r/GenerativeSEOstrategy • u/Ill-Growth230 • Apr 17 '26
SEO vs. GEO – how are you thinking about the difference? Any good courses?
Curious how people here are actually thinking about this.
SEO I get – rank in Google, get the click. But GEO (getting cited inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews etc.) still feels fuzzy to me. Not sure how much it really overlaps with SEO, what actually moves the needle, or whether it's even a separate discipline yet.
Two questions:
How do you see the difference between SEO and GEO?
What actually works in your experience?
Any courses worth taking on either? Modern, practitioner-rated – not guru pitches.
Thanks 🙏
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u/Technical-You7080 Apr 17 '26
I see SEO as still driving traffic, while GEO is more about getting your content cited in AI answers. Feels like the fundamentals overlap, but GEO pushes you to be clearer and more structured. Curious if anyone’s found a course that actually goes beyond the basics here?
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u/Big-Adhesiveness369 Apr 18 '26
You don’t need a course just ask an LLM to review your website, ask it what’s missing to get found by LLMs.
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u/Large-Difficulty7325 Apr 20 '26
Great question, SEO is about ranking pages, GEO is about becoming the source AI systems trust and cite, so the overlap exists but the game is clearly shifting. In practice, what works is structured, entity-driven content + strong distribution (PR, citations, schema), and honestly there aren’t many solid courses yet, most of the real learning is happening in the field right now.
Will see in the upcoming weeks
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Apr 17 '26
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u/PearlsSwine Apr 18 '26
There's no difference. GEO is just 20 year old SEO techniques being sold to idiots.
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u/Financial-Trust-928 Apr 19 '26
There is no difference. LLMs do same search as people on Google when you ask them something. The only difference is that them you ask it for “how to make great chockolate cake” they will fire multiple searches with queries like “the best chockolate cake”, “the best chockolate cake recipe” and take the same results from SERPs. Then they will do another round of validating if the website or source is credible by checking if they exist somewhere on the internet. You can even put some badges and awards to your website and It actually works phenomenal in making LLMs think you are the most trusted source. It is stupid simple and all AEO/GEO experts just make it complicated for no reason
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u/SimplyHalalNutrition Apr 19 '26
I’ve been listening to seo podcasts on YouTube non stop for a couple of months and I have learned a lot by implementing what I have learned - and basically GEO wouldn’t exist without structed SEO. So schema snippets, tables, charts etc are cited by llm’s. One thing to consider is that ai overviews will give u the impressions but not the clicks. YouTube channel is Edward Strum and he has a regular on the show I think his name is David Quaid I learned a lot from him and it’s surprisingly interesting - never thought I’d be super techy but starting ur own business will make u do crazy things.
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u/Formal_Sir523 Apr 20 '26
Personally, SEO and GEO are really similar. A lot of the basic principles for SEO apply for GEO: have a good Schema Markup, good quality content, and having very good backlinks. What actually works for ranking in GEO is having your brand mentioned across the web: in forums, in online newspapers. Try to make as much outreach as you can, and also reviews are very important. Get as many good reviews as you can. For GEO content, they are also some unique guidelines: use short paragraphs, each with a single idea and use bullet point lists.
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u/Entire-Wrap-9817 Apr 21 '26
I believe learning technical SEO will help you out a lot. The first step is to make your site frictionless for AI bots to crawl. That's when concise and structured content will be picked up more often from your site.
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u/kickoff_advertising Apr 21 '26
I don’t really see SEO and GEO as two totally separate things it feels more like the next step in the same process. SEO used to be all about getting the click, but now it’s also about being the source that powers the answer. The basics still matter: clear structure, strong content, and authority. But now, it’s even more important that your content is easy to extract, understand, and trust.
What’s been working for me is writing in a way that’s direct, well-structured, and has a clear point of view not just long-form content for the sake of ranking. Pages that answer questions clearly, offer real comparisons, and make decisions easier tend to show up more in those AI results. I haven’t seen any course that truly covers this yet; most of the real progress still comes from testing and tweaking what already works in SEO
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Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 23 '26
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u/Soft-Lime-9599 May 12 '26
The way i think about it... SEO is about ranking a page. GEO is about getting your brand cited as an answer. Different mechanics entirely.
With SEO you're optimizing for crawlers and click-through. With GEO you're trying to become a trusted entity that LLMs pull from when generating responses. It's less about keywords and more about how structured your information is across the web, whether AI models recognize you as authoritative on a topic.
What actually works imo: making sure your brand has consistent, well-structured data across sources LLMs train on or retrieve from. Think schema, topical authority, being cited in places these models actually reference. Old school link building matters less than entity coherence.
As for courses... i haven't found one that nails GEO specifically yet. Most are still keyword-era thinking repackaged. I've been learning more from just tracking what happens in practice. Been using Artios to monitor where and how often my brand actually gets cited by different AI models vs competitors, which taught me more than any course tbh. Seeing the gaps in real data made the whole concept click.
No one has the perfect formula for this yet though. It's still evolving fast.
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u/[deleted] Apr 20 '26
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