GEO vs SEO and every other comparison, answered straight

SEO works to place your page in a ranked list of links. GEO works to place your brand inside the answer written above that list. The technical foundations overlap, the measurement and the off-site work do not.

AEO is about being the answer that gets extracted, mostly on Google surfaces such as featured snippets, People Also Ask and AI Overviews. GEO is about being the brand named inside generated answers across multiple AI engines.

A featured snippet quotes one page verbatim and links to it. An AI Overview generates a new summary from several retrieved pages and links to a handful of them, which means the text belongs to nobody and the traffic is split.

An SEO agency is accountable for rankings and organic sessions. A GEO agency is accountable for whether AI engines name your brand on an agreed prompt set, measured weekly and reported against named competitors.

Perplexity always retrieves and always shows sources, so it changes fastest when you publish. ChatGPT has far more users and often answers from memory, so it changes slower but carries more commercial weight when it does.

In-house works when you already have a content team, a developer with schema access, and someone who will run the weekly scan without being chased. An agency is faster when the bottleneck is the source placement and the measurement discipline, which is where most in-house attempts stall.