SEO vs GEO: what is generative engine optimization and why you need both

Anyone looking for an agency, a product or an explanation today increasingly sees an AI answer first. GEO (generative engine optimization) is the discipline that responds to this: making sure ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews cite your brand when they answer that question. Does that mean SEO is over? No. Since May 2026, Google itself writes that optimising for generative AI simply remains SEO. In this article we explain what GEO is, where it differs from SEO, what is concretely shifting in Flanders and how an SME divides its time between the two. All figures were checked on 3 October 2026, with Belgian data where it exists.

Want GEO handled for you? Take a look at ClickForest’s GEO approach.

What is GEO (generative engine optimization)?

GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the practice of optimising content so that AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews cite or mention your brand in their answers. SEO aims for a high position in the classic search results, GEO for a place in the answer itself. In short: SEO wants you to be found, GEO wants you to be named.

The term comes from the academic paper “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues (November 2023, accepted for the KDD 2024 research conference). The researchers tested nine optimisation techniques on a benchmark of 10,000 search queries and showed that targeted adjustments can increase visibility in the answers of generative engines by up to 40%. That figure concerns visibility in AI answers on their test benchmark.

There is no consensus on the name yet. Google puts AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO side by side and calls both simply SEO. In Belgium GEO is the common search term, while worldwide “AI SEO” is searched more often. You will also hear GEO marketing and AI search optimisation. A short definition of GEO and AEO is in the ClickForest glossary. ClickForest helps Flemish SMEs in Mechelen and Antwerp with GEO, always combined with SEO.

What is the difference between SEO and GEO?

SEO optimises for a position in the classic search results of Google and Bing. GEO optimises to be cited in AI-generated answers. SEO measures success in positions and clicks, GEO in citations and mentions. The foundations overlap: a technically sound site with authority feeds both, and GEO adds citable facts, sources and structure on top.

Google itself draws the line less sharply. In its guide to generative AI in Search from May 2026, Google describes AEO and GEO as terms for work aimed specifically at visibility in AI search experiences, and concludes:

“From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”

— Google Search Central, “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search” (Google, 15 May 2026)

Microsoft Advertising sees it differently. In its guide to AEO and GEO, reported by Search Engine Roundtable in January 2026 and aimed at retailers, AEO and GEO are two separate layers: “If SEO focused on driving clicks, AEO is focused on driving clarity with enriched, real-time data. GEO helps establish credibility through authoritative voice.” On the same page, Microsoft does call SEO the base: “At Microsoft, we believe SEO and catalog investments built a foundation to expand upon in LLM-based search.”

For an SME, this is mostly a battle of words. Both big search companies see SEO as the starting point. The SEO approach remains the foundation on which a site ranks; the GEO layer determines whether AI systems also understand, trust and cite that site.

Why is the search landscape tipping in 2026?

Because more and more questions end in an AI answer. In May 2026 Google merged AI Overviews and AI Mode into one experience, AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly users, and according to OpenAI, ChatGPT has more than 1 billion weekly users (September 2026). Meanwhile, 68% of US Google searches in the first four months of 2026 ended without a click.

Since Google I/O on 19 May 2026, you can ask a follow-up question straight from an AI Overview and carry on into a conversation in AI Mode, worldwide on desktop and mobile. Google also announced there that, one year after its launch, AI Mode “has surpassed one billion monthly users”. In September 2026 OpenAI wrote of “more than one billion people using ChatGPT each week”.

How often an AI Overview appears fluctuates strongly. In its own database of more than 10 million keywords (the study names no country), Semrush measured a share that climbed from 6.49% in January 2025 to 24.61% in July and stood at 15.69% in November 2025. The queries that trigger one also became more commercial: in January 91.3% were informational, by October 57.1%.

What that does to clicks is well documented by now. In March 2025, Pew Research found among 900 US adults that a classic result was clicked in 8% of visits to a search with an AI summary, against 15% without one. Across 300,000 informational keywords, Ahrefs saw the click-through rate of position 1 sit around 58% lower when an AI Overview was present (published February 2026); in April 2025 that figure was 34.5%. Ahrefs itself uses the word “correlates”. Both studies measure an association, though the direction is the same each time.

Zero-click search is no AI invention, either. Back in 2024, 58.5% of US Google searches and 59.7% of those in the European Union ended without a click (SparkToro with data from Datos). The 2026 measurement uses a different panel (Similarweb) and arrives at 68% for the US; on that new panel, 2024 already stood at 60.45%. So do not read those two studies as one series. For Europe, SparkToro reported in June 2026 62.1% for Germany, 65.3% for France and 69.5% for the United Kingdom (January to April 2026). More on this in our article on the importance of zero-click searches.

Rand Fishkin summed it up like this in his analysis of June 2026:

“Thanks to AI features, instant answers, UI elements that keep searchers in the results, and shifting user preferences, Google is becoming a walled garden.”

— Rand Fishkin, cofounder and CEO of SparkToro (SparkToro, June 2026)

Google sees a rosier picture. Liz Reid, VP and Head of Google Search, wrote in August 2025 that total organic click volume had remained “relatively stable year-over-year”. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said at the July 2026 quarterly results: “And we’re now sending billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features in Search.” Bear in mind that these are statements by Google itself, with no independent measurement behind them.

And one nuance deserves its place. Classic search remains by far the largest channel: of the traffic that websites received from Belgium via Google or ChatGPT in September 2026, 99.7% came from Google and 0.3% from ChatGPT (Statcounter). Statcounter counts referrals to websites; it does not measure the number of searches. So GEO adds to SEO and replaces nothing. GEO comes on top of it and replaces nothing.

How does GEO work in practice?

AI search engines build their answers on sources they can retrieve, understand and trust. Google describes a “query fan-out” technique: the system fires off several related searches across subtopics and composes one answer from those results. GEO responds to this with clear definitions, figures with a source, expert quotes and a consistent brand entity.

That fan-out is described in the official documentation on AI features. The GEO paper also tested what demonstrably works. The three strongest techniques were adding source citations, adding quotations and adding statistics, each good for a relative improvement of 30 to 40% on the study’s visibility metric. Classic keyword stuffing did next to nothing. Striking for smaller players: for sources only in fifth position, the citation technique delivered 115.1% more visibility, while the top source lost 30.3% on average. That remains an effect on a test benchmark.

Equally important is what you do not need. In its May 2026 guide, Google crosses out a series of popular tips. For Google Search, you can ignore these:

• Chopping content into pieces (“chunking”) specifically for AI.
• Unnecessary AI text files such as llms.txt.
• Collecting artificial mentions: “Seeking inauthentic ‘mentions’ across the web isn’t as helpful as it might seem.”

According to the same guide, content that people find unique, compelling and useful will likely carry more weight in the long run than any other tip in it. The llms.txt file is a proposal by Jeremy Howard from September 2024. SE Ranking found it on barely 10.13% of nearly 300,000 domains studied and saw no correlation whatsoever with AI citations (SE Ranking). Google wrote in June 2026 that Search ignores such files. No major AI search service says it uses them to choose sources, although OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini publish one themselves for their developer documentation. Google’s John Mueller was dry about it on Reddit in April 2025:

“AFAIK none of the AI services have said they’re using LLMs.TXT (and you can tell when you look at your server logs that they don’t even check for it). To me, it’s comparable to the keywords meta tag – this is what a site-owner claims their site is about … (Is the site really like that? well, you can check it. At that point, why not just check the site directly?)”

— John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google (via Search Engine Journal, April 2025)

Correct structured data does remain useful as hygiene: it helps search engines recognise your entities and authors correctly, even though no proven citation rate is attached to it. The technical side is in the JSON-LD implementation guide. How to roll all of this out step by step, from entities to question headings, is covered in our guide on GEO strategy.

What is changing concretely in Belgium and Flanders?

The shift is measurable here too. AI Overviews have been active in Belgium since 25 March 2025 and AI Mode since October 2025. According to imec.digimeter, 43% of Flemish people used generative AI at least monthly in 2025. And of the traffic that websites received from Belgium via AI chatbots in September 2026, 79.91% came from ChatGPT (Statcounter).

AI Overviews came to Belgium on 25 March 2025, initially in English only. Dutch-language AI Overviews followed later; Google never announced that separately. AI Mode expanded to more than 40 new countries on 7 October 2025, and ITdaily reported on 8 October 2025 that AI Mode was available in Belgium. Google’s help page today lists Dutch, French and German among the languages.

Use is growing fast. According to imec.digimeter 2025, the share of Flemish people using generative AI at least monthly rose from 18% in 2023 to 28% in 2024 and now 43%. Daily use went from 4% to 11%, nearly a threefold increase. “The diffusion pattern is unprecedented. (…) Netflix, the smartphone and Instagram needed 7, 8 and 10 years respectively to reach that same penetration rate in Flanders,” says Lieven De Marez, research director for society and innovation at imec and UGent.

Traffic to websites tells a different story. In September 2026, 89.3% of referral traffic to websites from Belgium came from search engines, 10.4% from social media and 0.3% from AI chatbots (Statcounter). Within those chatbots, ChatGPT took 79.91%, ahead of Gemini (10.83%), Copilot (5.04%), Perplexity (2.5%) and Claude (1.7%). Statcounter revises monthly figures for up to 45 days after publication. Plenty of Flemish people use AI, yet as a source of visitors to websites, chatbots still barely register. That is precisely why it matters that your brand is in the answer itself.

Online Marketing Monkey measured how often Google shows an AI Overview here, across more than 8 million keywords: from 3.37% in May 2025 to a peak of 14.53% in August and 12.21% in November 2025 (Online Marketing Monkey). We did not find a more recent Belgian measurement.

There is one limited measurement of the click impact in Belgium. For 141 Belgian HubSpot keywords that sat under an AI Overview, Ahrefs saw 48% fewer clicks in one year at a near-identical ranking (within three positions), in a study published in July 2026. It concerns one site and a traffic estimate by Ahrefs. For Dutch-language search results, we have not yet found a measurement.

Our study of 200 scanned Belgian websites shows how Belgian sites are doing technically. Curious about your own site? The GEO audit by ClickForest maps how AI engines see your brand today and doubles as your baseline measurement.

Is SEO dead now that AI is taking over?

No. AI search engines largely find their sources through the same signals as classic search engines: crawlability, structure, speed and authority. In its May 2026 guide, Google writes that optimising for generative AI is still SEO. That foundation is just no longer enough on its own: whoever is not citable drops out of the answers in which more and more searches end.

If that foundation is not yet in place for you, start with the diagnosis in why your website is not ranking high in Google. Danny Sullivan, at that point a director at Google Search and already the former Search Liaison, summed it up in deliberately sobering terms at WordCamp US on 28 August 2025:

“Good SEO is good GEO, or AEO, AIO, LLM SEO, or LMNOPO. So, they’re all fine.”

— Danny Sullivan, director at Google Search and former Search Liaison (Search Engine Land, September 2025)

His next sentence: “What I’m trying to say is don’t panic.”

Rand Fishkin puts the emphasis elsewhere. In his view, simply getting better at classic SEO is no answer to a search engine that hands out fewer clicks: “there’s not much point (nor any hope) of fighting back by simply getting better at SEO”, he wrote in June 2026. Right after that comes: “your SEO still matters as much or more than ever before, it just won’t earn you traffic the way it once did.” That is where GEO sits: the same foundations, with a citable layer on top.

International SEO consultant Aleyda Solis, founder of Orainti, calls it the evolution of the profession itself: “We are evolving into findability specialists, ready to navigate the increasingly diverse search landscape.” (Aleyda Solis, May 2025). How SEO and AI reinforce each other in daily practice, from keyword research to content production, is covered in our article on combining SEO and AI.

How should an SME divide its time between SEO and GEO?

Treat GEO as an extra layer on your existing SEO work. Most of the work feeds both channels at once: technical work, structure, authority and good content. On top of that comes a limited, targeted GEO layer that makes your content citable for AI systems and makes your brand visible in external sources.

What stays the same in both worlds:

• Technical basis: crawlability, speed, a logical site structure and internal links.
• Authority: mentions and links from reliable external sources. Across 75,000 brands, Ahrefs found that web mentions correlate more strongly with visibility in AI Overviews (0.664) than backlinks do (0.218), and adds that correlation is not causation (Ahrefs).
• Local findability: if you work regionally, you rely on local SEO. AI answers to questions like “best X in region Y” also lean on those signals.

What GEO adds on top:

• Citable core blocks: every important page opens with a direct, factual answer that an AI can adopt.
• Statistics and sources: figures with source citations, one of the strongest techniques from the GEO research.
• Entity consistency: the same company name, service description and region on your site, your socials and in external mentions.
• Tracking visibility in chatbots: regularly test how ChatGPT talks about your brand. The full step-by-step plan is in our guide on getting recommended by ChatGPT.
• Looking ahead to AI agents: the next step is AI that also buys. What that demands of your webshop is covered in our article on agentic commerce.

Google does warn that artificial mentions help less than you might think. So build real ones instead: reviews, case studies and mentions in trade media. ClickForest helps Flemish SMEs in Mechelen and Antwerp with that combination of SEO and GEO, with the existing site as the starting point.

How do you measure whether GEO works?

In three places. The generative AI report in Search Console shows your impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. The AI Assistant channel in GA4 shows visits via ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and other chatbots. And a fixed set of core questions in a tracker shows whether your brand is named in the answers. None of the three covers everything.

The report in Search Console has been available worldwide for all websites since 31 August 2026. It only shows impressions. The AI Assistant channel in GA4 has been standard in every account since 13 May 2026 and captures visitors from ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot and Grok, among others. Google’s own AI Overviews and AI Mode are explicitly excluded. Together, the two reports therefore cover both the chatbots and Google’s AI features.

Small in volume, but the traffic that does come through is valuable. Adobe found that AI traffic to US retail sites converted 54% better than other traffic in May 2026 (Digital Commerce 360). Semrush calculated that the average AI search visitor is worth 4.4 times as much on conversion as a classic organic visitor. That is a study by an SEO tool vendor within its own niche, so read it as an indication.

For the tracker, you ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini the same core questions every day or every week and note whether your brand is mentioned. For continuous monitoring, you can use a GEO monitoring tool such as Veesie, which queries five AI assistants every week, and how those tools differ in price, engines and measurement frequency is covered in AI visibility tools compared. ClickForest uses this method itself: in our own ChatGPT tracker with 50 Belgian questions, ClickForest was named in an average of 9.6% of the answers in early July 2026, and on 3 October 2026 in 21 of the 50. It concerns one tracker, one engine, one language and 50 fixed questions, of which we swapped eight at the end of July and one more on 28 September. We do not know the cause of the increase. The full measurement series is in our article on recommendations in ChatGPT.

Would you rather have a specialist handle that baseline and follow-up? ClickForest helps Flemish SMEs in Mechelen and Antwerp with a GEO audit: what AI engines say about your brand today, which sources feed that and where the biggest gains lie.

What should you remember about SEO vs GEO?

SEO and GEO complement each other. Google remains by far the largest search channel and itself calls GEO simply SEO. At the same time, more and more searches end in an AI answer, in Flanders too, and you only get into that answer with citable content and a brand that can also be found beyond your own site.

Our advice is therefore simple: do both, and start by measuring. Measure first, in Search Console, GA4 and with a fixed set of questions, then build on what is already there. Looking for a partner for that? The overview of GEO agencies in Belgium puts fourteen players side by side, ClickForest included. ClickForest helps Flemish SMEs in Mechelen and Antwerp with one integrated approach: SEO as the foundation, GEO as the citability layer, and the GEO audit as the baseline measurement. That way your brand stays visible, even when the answer now comes before the click.