It's tempting to file generative engine optimisation under "SEO, but for AI." That framing is comfortable, but it leads to bad strategy.
The two disciplines share DNA. Both depend on understanding your audience's questions. Both reward authority and content quality. Both punish thin material and reward depth. If you do GEO well, your SEO gets stronger as a side effect, because the signals that earn citations also tend to earn rankings.
But everything past that is different.
SEO is about position. You want to be number one on a ranked list of ten results. The metric is your rank, the change in your rank, and the click-through you earn from your position. The cycle is slow — three to six months to see meaningful movement.
GEO is about presence. You want to be named when the engine has only one or two names to give. The metric is citation frequency and how often you're cited compared to competitors. The cycle is fast — first citations in 30 to 60 days, because AI engines update their internal models far more often than Google updates its rankings.
Content shape is different too. SEO favours long, comprehensive pieces engineered to rank for a target keyword. GEO favours entity-rich, citation-ready writing — content that an engine can extract a sentence from and quote with attribution.
Volume is different. A serious SEO programme might publish four to eight articles a month. A serious GEO programme publishes ten times that, because AI engines hunt for fresh, well-attributed material to update their models with.
Distribution is different. SEO is about on-site authority. GEO is about both on-site and off-site authority, because roughly 85 per cent of AI citations come from external domains, not your own blog.
The strongest programmes run both — but they do not run them with the same playbook. Treating GEO as SEO with a new sticker is the most common, and most expensive, mistake in this space.