GEO vs SEO: what differs and what B2B companies should do first

What SEO and GEO mean

Tibexa is an outbound and GTM agency. We do not sell GEO or SEO services, so this page is general guidance built from public documentation. Every statement about a platform or vendor below was checked on 18 October 2026.

Google's SEO Starter Guide describes search engine optimization as helping search engines understand your content and helping people decide whether to visit your site from the results. The system it covers is Google's own: crawlers find pages mostly through links from pages they already know, then Google indexes and ranks them. The guide says that "there are no secrets here that'll automatically rank your site first in Google," and that "some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months" (Google SEO Starter Guide).

GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization) are names for work aimed at getting a brand cited or mentioned in AI answers, whether from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI search says that "optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO" (Google, Optimizing for generative AI search). That covers Google only. OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic each publish crawler documentation but, in the pages we read, no equivalent optimization guide.

What overlaps, according to Google

For Google's AI features, Google's position is that the work is shared. AI Overviews and AI Mode pull pages from the Search index (Google calls this grounding) and run related searches (query fan-out), and the guide says they are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems." A page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet, and the AI features page adds: "There are no additional technical requirements."

On a B2B site the usual way to fail the one requirement is a page that is blocked or hidden. The SEO Starter Guide says Google aims to see pages the way an average user does, so blocking CSS or JavaScript can stop it from understanding a page, and the AI features page lists noindex as a way to keep a page out of results. Check for both before anything else.

Our reading: if your goal is Google's AI features, the work is the SEO work you would do anyway. Whether that holds for ChatGPT search, Perplexity or Claude is a separate question, and none of the documentation we read for those three says either way.

Where they differ: crawlers and access

The practical difference is access control. Each AI company runs its own crawlers, some for training and some for search, and each documents them separately. All rows below are as published by the operator and checked on 18 October 2026.

OpenAI says each of its settings is independent, so a site can allow OAI-SearchBot and disallow GPTBot. Whether to block training is a business decision, and the pages we read do not say whether it changes what an assistant says about you. OpenAI also says a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to take effect. Anthropic advises against blocking by IP address, because that stops its bots from reading your robots.txt, and says to set the rule for every subdomain you want to opt out.

Blocking Google-Extended does not remove you from AI Overviews. Google-Extended has no effect on Search inclusion, and those features follow the Googlebot controls and the snippet directives in the first table.

Do AI citations follow search rankings?

For Google AI Overviews, two large studies point in different directions, and both only cover Google.

The two counted differently (Ahrefs looked at the three most visible citations per response, Conductor at all of them), and neither claims to explain the other. Conductor says it did not set out to prove ranking causes citation. Ahrefs says it could not explain the roughly 10% of citations ranking beyond the top 10. Read together, they support one cautious conclusion: ranking and citation move together, and a top-10 ranking is not a requirement. We found no comparable study for ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude among the sources we fetched, so we make no claim about how those assistants pick sources.

What can and cannot be measured today

Measurement is where GEO differs most from SEO, mainly because, among the four operators here, only Google publishes a first-party report.

What you cannot measure today is how often ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude cite your site across real user conversations. None of the three vendor pages we read describes a publisher report for it. Google's own report counts impressions in AI features, which is not the same as clicks or influence on a deal. If you are choosing a tracking product, our list of AI visibility tracking tools covers pricing models. Whatever a tracker costs, it observes answers from the outside.

Claims we could not source

These are common GEO claims we could not support from a primary source on 18 October 2026.

• Schema markup raises AI citations. Google says it is not required and that there is no special schema for generative AI search. The OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic pages we read do not mention structured data, so for those assistants we have no primary source either way.
• An llms.txt file improves visibility. Google says Search does not use such files. The other three vendors' pages do not mention them.
• Blocking a training crawler lowers or raises how often an assistant cites you. No documentation we read states this, and Anthropic's own article does not say it.
• Genuine brand mentions on other sites lift citations. Google calls manufactured mentions unhelpful, but we found no primary source that quantifies the effect of real ones for any assistant.
• ChatGPT adds a utm_source=chatgpt.com tag to links it sends. OpenAI's publisher help article returned a 403 error when we tried to open it, so we could not check this and have left it out of the measurement table.
• Rankings drive citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude. The two studies above cover Google AI Overviews only.

What to do first at a B2B company

This order is our opinion, drawn from the documentation above. The first three steps cost little.

1. Check that your commercial pages are indexed and can show a snippet. Google lists that as the requirement for its AI features, and Search Console shows index status page by page.
2. Decide your crawler policy bot by bot and write it into robots.txt for every subdomain. If you want to appear in assistant answers, allow OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot. Treat GPTBot and ClaudeBot as a separate decision about training, and re-check the file after changes, since OpenAI says adjustment can take about a day.
3. Publish original material that a buyer would search for: your pricing logic, implementation details, test results from your own work, comparisons of the options you actually meet in deals. Google's guidance asks for original, experience-based content with a unique viewpoint.
4. Set a baseline before you change anything. Record Search Console impressions and clicks, check whether the Generative AI performance report is available in your Search Console, count crawler hits in your logs, and add a "how did you hear about us" field to your forms.
5. Skip llms.txt files and mention campaigns built only for AI. Google says its Search does not use the first and treats the second as unhelpful. Keep any structured data you already use for rich results.

Then keep the rest of your pipeline independent of any of this. For other channels, see cold email vs. LinkedIn outreach and outbound agency vs. in-house SDR team, or our GTM strategy service. Search authority is a slow asset: Google's guide suggests waiting a few weeks before judging a change and says some changes take months. Our outbound work runs on a shorter clock. In one engagement an HRTech SaaS company had $1M in active pipeline within 120 days of repositioning and rebuilt messaging.

Questions

Is GEO different from SEO?

For Google's AI features, Google says optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO. What differs is the set of crawlers you manage in robots.txt and what you can measure, because OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic each run their own bots and publish no equivalent of Search Console.

Should I block GPTBot or ClaudeBot?

OpenAI says GPTBot is for training and OAI-SearchBot is for search, and that each setting is independent. Anthropic describes ClaudeBot as a training crawler and Claude-SearchBot as a search indexer. Blocking the training bots is a business decision, and the pages we read do not say what it does to your visibility.

Do I need llms.txt or schema markup to appear in AI answers?

Google says neither is needed for its AI features and that Search does not use llms.txt. OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic do not mention them in the pages we read, so we cannot say whether they help on those platforms.

Can I measure how often AI assistants cite my site?

Only partly. Google's Generative AI performance report shows impressions in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover for a subset of sites. We found no first-party citation report from OpenAI, Perplexity or Anthropic.