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In my article on what GEO is I explained why getting cited by AI is the new frontier of visibility. Since then, the question I get most often has changed: no longer “what is GEO?” but “should I stop investing in SEO and move everything to GEO?”.
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Short answer: no. Longer answer: the real strategy is how to split the investment, and that’s what we’ll look at in this article.
The real picture, without alarmism
The numbers say two things that are simultaneously true.
AI search is growing at an impressive pace. ChatGPT has passed 900 million weekly users and Google’s AI Overviews now appear in over a quarter of searches. A growing share of purchase journeys begins (and sometimes ends) inside a generated answer.
Google remains dominant by a wide margin. Search volume on Google continues to be enormously higher than that of any AI assistant, and for local and transactional searches (“plumber near me”, “running shoes deal”) traditional search remains the main channel.
Translated: whoever abandons SEO today gives up the channel that still brings the majority of traffic; whoever ignores GEO hands competitors the channel that will grow the most in the coming years.
The good news: 70% of the work is the same
SEO and GEO aren’t two separate building sites. The foundations coincide.
- Content that answers real questions, directly and verifiably: Google rewards it, AI cites it.
- Clear structure (hierarchical headings, self-contained paragraphs, FAQs): it helps the crawler and helps the model extracting passages.
- Authority and consistency across multiple sources: E-E-A-T for Google, perceived reliability for AI.
- Structured data and factual information: readable by both.
The difference lies in the remaining 30%: GEO adds attention to how AI systems extract and cite (explicit statistics, sharp definitions, quotable passages, presence on the sources models draw from), while SEO keeps its technical specifics (link building, crawl optimisation, the local pack).
How to split the budget: three profiles
Local business (restaurant, practice, tradesperson). Local SEO 80-90%, GEO 10-20%. Your decisive searches still go through Google and Maps; here GEO is done by curating consistent data and reviews — the same things AI reads when someone asks for “a good accountant in [city]”.
B2B SME / professional services. SEO 60-70%, GEO 30-40%. Your clients run complex informational searches — exactly the ground where AI is eroding Google. The authoritative content you publish works on both fronts.
Brands whose content is the asset (publishing, education, SaaS). Heading towards 50/50. If your model lives on informational visibility, the erosion of clicks by AI answers hits you first: you need to control the citations, not just the rankings.
What to measure (because “Google position” is no longer enough)
Add to your monitoring: how often your brand is cited in AI answers for your industry’s key queries (periodic manual tests or dedicated tools), referral traffic from AI assistants, and AI Overviews impressions in Search Console. And accept a new fact: part of the value will be visibility without clicks — your name in the answer, even when the user doesn’t visit the site.
In practice
It’s not a derby. In 2026-2027 there’s only one sensible strategy: excellent content as the common base, SEO for the present that pays the bills, GEO for the future that’s already eating the present. The proportions depend on your business model, not on fashions.
If you want to understand how your site is positioned on both fronts, the audit I offer covers SEO and GEO together.
Frequently asked questions about GEO and SEO
Will SEO die? It will transform. Transactional and local searches stay on Google; informational ones partly migrate to AI. The SEO of 2027 includes GEO — it isn’t replaced by it.
Can I do GEO without doing SEO? Hardly: AI systems largely draw on content that ranks well and on authoritative sources. Wanting to do GEO without SEO foundations is like trying to build a roof without having the house.
How much does adding GEO to my strategy cost? If your content is already high quality, GEO adaptation is an extension of existing work, not an entirely separate budget: it’s about structure, data and presence on the right sources.
How do I know whether AI systems cite me? By periodically testing your industry’s key questions on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and monitoring referral traffic from those domains in your site statistics.
Do AI citations bring real clients? Yes, and often more qualified ones: whoever arrives from an AI recommendation has already been pre-selected. Volume is lower than Google traffic today, but conversion tends to be higher.
