SEO and GEO: what is the difference for your website?

SEO: help the right people find your site

You run an online store or sell services independently. Your future customer has a question, is looking for a product or is comparing solutions. Search engine optimization, or SEO, aims to make your pages visible when they answer that search.

Before aiming for a better ranking, search engines need to access and understand your pages. Google describes three minimum technical requirements: let its crawler access the content, serve a working page and provide indexable content. Meeting these conditions does not guarantee indexing. See Google’s requirements.

Take a fictional ceramics shop. A product page states a cup’s capacity, care instructions and production time. This information helps visitors decide. A page that only repeats ‘beautiful handmade cup’ leaves their questions unanswered.

GEO: be understood and cited in an AI answer

Someone may also ask an assistant how to choose a cup for their needs. Depending on the service and question, the answer may mention brands, cite pages or suggest links for further reading. This is the visibility GEO aims to understand.

Assistants and search engines’ AI features are not a single channel. An observation on one tool at a particular time does not automatically describe your presence on others. Record the test context before comparing results.

For Google Search’s generative features, Google continues to rely on clear technical foundations and SEO practices. It also states that following its recommendations does not guarantee a page will appear. These guidelines concern Google, not how every assistant works. Read Google’s official guide to its AI features.

What you observe is not quite the same

Keep one shared question for your business: are these visitors and mentions actually relevant to what you sell? An answer to a question far removed from your offer is not as useful as a page viewed by someone looking for exactly your service.

Where should you start when you do everything yourself?

1. Choose one important page. An offer, category or product you genuinely want to sell. Avoid starting with twenty pages at once.
2. Check its condition. Is it accessible? Does its main content appear? Search Console distinguishes what Google knows from a test of the current page. Understand URL inspection.
3. Answer pre-purchase questions. Who is your offer for? What does it include? What are its limits and conditions of use?
4. Add verifiable evidence. A product demonstration, explained screenshots or a method you can actually show.
5. Record the starting point. Keep the observations, date and change made. You can then compare without attributing everything to your latest change.

If you don’t yet know what is holding your page back, start by understanding what an automated SEO audit can check. Diagnosis should come before changes.

Shortcuts that do not help you decide

Do not treat an occasional appearance as a promise of lasting visibility. Nor should you treat a crawler visiting your site as proof that your business was recommended. These are different observations.

For content, I recommend starting with questions your customers actually ask. A short page that clearly explains your product is more useful to them than a long text that talks around it. Google recommends content useful to its audience and says it has no preferred word count. Read its recommendations on helpful content.