GEO vs SEO: what actually changed, with our own numbers
GEO is being sold as a new discipline with its own price tag. We looked at our own sites instead of taking anyone's word for it, and the numbers point somewhere more specific than a new service. The pitch being sold right now Search a term like "generative engine optimization services" and the results are a wall of agency listicles, several of them advertising specific numbers: hundreds of…
GEO is being marketed as a new discipline with its own price tag. However, a deeper look at measured data from four of the author's own sites suggests the concept may be less distinct than advertised.
The article presents numbers from Google Search Console's dedicated Generative AI features report for each site. Across three weeks, every property showed growth in AI impressions, ranging from 1.3x to 3.0x compared to the previous measurement taken on September 5th. This growth held across all four sites, regardless of their focus or type of content.
The pages that garnered the most AI citations were those that provided direct, factual answers to specific questions. For example, the government-services directory's top-cited page was a specific province's land-use and demographic information, not the site's homepage or service offerings. Similarly, a land-use guide for a specific province and a city-specific emergency-preparedness guide topped their respective sites in AI citations.
The company homepage, which is typically dominated by brand search queries, also showed AI citation impressions but to a much lesser extent. This suggests that AI citations are not primarily driven by brand searches or typical commercial pages.
The author clarifies that GEO is not a separate service, but rather a component of good SEO practice. They argue that charging separately for GEO would be redundant, as the same content and strategies that improve search rankings also contribute to AI citation potential. The author's own data shows that specific, well-sourced, and clearly structured reference content wins both traditional search rankings and AI citations.
However, the article also cautions that the AI citation numbers are still relatively small, with only a few dozen to a few hundred impressions over a 90-day period. The author emphasizes that this is a snapshot comparison rather than continuous data tracking. They reiterate that AI citations are a visibility signal, not a click signal, as AI Overviews are largely zero-click experiences.
In summary, GEO as a separate discipline may be overstated based on the author's measured data. Instead, the same quality content that improves traditional SEO rankings also appears more frequently in AI citations. The author emphasizes that this insight should not be seen as a replacement for regular SEO work, but rather an additional benefit of producing high-quality reference content.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
