GEO & AI search

GEO vs SEO

Definition

SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of links; GEO optimizes for being the fact or product an AI assistant quotes or recommends directly, often without a click-through at all.

Defined in The Agentic Commerce Glossary.

Where GEO vs SEO comes up

The guides that put this term to work, rather than just defining it.

Related terms

Product schema audit: A scored review of Product (and related Offer / rating / policy) structured data on live product pages, measured as a crawler would read them, against a fixed field checklist weighted for AI shopping usefulness.
Retrieval-augmented answer: An AI response generated by first searching for relevant live pages, then having the model read and synthesize from those specific pages — as opposed to answering purely from training data. Perplexity's shopping answers are retrieval-augmented, which is why what's on your page right now matters more than what a model "knows" about your brand.
Shared foundation: Technical and data work — structured data, attribute completeness, site architecture, page performance — that simultaneously improves classic search rankings and AI-assistant citation accuracy. It should be budgeted once, not split across SEO and GEO line items.
Commerce GEO: Generative engine optimization applied to commerce — the practice of structuring a catalog and content so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity cite and recommend it.
Answer-first structure: Writing the conclusion or direct answer as the first sentence of a section, with supporting reasoning and caveats following it — the inverse of narrative or journalistic structure, which builds to a conclusion.
Corroboration: Independent confirmation of a claim from a source that isn't the brand itself. In GEO terms, it's the difference between a fact an assistant can state with confidence and one it has to hedge or omit.

All 112 terms

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