SEO, GEO and AEO: how they differ and where to start in 2026

What is GEO?

GEO (short for generative engine optimization, i.e. optimisation for generative search engines) covers activities that increase the chance that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Copilot will mention your brand and refer to your content when someone asks a question about your industry. It is not about one page for one keyword. It is about the model’s knowledge. What does it “know” about the company? Where does it know it from?

The name comes from a research paper by a team from Princeton and IIT Delhi, published in November 2023 and presented at the KDD 2024 conference. The authors showed that preparing content appropriately (for example, adding sources, quotations or specific figures) can increase a text’s visibility in the answers of generative engines by up to 40%. That is the result of an experiment on a test set, not a guarantee for every website. The direction, however, is clear. It goes like this: a model is more likely to use content that is easy to verify.

When someone simply asks us “GEO, what is it?”, we give a short answer: it is SEO extended to include everything others write about the company. An AI model assesses not only your website, but also media coverage, directories, review sites and online forums where the brand name comes up. It is one of several topics we organise in guide to AI in business, because visibility in models now affects both marketing and PR.

GEO vs SEO and AEO in one table

The question we hear most often is whether GEO and SEO are two different services. In practice, it is one job with three goals, and the table sets out how these three abbreviations differ.

What does Google say about it, and what do ChatGPT and Perplexity change?

In its guide on generative features (updated 10 July 2026), Google states that from the search engine’s perspective, optimising for AI search is still SEO. It also adds that there is no need to create special files or markup for machines, such as llms.txt file, because Google Search does not use them. For Google this is true, because its AI answers, i.e. AI Overviews and AI Mode in Google, are based on the same index as regular results.

ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, however, are separate systems. OpenAI explains in its help centre that ChatGPT rewrites the user’s question into several queries and also sends them to external search providers, and that it uses its own crawler, called OAI-SearchBot, to show pages in its answers. There, it is not only your website that counts. What also counts is whether others describe the brand. And that is where the whole “SEO vs GEO” debate comes from: SEO is enough to exist in Google, while GEO adds work on your reputation in the sources models draw on.

Why all the fuss? Because of people. Their behaviour is changing. According to a Pew Research Center study from July 2025, users who saw an AI summary in Google clicked a regular link in 8% of visits, compared with 15% without a summary, which means that more and more decisions are made on the basis of the answer alone, before anyone visits the company’s website.

Why is GEO also a topic for the PR department?

The Muck Rack “State of PR 2026” report (discussed by PRSA on 15 July 2026) shows that 73% of PR professionals consider GEO at least somewhat important, but 39% do not measure it at all, and in 29% of organisations nobody is responsible for it. At the same time, 55% secure coverage in influential media precisely in order to improve visibility in AI.

A second study by the same company, “What Is AI Reading?” from May 2026, covered more than 25 million links cited by three popular models: ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. 84% of citations came from earned media, i.e. publications the brand did not pay for. Paid content? A mere 0.3%. Models trust what someone independent has written about a company more, and this is exactly where SEO meets public relations. We expand on this in the article on why media coverage determines what ChatGPT says about your company.

The PR department already has the tools it needs: media relations, expert commentary, proprietary data. What changes is the measure, because alongside reach, what counts is whether the text has made it into the sources that models read.

Who needs SEO and GEO together, and for whom is SEO alone enough?

Not every company has to start investing in GEO tomorrow. Those that gain the most are companies whose customers ask comparative and advisory questions before they call a salesperson. Here are the situations in which it pays to run SEO and GEO together:

• A B2B company sells a service or machine with a long buying process, and before sending an enquiry, the customer searches for “who in Poland does…” and “how much does … cost”.
• The brand has a strong competitor that AI models mention by name, while the brand itself is not mentioned.
• The company is entering a new market and nobody has written about it yet, so the model has nothing to build an answer from.
• After a reputational crisis, models still summarise old, outdated articles.
• A local business whose customers look for a product in their own city. Here, good SEO and a Google Business Profile are usually enough.

Where to start, step by step

This plan works in companies without a dedicated SEO team, where one person in marketing is responsible for the website and someone on the board or an external agency handles media relations. You can do every step yourself. Outside help is most useful for measurement and media coverage, because what counts there is a repeatable method and contacts with editorial teams, which can’t be built in a single quarter.

1. STEP 01Baseline measurement

   List 20 questions customers ask before buying, for example “who in Poland carries out energy audits for manufacturing plants”. Ask them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google’s AI Mode. Note who is mentioned, with what source and in what tone. Without this zero point, you won’t be able to tell the effect from chance.

2. STEP 02Getting the SEO basics in order

   Pages must be indexed. They must also load quickly and be readable by crawlers. Look at your robots.txt file and check that you are not blocking the OAI-SearchBot crawler. OpenAI states plainly that sites that block it will not appear in ChatGPT search answers.

3. STEP 03Answers instead of generalities

   On every important page, the first sentence answers the question directly. Figures have a source and a date. The author is named. This is what AEO looks like in practice: a passage that can be extracted and quoted.

4. STEP 04Mentions in other sources

   Make sure you have expert publications in industry media, entries in business directories and profiles on review sites, all with the same company name, the same address and the same scope of services. Conflicting data on the web is the most common reason a model confuses a company with another one.

5. STEP 05A repeat measurement after 60–90 days

   The same questions, the same tools and a few control questions you have not touched. Only the difference between the groups tells you whether your activities changed anything or merely coincided with a change.

How much does GEO cost and what determines the budget?

The cost of GEO depends primarily on the number of questions in the measurement and the number of models checked, and then on the scope of content to be improved and how much media coverage needs to be earned. Below you will find public tool prices (as of September 2026) and the factors that change the budget. We do not give prices for agency services, because offers differ so much in scope that comparing the amounts alone, without describing what lies behind them, is more misleading than helpful for a decision.

Nie chcesz zaczynać od zakupu narzędzia? W usłudze AI search optimisation pierwszym krokiem jest pomiar bazowy na pytaniach Twoich klientów, a dopiero z jego wyników wynika, ile treści i publikacji naprawdę trzeba.

When is it worth tackling GEO, and when not yet?

The time for GEO comes when the website is in decent technical shape and customers say in meetings that “ChatGPT recommended” a competitor to them. A good moment is also the period before a major launch or entry into a new market, because coverage earned in the first few weeks often shapes the company’s image in models for a long time.

Wait if the website has indexing problems, has no service pages, or has just one sentence under each service. In that case, money spent on GEO will be wasted, because models that use search engines won’t find your content anyway. SEO first, then GEO. There is no way around it.

A baseline measurement, content improvements and the first publications usually take around a quarter before a repeat measurement makes sense. We have also written about working on a brand in search results in connection with Image SEO.

GEO a SEO w kalendarzu, czyli typowy kwartał w firmie B2B

Ten opis to scenariusz poglądowy, a nie historia klienta. Producent urządzeń dla przemysłu, jedna osoba od strony, agencja PR na zlecenie i handlowcy, którzy coraz częściej słyszą od klientów, że „ChatGPT polecił kogoś innego”. W tabeli GEO vs SEO różnice widać na papierze. W kwartale widać je w kalendarzu.

Miesiąc pierwszy. Pomiar bazowy na dwudziestu pytaniach i porządek w podstawach: indeksacja, robots.txt, podstrony usług. Tu wychodzi, jak wygląda relacja SEO a GEO w praktyce, bo bez stron w indeksie praca nad wzmiankami nie ma na czym się oprzeć. Przy okazji ustalasz jedną osobę odpowiedzialną za całość. Według raportu Muck Rack w 29% organizacji nikt za GEO nie odpowiada.

Miesiąc drugi. Poprawki treści pod AEO (pierwsze zdanie odpowiada wprost na pytanie) i pierwsze publikacje eksperckie. Zapis źródeł z pomiaru mówi, gdzie się pojawić: jeśli modele cytują o konkurencji portal branżowy, tam kierujesz komentarz ekspercki. Jak pisać materiał, który podchwycą i redakcje, i modele, pokazujemy w tekście o press releases in the AI era. Dla firm przemysłowych przyda się też tekst o B2B image activities.

Miesiąc trzeci. Powtórny pomiar na tych samych pytaniach plus kilku kontrolnych, których nie ruszano. Obok dane z Search Console i ruch oznaczony jako pochodzący z ChatGPT. Relacja GEO a SEO jest tu najlepiej widoczna: wyświetlenia w Przeglądach od AI rosną razem z pozycjami, a wzmianki w ChatGPT dopiero po publikacjach. Rachunek narzędzi z tabeli wyżej jest skromny. Kwartał z Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit to około 300 USD, a pomiar ręczny kosztuje wyłącznie czas.

Próg decyzji ustal przed startem. Przykład: prace idą dalej, jeśli marka pojawia się w wyraźnie większej liczbie pytań z poprawionymi treściami niż w pytaniach kontrolnych, a w analityce da się wskazać choć jedno zapytanie ofertowe z kanałów AI. Jeśli różnicy między grupami nie ma, zmień tematy publikacji, zanim zwiększysz budżet. Zespołowi często wystarczy krótkie szkolenie GEO dla osoby od strony i osoby od mediów, żeby obie pracowały na tej samej liście pytań. Jak modele wybierają firmy do polecenia, tłumaczymy w tekście o ranking in ChatGPT.

Jeśli szukasz, jakie są najlepsze agencje do optymalizacji GEO, zacznij od tych pytań:

1. Pokażecie listę pytań i raport z pomiaru bazowego, zanim podpiszemy umowę?
2. W ilu modelach mierzycie i jak często powtarzacie pomiar?
3. Jak odróżnicie efekt od przypadku? Czy używacie pytań kontrolnych?
4. Kto zdobywa publikacje w mediach, a kto poprawia stronę?
5. Jakie zapisy dostaniemy co miesiąc: źródła cytowań, ton, błędy w odpowiedziach?
6. Co zrobicie, jeśli po kwartale nie będzie różnicy między grupami pytań?

Jak mierzyć efekty GEO, AEO i SEO razem?

On the Google side, you now have official data. In Search Console you will find a report for generative features. It shows impressions of your pages in AI Overviews and AI Mode (without the number of clicks), and at the end of August 2026 Google made it available to all website owners.

You can recognise traffic from ChatGPT in your analytics by the tag utm_source=chatgpt.com, które OpenAI dodaje automatycznie do linków w odpowiedziach. Obecność marki w samych odpowiedziach mierzysz na stałej liście pytań: czy marka jest wymieniona, czy zacytowana z linkiem, w jakim tonie i czy informacje są prawdziwe. U nas robi to Commwork®AI system, który zadaje te same pytania w ośmiu silnikach AI i zapisuje, kogo cytują. Pełną listę kontrolną znajdziesz w poradniku, jak zrobić AI visibility audit.

In every measurement, we stick to one principle: correlation is not causation. If the brand appears more often after media coverage, compare this with the control questions and with an equivalent period before publication before you attribute the increase to your own activities.

Which GEO positioning agency in Poland?

The market for GEO agencies in Poland is young and full of promises. The best GEO agency is not the one that guarantees “first place in ChatGPT”. Nobody can give such a guarantee. A good agency for GEO website optimisation will show you a list of questions, a baseline measurement report and a way of distinguishing the effect from chance before you sign a contract.

Check whether the agency combines three competencies: website technology, content writing and media relations. SEO alone will not build mentions in independent sources, and PR alone will not fix a website that crawlers cannot see. We have collected questions for a first meeting (there are fifteen of them) in our guide to choosing a GEO agency. For a broader picture of the changes in search engine optimisation, read the article on how AI is changing SEO.

Jeśli zamiast pojedynczych działań potrzebujesz kogoś, kto wdroży AI w marketingu i PR od diagnozy do pomiaru, zobacz, jak pracuje Commplace AI agency.

W Commplace® robimy to dla firm B2B w czterech warstwach (technika, treść, dowody, pomiar), a szczegóły opisujemy na stronie: GEO agency. International clients are invited to visit the page generative engine optimization agency in Poland. If you would like to talk about your situation, talk to me; the first conversation costs nothing.

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