and sorts the results based on rating, popularity, or snippet context. If some information, like phone number or address, is missing, the AI does not consider it when delivering results.

Important point: It never loads the full page, downloads hidden content, or interacts with forms. It only sees what the snippet gives it. Which means if your snippet is clear, informative, and well-structured, both humans and AI “see” it more easily, giving you a better chance to rank.

What makes it different from SEO?

SEO and GEO were both revolutionary when they first emerged. For decades, SEO has helped brands become visible in search engines like Google. Today, GEO helps people rank in AI chatbots, which are becoming increasingly popular. Understanding how GEO and SEO are similar and different will help you optimize your content for both traditional SEO and AI-driven chatbot searches.

Similarities:

• Both focus on high-quality, relevant content that meets user needs and adheres to standards of E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).
• Both require technical aspects such as loading speed, mobile friendliness, and crawlability. AI obviously can’t see these details, but search engines do.
• Both use keywords to improve discoverability and relevance, but GEO focuses more on intent, context, and structured data.
• Both prioritize writing good and engaging content that is well-structured, detailed, and comprehensive.
• Both need authority before they rank websites.
• Both are constantly evolving, adopting new strategies every year as algorithms and technology change to maintain and improve content visibility and performance.

Differences:

• SEO helps websites show up in search engines as a list of links, while GEO helps AI give quick and complete answers by understanding and using content.
• SEO focuses on putting the right words in titles and text so search engines rank pages higher, but GEO ensures the content is easy to understand and meaningful so AI can give correct answers.
• SEO tries to make each webpage rank well, but GEO looks at how AI combines information from many sources to give full answers.
• SEO matches words to what people search for to get clicks, while GEO uses AI to understand exactly what people mean and gives smarter answers.
• SEO organizes content for search engines to read, but GEO makes content in a way AI can easily understand, like using clear formats and structured information.
• SEO studies keywords and technical details to plan improvements, while GEO looks at how AI uses content, what topics it prefers, and how it cites information to improve strategy.
• SEO checks how well words and pages perform in search results, and GEO observes how AI presents content, which sources it uses, and how it builds answers to know what works best.

Are SEO tactics useful for GEO?

Many digital marketers claim that GEO is just SEO at best. But are they 100% correct? The answer is a little more complicated than that.

Chunking Content Is the King

There are AEO/GEO experts who emphasize that content should be written in chunks because AI and large language models (LLMs) process pages in smaller pieces—think of it like a student who prefers a precise answer over a long-winded one. AI is similar that way. Bing’s guide to Answer Engine Optimization, written by Krishna Madhavan, Principal Product Manager at Bing, supports this idea:

“AI assistants don’t read a page from top to bottom like a human. Instead, they break content into smaller, usable pieces through a process called parsing. These modular pieces are what get ranked and used to generate answers.”

Chunking content has existed for at least a few years. In 2020, Google introduced the Passage Ranking algorithm, which breaks up a webpage into small, concise sections on the search engine results page to provide short, relevant answers to queries.

Conclusion

AI has been integrated into traditional search by Google and Bing for nearly a decade, so AI search ranking is not new. SEO best practices align closely with ranking for AI-generated answers. While many SEOs still focus on traditional keyword optimization, AEO and GEO discussions offer a valuable opportunity to learn concepts like disambiguation and content precision. Ultimately, there is no separate AEO or GEO—it’s all SEO, evolving to better serve both AI and human users. Do you want to learn GEO? Then join sreemedia agency.