Search “best burr grinder under $100” in Google and you may get an AI Overview above the results. It answers in a paragraph and cites a handful of pages. Ask ChatGPT the same thing and you get a list of grinders with stores beside them. Your store is either in those answers or it isn’t.
Getting into them now has a name, GEO, and an industry selling it. Google’s own guidance, last updated in July 2026, says the work for its AI features is SEO. Both views have a point, and the difference matters for how a store spends its time.
In short: SEO gets a page ranked in search results. GEO gets a page used and cited in an AI answer. For Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode they’re the same work, because Google picks the sources from its search index with its normal ranking systems. What changes is what you measure: a citation inside an answer, against your competitors, instead of a position in a list.
GEO and SEO side by side
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| The goal | A high position in the results | A citation or mention in an AI answer |
| Where it shows | Google and Bing results | Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot |
| How pages are found | A search crawler and an index | The same: Google’s index for its AI features, each engine’s own crawler for the rest |
| What wins | Relevant, useful pages with links and a good reputation | The same, plus facts stated plainly enough to quote |
| What you measure | Position, clicks, impressions | Whether you’re cited, how often and who is cited instead |
| One check tells you | Quite a lot, as rankings move slowly | Little, as answers change from one asking to the next |
Where the term GEO comes from
GEO comes from a 2023 research paper by researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi. They tested nine ways of rewriting web pages and measured how much of each page AI answers then used. The best methods raised a page’s visibility in the answers by up to 40%. They also found that what worked differed from one subject to the next.
The methods that did best were the plain ones. Adding statistics, quotes from credible sources and citations helped most. Stuffing pages with the search’s keywords, an old SEO habit, did little or made things worse. That’s the same advice good SEO has given for years, aimed at a reader that quotes rather than ranks.
What Google says
Google has a guide to its AI features for site owners, Optimizing for generative AI search, last updated in July 2026 (read October 4, 2026). Its answer to “GEO vs SEO” is short. From Google’s view, optimizing for AI search “is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.”
The reasons it gives:
- The sources come from the index. AI Overviews and AI Mode retrieve pages with Google’s core ranking systems, then write the answer from them. A page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet to be cited, and there are no extra technical requirements.
- One question becomes many searches. Google calls it query fan-out. Asked how to fix a weedy lawn, it also searches for herbicides and for ways to prevent weeds. So a page can be cited for a question it never mentions.
- Some things don’t help. The guide says to skip llms.txt and other AI text files for Google, splitting pages into small chunks, rewriting pages just for AI and chasing paid or fake mentions.
- Some things still matter for stores. Merchant Center feeds and a Google Business Profile can put your products and shop details into AI answers.
It also warns that no outside tool has access to Google’s internal ranking or AI systems. That includes ours. A tracker can only show what Google shows, which is the point of tracking.
What actually changes for a store
If GEO is SEO for Google, why does the term stick? Because a few things really are different.
An answer has only a few slots. An AI Overview cites a handful of pages. A ChatGPT shopping answer shows a few products. Being eighth in a list still gets some clicks. Being left out of an answer gets none.
Other engines have their own crawlers. Google’s AI features use Google’s index. ChatGPT uses OpenAI’s search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and its shopping results lean on product feeds. A store that blocks those bots in robots.txt is out of ChatGPT’s answers, however well it ranks in Google. Our guide to getting recommended by ChatGPT covers each one.
What others say about you counts for more. An AI answer often draws on reviews, forums and buying guides as much as on your own pages. Ranking your product page isn’t enough if every comparison article names three other stores.
You can’t check it once. Ask the same question twice and an AI answer can cite different pages. Rankings move over weeks. AI answers move between askings. So a single check proves little. The trend over several weeks, against your competitors, is what tells you something.
It’s measured against rivals. “We were cited in 4 of 20 answers” means little alone. “We were cited in 4, our closest rival in 11” tells you what to do next.
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What to do this week
None of this needs a new budget line. It’s SEO work done with AI answers in mind.
- Check that the crawlers can get in. Open your robots.txt. Googlebot, Bingbot and OAI-SearchBot should all be allowed. Check your firewall or CDN doesn’t block them either. Some block bots by default.
- Put the facts on the page as text. Price, sizes, materials, shipping and returns, written out, not only in images or tabs that need a click. Keep your product structured data matching what the page shows.
- Answer the questions shoppers ask. A short, plain answer near the top of a page is what gets quoted. “Ships in 2 business days from Portland” beats “fast, reliable shipping.”
- Keep Merchant Center and your Business Profile current. They feed Google’s shopping answers directly.
- Earn mentions honestly. Ask happy customers for reviews. Get your products into the buying guides that already rank. Google says inauthentic mentions don’t help.
- Track it against your competitors, weekly. Note which of your main searches show an AI Overview, which pages it cites and whether yours is one of them.
How to measure it
Search Console. Google’s guide points to the Generative AI performance report in Search Console. It shows how your own pages do. It can’t show which competitor was cited in your place.
By hand. Pick your ten most important searches. Each week, search them from the country you sell in and note the sources under any AI Overview. A spreadsheet works for a while. It’s slow, and AI Overviews vary between checks, so a few weeks of samples beat one careful look.
With a tracker. Over the Fence checks every keyword you track each week, records whether Google showed an AI Overview and which websites it cited, and counts your citations against each competitor. We read Google’s AI Overviews, not ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini. Full citations come with the Growth plan, $119 a month. If you want several AI engines checked daily, our list of AI visibility tools compares 13 of them.
The short answer
GEO isn’t a separate job from SEO, at least not for Google. It’s SEO measured in a new place, where there are fewer slots and the results move every time someone asks. Do the SEO work and let every AI crawler in. Then watch who gets cited instead of you, every week.