# SEO vs GEO: Why You Can't Do GEO Without SEO > GEO and SEO share the same foundations, so they have to be worked on together. Here # SEO vs GEO: why you can't do one without the other Published: 28 September 2026 ## The Great SEO vs GEO Debate ![SEO vs GEO image](/_astro/SEO-vs-GEO-image_Z1AEqJs.webp) SEO gets you ranked in Google. GEO (generative engine optimisation) gets you cited and recommended when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI Mode a question. They target different places, but the work underneath is almost identical. Technical health, content, authority and entity clarity drive both. That's why our answer is always the same. You can't do GEO without SEO, and the two share so much that they need to be worked on together, as one program. ## What you're paying for with SEO A good SEO program covers five things: - Technical SEO, so search engines can crawl, render and index your site - Content that answers what your customers are searching for - Links and digital PR that build authority - Migrations that protect your rankings when platforms or URLs change - Reporting on rankings, clicks and conversions in Search Console and GA4 For most Australian businesses, organic search is still the biggest source of discoverable demand. That hasn't changed. ## What you're paying for with GEO A good GEO program covers five things too: - AI readiness audits to check that AI crawlers can reach and understand your site - Tracking how often you're recommended for the questions your buyers actually ask - Content with clear definitions and facts that are easy for AI to lift - Entity and schema work, so AI systems know who you are, what you do and where - Digital PR, because AI platforms lean heavily on third-party proof Put the two lists side by side and most of the work overlaps. ## Every AI citation starts with crawl, index, rank AI platforms don't find sources by magic. They pull them from search indexes. I made this point in AdNews earlier this year: every URL ChatGPT cites got there by crawl, index, rank. That's the same foundation you were supposed to be building for SEO. The data backs it up. In Ahrefs' study of 1.9 million AI Overview citations, 76% of cited pages ranked in Google's top 10, and 86% sat somewhere in the top 100. The relationship has loosened since (more on that below), but 94% of AI Overviews still cite at least one page from the top 20 organic results. You can see it on this search too. In Australia, Google's AI Overview for "geo vs seo" cites Informa TechTarget and Semrush. They rank second and fourth organically. If AI platforms find sources through search indexes, GEO without SEO has nothing to work with. Every citation you want starts with a page search engines can find, trust and rank. ## Why AI answers need more SEO, not less ![Chart 1 ranking isnt enough](/_astro/chart-1-ranking-isnt-enough_ConSl.webp) Here's where the two start to pull apart. In a bigger follow-up study of 863,000 keywords and 4 million AI Overview URLs, Ahrefs found 38% of cited pages ranked in the top 10 for the same query, down from 76% in its July study. Standalone assistants go further again. Across 15,000 long-tail queries, citations from ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity matched Google and Bing's top 10 about 11% of the time. Read quickly, that sounds like rankings stopped mattering. They didn't. Ahrefs puts the change down to AI Overviews pulling more from "fan-out" results, meaning the related sub-questions the AI searches behind the scenes. So to get cited, you need to rank across the whole cluster of questions around a topic, not just the head term. That's SEO work: topical depth, internal linking, and pages that answer the follow-up questions. What SEO reporting won't tell you is whether any of that turns into AI recommendations. That's the gap GEO fills. ## Is GEO replacing SEO? Not even close The "companies shift from SEO to GEO" headlines are doing marketers a disservice. Most search still happens on Google. AI platforms still retrieve from search indexes. If you cut SEO to fund GEO, you weaken the signals AI platforms use to decide who to cite. GEO depends on SEO. Cut one and the other stops working. ## What 115 Australian businesses tell us about AI traffic ![Chart 2 ai vs organic funnel](/_astro/chart-2-ai-vs-organic-funnel_ZpkHe.webp) In our [Australian AI Traffic Study](/blog/australian-ai-traffic-study), we looked at AI-referred traffic across 115 businesses and 24.8 million sessions: - AI sessions grew 1,200% year on year (median) - 88.5% of sites received AI traffic in 2025, up from 13.5% in 2023 - AI drove around 0.1% of ecommerce revenue - ChatGPT sent 90% of identifiable AI visits It's kept climbing this year. Across the Australian ecommerce brands we track, ChatGPT referrals grew by a median of 76.8% in three months. Those visitors behave differently once they land. AI traffic added to cart at 16.2% against 27.4% for organic, and purchased at 2.9% against 6.0%. Perplexity and Gemini visitors converted three to six times better than ChatGPT visitors. Organic search still converts at roughly double the rate. AI traffic is growing on top of it, not eating it. ## The AI does the persuading, Google gets the credit That 0.1% revenue share undersells what's happening. Here's how people search now, me included. Ask ChatGPT a question, get three brands back, Google the one that stuck, click through and buy. GA4 logs that as branded organic or direct. ChatGPT made the decision and gets none of the credit. Google's own AI summaries hide even more. Pew Research found people clicked a traditional result in 8% of searches with an AI summary, compared with 15% without one. They clicked links inside the summary in just 1% of visits. And 60% of searches starting with "who", "what" or "why" triggered a summary, which is exactly how people search this topic. People are being influenced by answers they never click. Clicks alone can't measure either discipline anymore. That cuts the other way too. As I said in Mediaweek, visibility is not demand, and right now it's barely even traffic. Across more than a hundred Australian brands we track on four AI platforms, the brand cited most was never the one winning the most sales from AI. The test we use is simple. When AI visibility climbs, do branded search, direct traffic and assisted conversions climb in the same window? If they do, you've found something real. If they don't, you've got a nice chart. ## Why SEO and GEO have to be worked on together People ask us this a lot, usually because an agency has quoted GEO as a separate line item. Here's how it plays out when the two are split. - **GEO without SEO doesn't work.** If AI crawlers can't reach your site, your pages aren't indexed, or you don't rank for the questions around your topic, there's nothing for AI platforms to cite. You'd be optimising content that AI can't find. - **SEO without GEO leaves you blind.** Your rankings might be strong while AI platforms recommend your competitors, and your SEO reports won't show it. You're also missing the structural work that makes content easier for AI to cite. - **Splitting them across two teams costs more and does less.** Most of the work overlaps: technical fixes, content, digital PR. Split it and you pay twice for the same work, run two strategies that pull in different directions, and nobody owns whether it moved revenue. We break down what that duplication costs in [How Much Does GEO Cost?](/blog/geo-cost) - **Doing them together is the only setup that works properly.** One strategy covers both surfaces. Every technical fix, piece of content and link helps you rank and get cited at the same time, and you can see both in one report. ![AI Logos](/_astro/AI-Logos_hLc0n.webp) ## What GEO costs in Australia, and why integrated is cheaper GEO pricing is still all over the place. Here's what we're seeing in the Australian market ([How Much Does GEO Cost?](/blog/geo-cost)): - **Entry-level GEO:** $2,000 to $4,000 a month - **Mid-range programs:** $4,000 to $10,000 a month - **Comprehensive strategies:** $10,000 to $20,000+ a month - **One-off AI readiness audits:** $10,000 to $20,000 That's also why integrated is cheaper. When GEO sits inside your SEO program, the foundational work gets done once and pays off on both fronts. ## How to tell if your agency actually does both Most agencies added GEO to their services page in the last year. Far fewer changed how they work. Ask yours to show you where your brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini today, and how that's moved over the last quarter. Then ask whether it lined up with branded search, direct traffic and pipeline. If they can show you with data, hold onto them. If you get a roadmap, you've got your answer. ![James Co Founder OPT](/_astro/James-Co-Founder-OPT_Z1BEUkz.webp) ### James Richardson Co-Founder [James Richardson](/about/james-richardson) is one of the co-founders of Optimising, that he started in 2008. He's spent nearly two decades helping Australian brands get found online, from technical SEO and platform migrations through to AI search.  Outside work, he's usually on the basketball court or golf course or being comprehensively outsmarted by his three daughters. [Connect on Linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesis/) [← Back to Blog](/blog)