SEO vs GEO: Are Generative Engines rewriting rules of digital visibility?

Search has changed. Again.

No longer the blue-link bazaar it once was, search in 2025 is now a battle of relevance inside the glowing minds of generative AI engines. Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), OpenAI’s ChatGPT integrations, Perplexity’s cited answers, and Gemini’s info overlays have quietly rewritten the rules. 

And with that, an old acronym has taken on new meaning. Goodbye Search Engine Optimization. Hello Generative Engine Optimization—GEO, if you're short on time and long on LinkedIn buzzwords.

Unlike classic SEO, which chased keywords and backlinks, GEO is about making sure your content gets picked up, cited, or surfaced in the AI-powered responses that more and more users now see as their first and last stop on the web. Generative engines don’t show 10 results. They show one. Sometimes, they don’t even show you.

So, what’s a brand to do?

“Brands must move beyond traditional keyword-centric SEO and optimize for conversational AI and generative engines,” says Dikshant Dave, CEO of Zigment AI. “This means structuring content to answer specific user intents, creating rich, contextual knowledge assets, and ensuring their data is integrated into AI training pipelines and answer engines.” In other words, stop writing for bots. Start writing for AI that thinks.

Vaibhav Jain, Head of Media at First Economy, agrees. “AI-driven search is reshaping how visibility is earned. Brands now win attention by delivering answers that AI can easily interpret, cite, and trust,” he says. That means content precision, semantic depth, and factual clarity are now the currency of digital visibility. Not keyword stuffing or link wheels.

Marketers are already adapting. Schema markup, FAQs, and structured data have become baseline tactics. But the real shift? Authority isn’t about who shouts the loudest anymore. It’s about who answers the best.

According to SE Ranking’s 2025 report, 58% of SEO professionals worldwide report increased competition due to AI-driven search. GEO tactics, especially those focused on structuring content for generative models, can improve visibility by up to 40%. The global SEO market, already worth $82 billion in 2023, is projected to grow to $143 billion by 2030—but a significant chunk of that growth is now tied to GEO practices, not just traditional search optimization.

Sini Magon, Chief Operation Officer and Global Partner at Grapes Worldwide, says that brands should focus on building comprehensive content clusters and integrate semantic SEO to form connection between concepts, questions and intents. “Simultaneously, optimization of AI summaries and featured content should be performed considering that AI summaries extract information from topical summaries, structured data or authoritative sources. Thereby, structured data/ schema markup must be incorporated to facilitate understanding of content by machines.”

This, naturally, has opened the door for smaller players to shine. “Generative Engine Optimization has the potential to level the field by rewarding relevance, clarity, and authenticity over sheer backlink volume,” says Dave. 

Jain echoes the sentiment, noting that “AI models are less influenced by traditional metrics and more by the specificity and authenticity of information.” So yes, your two-year-old blog post about fermented gooseberries might actually outrank Big FMCG—if it’s well-written, structured, and cited.

But let’s not get too utopian just yet.

GEO, as it stands today, is still early-stage. As Dave points out, “without transparency and guardrails, it risks becoming SEO 2.0 with a new set of gaming tactics.” And that’s not a hypothetical.

According to a 2024 study on arXiv, certain text strings can be engineered to appear disproportionately in AI responses. Manipulating generative engines is already happening, and the race to ‘game the AI’ has begun.

Bala Kumaran, Founder and Director, BrandStory believes that GEO democratizes visibility in ways SEO never could but only for brands agile enough to pivot. Smaller players now compete on relevance, not budget. 

“An AI doesn’t care if you’re a Fortune 500 or a bootstrapped startup; it rewards depth, freshness, and E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). However, calling it ‘SEO 2.0’ undersells the seismic shift,” he says.

But not everyone is buying the GEO hype wholesale.

“SEO is still relevant,” says Amit Verma, CEO of DigitUp, citing his company's work with Kotak Life as just one example. “We prove what works with data, not just tweets from Neil Patel or speculative blogs.” He’s not wrong. 

Verma points out that while technical SEO, content, and site speed remain essential, the evolution now lies in understanding search intent and delivering useful outcomes. Tools, checkers, reports, and logic-driven sitemaps have become the new SEO currency. “It’s not just about ranking anymore. It’s about usefulness, answers, and experience,” he says.

As for fairness? “What is fair?” Verma shrugs. “Unless ChatGPT starts charging brands for citations, everything’s fair. Yes, everything.” According to him, the real problem is that the industry is flooded with folks who don’t understand SEO—so naturally, they’re the loudest voices declaring it dead. “Just because 99 out of 100 agencies never really knew what worked doesn’t mean the game is over. It means the rules changed.”

And the stakes are only getting higher.

India, of course, is right in the thick of it. The country’s digital marketing industry is expected to hit $15 billion this year, according to some estimates, driven in part by a younger, AI-native audience and the explosion of content creators entering the fray. Indian agencies are adapting fast—blending voice optimization, video SEO, and now GEO—to deliver results.

And results, ultimately, are what matter. Not whether it’s called SEO, GEO, or something else entirely. As Jain notes, “Success belongs to those who blend technical proficiency with authentic insight.”

GEO isn’t a silver bullet, or a scam, or some magical fix that finally dethrones Google. It’s just the next evolution of a very old game: making sure people (and now machines) find your stuff first. The methods may have changed. The mission hasn’t.