You don’t “rank” in AI search tools the same as you do in search engines. It’s not an ordered list that everyone sees exactly the same way. As a matter of fact, if you turn off memory, and start a new conversation each time, you aren’t likely to see the same results yourself. They don’t maintain a traditional, rankable index of URLs and brands like search engines do. The retrieval process is much different than Google or Bing’s process.
Add to that, with memory turned on, which it is for most people, the results you see will be different from my results because it’s based on context, the conversations each of us has had with the AI and what it knows about us.
Before We Get Into The Differences
Let’s Get A Few Facts Straight
- SEO is not dead. As a matter of fact, it’s at least as important that you do proper SEO now as it ever was.
- The major AI search tools or chatbots do not just scrape Google, Bing and other search engines for their answers.
- You cannot submit your web pages to AI Search tools.
- For those who say all you have to do is good SEO to get mentions in AI search, first you would have to define “good” SEO because that is obviously misunderstood by a lot of people who claim to do good SEO.
- Correlation does not equal causation. I’ve seen people posting things like “Look! I did this thing right here and I ranked in ChatGPT!” Just stop already.
- You cannot track brand mentions across AI search tools consistently or reliably.
- Did I mention that You cannot track brand mentions across AI search tools consistently or reliably?
I mentioned that last one twice because it’s important to note. Don’t waste your money. I wrote another entire post explaining why here.
So What Is The Difference Between SEO and GEO?
There isn’t just one answer to that question because of the number of ways people describe SEO or provide SEO services. It is definitely subjective. It’s all about goals. Some believe ranking in Google is the end goal and whatever happens after that, conversions, signups, etc. aren’t their concern. Technically they aren’t wrong in the strictest definition of SEO. However, business owners are looking for more than that.
If you define good SEO as…
- Putting up a bunch of thin keyword-rich content and buying a bunch of backlinks.
- Building 100s or thousands of junk pages to target every possible variation of your keywords.
- Adding a bunch of city pages that have the same content and just change the city names.
- If you use FAQs, Glossaries, How To Articles, etc. as a way to spam your keywords and/or links into the page.
- Stuffing your keywords in every single header tag and repeatedly in the text where it isn’t natural.
Then, I believe you are in for some surprises and a lot of work to do sooner than you might think. If that is how you define Good SEO, then there are a lot of differences between what you are doing now and optimizing for AI search.
A lot of people use shortcuts rather than putting in real work. And if you think using these shortcuts is valid, the rest of this post isn’t likely going to interest you.
On the other hand, If you have been…
- Writing high-quality, conversational, customer focused content.
- Attracting links instead of buying them.
- Building content clusters that use a good internal linking strategy, (not an automated tool).
- Been structuring your website, your URLs and your pages so they are easy to understand and easy to use for visitors.
- Creating unique geo-targeted pages for service areas that address the unique problems and perspectives of the people that live in each of those areas.
- Creating FAQs, Glossaries and How To Articles that are actually helpful to your visitors instead of writing them for the search engines.
Then you aren’t going to have to change very much to get mentioned in AI search. And you’ll likely be interested in the rest of the article. Defining it this way, I agree that Good SEO can help you get more brand mentions. Structured, authoritative sites are easier for AI systems to trust
Of course, in just this one post, I can’t possibly cover every single thing that defines Good SEO or AEO or GEO or AI SEO. But I think you get the idea. Quality matters more than quantity and that’s true no matter what acronym you want to use.
What About Off-Site SEO and AI SEO?
Again, quality over quantity and clarity is also important. You need to understand entity optimization whether it’s for SEO or AI SEO. Short explanation; Anything that can be identified as a “thing” by Google or AI is an entity. Your personal name, company name, brand name, product name, even an idea or a slogan are all entities. (Entities are recognized, disambiguated concepts, not just any noun). Helping Google and AI understand how those entities relate to each other is one of the most important things you can do to rank well in any kind of search.
“On your web pages and blog posts, you can let schema markup do a lot of the heavy lifting to define those relationships.”
When you are on social media or on publishing platforms like LinkedIn, Substack, and Medium, you should try to find ways to define or associate the relationship between entities. An example: The slogan our website uses a lot is Search Everywhere Optimization. Those 3 publishing platforms I linked to in the previous sentence all lead to my newsletter on each platform. The newsletters all promote Search Everywhere Optimization. It’s very clear to Google or AI that it’s a philosophy I promote.
Whether for SEO or AI search, Brand Visibility and Brand Authority are important, but in slightly different ways.
- Both Google and AI associate the keywords you use. But that’s only what you say you’re page is about.
- Your schema markup, even if it has been validated by the Schema.org Validator and Google’s Rich Snippets Test, is still what you say your page is about.
- A well structured page with chunked content can help validate that your page is really about what you say it is.
- But is there any reason why AI or Google should trust that you are the best recommendation or at least one of the best? You need signals and clear indications that you actually know the topic or that you are an authority on that topic. What other things are associated with your name?
The easiest way for me to explain it:
Tell Google and AI the 5Ws and the How Of Your Entity
- Who are you? (This can also be the name of a company, product, brand etc.)
- What are you?
- Where are you?
- When can be when you started, when an event is scheduled, how long it’s been around, etc.
- Why can be a mission statement, a philosophy, an idea, a problem you’re solving or a need you are fulfilling.
- How can be how to buy it, how to subscribe, how to do something, etc.
If you can tell Google and AI those 6 things, you’re almost there. Now you need to add things they are related to, like; Author: Your Name. Works For: Your Company. Same Person as this profile on social media, etc. Schema markup can help machines understand the relationships where it can be used, but on other platforms, your content has to carry the weight without sounding like a machine doing it.
And one last thing that is counterintuitive. We all know about creating your ideal customer and writing your content with them in mind. But AI wants to know who your are NOT writing for. (Exclusion signals reduce misclassification.) This is especially true with AI agents. It builds trust even more by defining who your content is meant for and who it isn’t meant for. If you go back up to the Good SEO vs Poor SEO section of this post, you’ll see I defined who this article is and isn’t for. It can be subtle or explicit, AI will get it.
I’ve found that doing this also improves conversion rates. When clearly defined in the beginning, you respect your visitor’s time and those it isn’t for can move on. Those who it is for already feel heard and that they are in the right place.
What Should I Focus On The Most?
The answer to this question isn’t a choice between SEO and AI search optimization. If you do it right, you’ll satisfy both. Google is basically AI now anyway. Except for the whole database and knowledge base they have. It’s still AI that is doing the crawling and AI that needs to understand your content and find reasons to trust it.
These are things you can do… (And they apply to SEO and AI)
- Ignore anyone claiming they can track your brand mentions. They don’t have the raw data or access to analytics to make it reliable. At best, it gives you some ideas that you can try to bet on.
- What we do have data for is what websites and platforms tend to be used the most by AI search. A lot of those are the same spots Google considers important too, like Reddit. LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Government sites, etc. Make sure you are being mentioned on those platforms or that you are publishing there where possible. I just call it, “Getting in the way.”
- Write high quality, well-researched content that thoroughly covers the points you want to make. Link out to some authoritative examples of what you are writing about.
- Make sure your website is helpful, user friendly, good navigation, well-structured pages, with content chunks that are written for the reader, not for machines.
- Write for machines in your schema markup, not in your content. Don’t spam a lot of links in your schema. Speaking of schema, there is more to it than just the 30 or so types Google will consider for rich snippets. AI and Google both can understand most of the 800+ types of schema there is.
- Don’t rely on FAQs. Google has pretty much killed that idea because of all of the FAQ spam most likely. If you use FAQs, actually use questions your readers might have and give them the answers without trying to sell them something or get them to click a link in every answer.
I’m Going To Wrap It Up Here
I don’t expect everyone to agree with everything I wrote here and I welcome discussion. I have been doing this for 30 years and I’ve seen all kinds of changes when it comes to SEO. I don’t say that to brag. I say it to tell you that even with that much time in, I’m still learning new things every day and doing my best to keep up like everyone else. The people that are running around saying they have AI or GEO or AEO all figured out… don’t even know what they don’t know.
I feel we are still early in this latest evolution of SEO or or whatever you want to call it. In 6 months I may have to rewrite this post. None of us can be sure of what comes next. But what I do know is that it’s SEO professionals that are best suited to figuring it out. We’ve done it before.
Google is still the number 1 priority when it comes to SEO. No one is getting enough verifiable traffic from AI search to even think abandoning traditional search optimization. And since a lot of that aligns with AI search as well, keep your eye on the ball and don’t believe ChatGPT when it says that your idea of repeating the same 10 Q&As across the web puts you “Ahead of 99% of all other SEOs out there”. (Just a joke for those that use ChatGPT. You know what I mean.)
However, do keep in mind that Google is no longer the only way for people to find your business. The number of people that search on their favorite social media platform, who use voice search, AI chatbots and even smart devices and wearables has steadily increased over the past few years. Your brand needs to be in the results wherever people search on whatever device they use.
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