Andreessen Horowitz calls it “Act II of search” and says the 80-billion-dollar SEO market just cracked.
Alts.co’s recent newsletter echoes the shift, arguing that a new discipline, Generative Engine Optimization, is forming as LLMs become the first place people ask questions.
Not only is AI referral traffic growing, but it is also more valuable, with Semrush recently sharing an article highlighting that AI referral traffic is up to 4.4x more valuable than SEO traffic, due to it being higher intent and often pre-warmed.
Pace Generative was highlighted in the Alts piece for helping brands win early in GEO. The rest of this guide breaks down exactly how.
As of June 2025, GEO is still a nascent discipline. In fact, there is controversy around whether or not it only deserves to be considered a separate discipline from SEO.
The controversy makes some sense. As SEO has evolved, a lot of the best practices for ranking in Google include action points that should help with Google’s AI Overviews, and with LLMs in general.
It’s easy to understand why an SEO would say “It’s the same thing, everything you would do for ranking in LLMs is already something we do for ranking in Google”.
On the surface yes, but in reality, there are a lot of differences.
These differences are already showing up in research pieces.
Profound, a tool that helps people track their AI visibility ran an experiment which found only 13% correlation between Google search results and LLM recommendations for the same search queries. 13% is a tiny amount.
In addition, Chosenly ran a similar experiment and found 30% overlap, concluding that “Simply put, even if you’re ranking well on Google, you might still be invisible on ChatGPT. This critical insight underlines the importance of distinct AISO efforts.”
– Note: while GEO is emerging as the dominant term, some people refer to the discipline of improving your AI traffic as AISEO, AEO, or LLMSEO. It’s all the same thing (except SEO).
While it’s true that the top websites on the internet will have high quality SEO, and therefore are more likely to show up in LLMs as well, the Profound research experiment found that Google is much more likely to favour the reputation and authority of a domain, than what is being posted. ChatGPT on the other hand, prefers longer, well thought-out research pieces with evidence, statistics, and well organized structure.
In other words, you CAN compete in GEO where you might struggle in SEO.
In fact, the lower ranked you are, the bigger the difference GEO can make in both AI Overview (the AI answers at the top of Google) and LLM impressions.
The table below shows the improvement seen by performing certain GEO tasks on websites. The lower they were ranked (rank 5) the bigger the impact.
Websites ranked lower in Google saw as much as 99% Relative Improvement in their visibility from GEO efforts.
This is huge.
In this article, we’re going to summarize where GEO and SEO overlap, and where there are key differences.
A large part of our findings comes from our own experiments and case studies, coupled with the research performed by other data scientists. No guesswork here.
We’ve identified 6 best practices for GEO that are distinct enough from SEO to be considered worth of attention. Over time, we are sure more will be added.
1. Authoritative Tone…Sometimes
Yes, simply writing in a more authoritative tone can make a big difference to the likelihood AI references or recommends your website in certain scenarios. These are mostly debate related queries, where being authoritative is more likely to be interpreted positively by AI.
This is distinct from SEO, where “being an authority” is a big part of E-A-T-T, but little credence is put into the style you write in, and rarely moves the needle by itself.
With AI, it’s actually the inverse. Writing in an authoritative style is enough to convince AI of your authority. Even better if you can provide sources to back up your confidence of course. (Speaking of which, here’s our source: https://arxiv.org/html/2311.09735v3)
I added this ranking factor first because it is often cited on other “How to do GEO” blogs, but it is not as important as it may appear.
2. On-Page Hygiene and Fluency
Writing fluency is generally good practice any time. Copyediting is important regardless of your goal. Want to rank higher in Google? Great. Want to get more conversions on your sales page? Great.
But did you know according to the research we cited earlier, spotless grammar and varied sentence length can be responsible for a lift in your GEO performance? Yeah, we were surprised too. Get those tpyos fixed.
To quote the research paper we read: “Interestingly, stylistic changes such as improving the fluency and readability of the source text, i.e. methods Fluency Optimization and Easy-to-Understand also resulted in a significant boost of 15 – 30 % in visibility.”
While it’s not as big a lift as some of the other things on this list, it is one of the easier things to implement.
3. Adding Citations
Again, this is something SEO practitioners will say is already an SEO best practice, but in GEO it is critical, and is one of the 3 highest influencers. The other key difference in GEO is that citations have to be AI friendly, and very obvious. It’s not enough to just hyperlink to an article, you need to call it out as a citation. Researchers found that adding citations to an article made the biggest impression overall, particularly in fact based queries.
AI doesn’t trust your backlink profile, it trusts your research. Or more specifically, it trusts you because you show you did research.
4. Quotes
Adding quotes (with proper attribution) also makes a big difference, resulting in an improvement of 99.1% in the researchers findings.
Looking at the table below, we can see this again.
5. Adding Statistics
Statistics are often viewed as a “nice to have” in SEO and while many people add them if they have them, the research shows in GEO it is mission-critical.
And like with the other items above, it is not just enough to add them, you need to do it in the right way. Well structured, cited, token-friendly, and something easy for LLMs to quote.
For example, if you write “millions of people travel on the train every day”, it is nowhere near as good as writing “5M people travel every day” because “5M” is a token, but “millions” is undefined.
6. Being A Source – Or Being Cited By Sources
The first 5 points above deal with your own website and the on-page changes and optimizes you can make (or we can make for you). The next item deals more with off-page, and could actually be split into two items.
The first is, being one of the sources ChatGPT and co rely on when answering a query. This doesn’t necessarily mean forming part of their training data. It means when somebody queries something and their LLM does a quick search to find the answer, trying to make sure YOUR site is one of the sources used.
In SEO, this is increasingly done by being viewed as an authoritative source by Google, which used to be just about building your backlink profile, but is more opaque in 2025.
In GEO, it’s not tied specifically to the same metrics Google uses, which is why there’s such little overlap between sources cited. Yes, being well known and being an authority helps, but where Google values the authority of a domain, ChatGPT values the body of work you’ve created instead. Remember the 5 points we just highlighted? It’s possible to win just by producing the most authoritative article, NOT by being the most authoritative source.
The second method is looking at what sources are already being cited (chatGPT literally shows you this – see below) and trying to win yourself an appearance on those sites.
Of course, that is the most difficult part of GEO, and is why agencies like ours exist. We have relationships with publishers, and playbooks to win features built over the years, and we’re owned by a public company.
Bonus tip – We also are developing a proprietary process to identify opportunities to fill a gap in LLM’s existing knowledge. This is a largely data-driven process whereby you identify topics in a niche that LLMs either don’t have sufficient depth to their answers, or they have a lot of uncertainties in their answers.
By producing the content they need to fill that gap, not only are you likely to become a source for that query, but you will now become more trusted for all queries.
Combined Efforts Make A Huge Difference
What we have found to be the most interesting is that when you combine the top items in this list (citations, quotes, and statistics), the improvement is huge, as much as 40% in some areas.
This means that while GEO and SEO have the same fundamental background (improve your on-page, get some off-page validation), GEO really does focus on 3-4 areas that are considered nice-to-have’s in SEO, and other SEO items don’t really make any difference to GEO, especially domain authority and backlinks (except where the backlinks are from an often cited source in LLMs).
Things That Don’t Make A Difference
Not surprisingly, some old school techniques like keyword stuffing don’t appear to make any difference in GEO. It hasn’t made a difference in SEO for a long time either, but where the nuance lies here is in GEO you don’t need to use the keywords at all, while most SEO’s would still deem it good practice to include keywords somewhere on the page (and you’d likely benefit from doing so in Google search results).
I would put this under “things that SEO and GEO have in common” though, because you’d be hard pressed to find an SEO expert recommending keyword stuffing in 2025.
GEO vs SEO – The foundations both channels share
While we’ve talked a lot so far about where GEO focuses, and how that differs from SEO, it’s also important to acknowledge the two disciplines have a lot in common, and clearly have shared fundamentals. Much like a Google Media Buyer and a Meta Media Buyer, they have the same skills, but different tactics.
Still, let’s look at some of the areas that both channels share.
Technical implementations
Google’s own documentation states there are no extra technical requirements for appearing in AI Overviews. Standard Search Essentials still apply.
That same crawler-friendly code, fast pages and trust signals also feed the retrieval stacks behind ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Keep Core Web Vitals, schema and backlink profile tight before chasing GEO-specific tactics.
Yes, you can add things like LLMs.txt, but it is still a largely theoretical practice.
Content focus
Fundamentally you aren’t going to show up in AI engines unless you have sufficient content for them to understand. This is the same as SEO.
Additionally, you need to produce, present, and structure that content in an optimal way. Again, this is the same in SEO.
Proving Authority
Finally, you need to demonstrate that you are a credible and authoritative source. This is also the same in SEO.
Where it differs, is the methodology for demonstrate value, as we have explained above.
Six-month rollout
The following is a timeline you can follow if you want to succeed with a GEO strategy. Ideally, you start with an audit, an ideally that is one we do for you.
- Month 1: Authority and technical audit, source mapping, baseline dashboards
- Month 2: Quick-win tech fixes, reformat five pillar pages, first PR wave
- Months 3-4: Scale outreach, publish GEO-native assets such as comparison tables and expert checklists
- Month 5: Double down on placements that boost citation share
- Month 6: Review KPIs, expand to secondary keywords or languages
Pace Generative can own the whole timeline or plug in for audits, outreach or reporting.
Key takeaways
- Credibility still rules; authority and clean tech unlock both channels.
- GEO success depends on who cites you, and how authoritative you are, not how many keywords or backlinks you target.
- Structured, skimmable content plus targeted PR drives LLM mentions.
- Measurement must include reference share or you are flying blind.
Want both clicks and quotes? Talk to us about a combined SEO + GEO program that captures classic traffic and the first wave of AI visibility.