There’s no shortage of debate on GEO vs SEO right now. Whether it’s at events, Facebook, Reddit, or private groups, things are starting to get a little heated.
So is GEO the Same as SEO?
The short answer is no. While there are a ton of similarities, and they share basically all the same tactics, the main difference is in the weighting. GEO optimization is going to require different priorities, and a different focus, than a regular SEO strategy. The key areas of difference are:
- Offsite Strategy
- Content Structure Strategy
- Technical Strategy
Offsite vs Onsite
Traditional SEO has always had an offsite component, mostly focused around backlinks, with higher tier SEOs often including off-site mentions as part of the overall strategy.
In GEO, that offsite mention becomes way more important. LLMs use aggregate date, so having a wider range of high authority delivering consistent messaging around your brand, products or services, and other information suddenly becomes critical for a GEO strategy.
GEO optimization is highly complementary to your overall strategy, but it does require a little more work, and it’s more difficult to find relevant off-site placements willing to include your content.
Content
Content is king, and AI hasn’t changed that one bit, but how you write the content has changed. First off, the AI crawlers have far less patience than Google. Most LLMs are only going to look at 400-800 words (caveat, that may change in the future) so it’s more important than ever to get that important content at the top of the page. For many SEO’s shorter content has already been a strategy for some terms, but now, it’s become far more common for effective AI ranking.
How you write has also changed, and I’m probably doing a bad job of it on this content, but AI pulls in “bites” of content, shorter, more succinct sections of content tend to do better than wordy content. Surprisingly this is hotly debated, despite many real life examples of this working, this has been spurred by Danny Sullivan of Google saying this (along with GEO) is not recommended. For those of us on the ground however, we’ve heard Google push against SEO techniques in the past, this is nothing new.
Effective GEO content strategies include
- Answer up front, provide a summary and an overall answer to a query before you start the regular content
- Facts matter – link to sources & include verified quotes
- Modularize your content – simple “liftable” sections that AI can reference and use
- Avoid fluff – keep your content to the point (this can conflict with writing for humans, prioritize accordingly)
Technical Strategy
A solid technical GEO strategy is the same as an SEO strategy, except for one big thing. and as with content length, it all comes down to most AI’s simply crawling differently. Most LLMs and AI crawlers will not render Javascript.
If you’re utilizing heavy javascript on sites, you need a non-javascript version. If you use javascript elements, it’s unlikely to be crawled.
This is a particular issue for FAQ’s an important part of every SEO’s content strategy. A vast amount of sites incorporate FAQ’s in to an accordian style output, especially for core FAQ pages. A lot of these simply can’t be read by LLM and AI crawlers, and to make that worse, it’s some of the best content for AI visibility.
Make sure whatever content you put on your site, there’s a viable non-javascript version.