GEO vs SEO: what is the difference, and which one does a small business need?

Reading the table, one row at a time

The top three rows are the whole shift. On a list of links, the customer chooses. In an AI answer, the machine chooses, and it names about three businesses. So your question moves from "do I rank?" to "does the AI recommend me?"

That move matters because fewer people reach the list. When Google shows an AI summary, people click a normal link about 8% of the time, against 15% when there is none (Pew Research Center).

The fifth row is the one that surprises people. Only about 12% of pages AI engines cite sit in Google's top ten. And the share of AI Overview citations from top-ten pages fell from about 76% to about 38% (Ahrefs). Ranking and being named have drifted apart.

The last three rows are where the work is. Customers ask an AI in full, messy sentences. The AI wants a real person and an outside voice before it vouches for you. And it needs one plain sentence it can lift. None of those three were ever part of ranking.

Where the two still share ground

Don't throw out what you know. The first check an AI runs is the most SEO-like of all: can its bot get in and read your words?

That means your robots.txt must not turn AI bots away. Your words must be real text, not pictures. And the page must not be an empty shell that only fills in after scripts run. If any of that fails, nothing in the GEO column matters. The free AI crawler checker tests the first part.

So the order is simple. SEO ground first, as the floor. Then the four new checks on top.

GEO, AEO, AI SEO: one goal, several names

GEO stands for generative engine optimization. The term comes from a 2023 research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, which studied how content creators can be more visible inside answers written by AI engines.

Since then you will also see AEO (answer engine optimization) and plain "AI SEO." People argue about where one ends and the next begins. For a small business, they all point at the same goal: being named inside an AI answer, not only ranked in a list. The book skips the labels and works through five plain questions instead.

So is GEO a part of SEO? The two share a floor, as the next section shows. But GEO adds checks that ranking never asked for, so it is more than SEO with a new name.

How you measure each one

You measure SEO with rankings and clicks. Where does my page sit for a keyword, and how many people click through?

GEO needs a different check, because the win is a mention, not a click. When Google shows an AI summary, people click a link inside the summary just 1% of the time (Pew Research Center). So the book measures GEO by asking.

1. Write down the exact questions your best customers would ask.
2. Ask them in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI.
3. Note three things: are you named, who is named instead, and what the AI says about you.
4. Make your fixes, then ask the same questions again and compare.

The book calls this the AI Visibility Snapshot. It takes about four minutes, and it shows which of the five checks you are failing.

Your boss says do some GEO by Friday

Picture it. You run marketing at a small company, which means you run everything. Your boss read an article. He wants "GEO" done, and there is no budget.

You search the word and find a wall of sales pages. Most of them push a file called llms.txt, or a service with a monthly fee. You can't tell what is real.

Here is the plain version you can bring to Friday's meeting. GEO means the AI names us. It names a business when it can find it, tell what it is, trust it, quote it, and match the customer's real question. We will check those five, in order, with one sheet each. No password files. Google's own engineers said they don't use llms.txt.

That is a plan your boss can follow, and it costs time, not money.

The GEO column, one chapter per row

This is the problem Found by AI was written for. It never leans on the acronym. It walks the GEO column of the table one row at a time.

The Introduction: The New Front Door sets out the list-to-answer shift and the five questions.

Chapter 2, Can I Tell What You Are?, covers the identity row. Its Entity Clarity Sheet turns a fuzzy tagline into one sentence: what you do, who for, where.

Chapter 3, Do I Trust You Enough to Name You?, covers the trust row, with a Trust Signal Map for on-site proof, outside mentions and the named human.

Chapter 4, Can I Quote You Cleanly?, covers the last row, with a four-line Citability Checklist. If quoting is your main worry, start with how to get quoted in AI answers.

The free Found by AI workbook has all seven tools as printable pages.