The difference between SEO and GEO: how should you split your budget?

SEO aims to get a page to appear high in search results; GEO aims to get the brand included in the answers given by AI engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews. The two jobs overlap heavily on the technical foundation, but they diverge in off-site mentions, quotable writing and measurement. There is no reliable general ratio for how to split the effort; that decision is made by measuring where you stand today and measuring again with the same questions.

The two jobs have different units

The outcome of SEO is a position: where you rank for a keyword, and how many clicks you got. These numbers are read from a search console or a rank tracker and can be measured the same way every day.

The outcome of GEO, by contrast, is a set of individual answers. A question was asked to an engine; your brand was either mentioned in the answer or it was not, and your site was either cited as a source or it was not. The result is written as a pair of numbers, such as "we were mentioned in 12 of 40 questions". Position is not a sound measure here: in the research SparkToro published in January 2026, when the same question was asked 100 times, the chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI gave the same list of brands in two answers came out below one percent. The research concludes that how often a brand appears across many questions is, however, a reasonable measure.

Common ground: technical SEO

Google states plainly that there is no extra requirement for appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode: no special markup, no new machine-readable file and no AI-specific text file is needed. For a page to appear as a supporting link in these features, it is enough for it to be indexed and eligible to be shown with a preview in Google Search.

The same page says the fundamental SEO practices apply here too: allowing crawlers in robots.txt, making pages findable through internal links, a good page experience, content provided as text, and structured data that matches the visible information on the page. This matters directly for Turkey as well: Google announced that AI Mode and AI Overviews began rolling out gradually in Turkey on 18 February 2026.

In short, an investment in technical SEO also counts as an investment in GEO. A page that is not indexed, is closed to crawlers or has its preview turned off cannot get into Google's AI features.

The relationship between SEO and GEO varies by engine

The assumption that a page that ranks well will also be cited in the AI answer is supported by published data to very different degrees from one engine to the next. In the study Ahrefs published on 11 August 2025, 15,000 long queries were both searched on search engines and asked to AI assistants. On average, only 12% of the URLs the assistants cited were in Google's top 10 results for the same query.

The share varied markedly by engine:

The relationship also seems to be weakening for Google's own AI Overviews. According to Ahrefs' update of 2 March 2026, about 38% of the pages shown in AI Overviews ranked in the top 10 for the same search; in the first study in July 2025, this share was about 76%. Ahrefs notes that it also improved its measurement method in the meantime, so part of the drop may come from the change in method.

Diverging work 1: off-site mentions

When AI engines talk about a brand, they largely read pages outside the brand's own site. In our own measurement, across the 60 analyses we ran up to 3 August 2026, 71,027 (93.6%) of the 75,914 source links the engines cited were outside the brand's own site; in 6 analyses the brand's own site was never cited at all. The measurement covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews and is based on our own client and comparison brands, made up of 19 company records. It is not a sample of the market, and some of the questions contained the brand name.

In the analysis Ahrefs ran on 75,000 brands and published on 26 May 2025, the factor most strongly related to a brand being mentioned in Google AI Overviews was the number of pages on the web that mention the brand's name (correlation 0.664). The relationship with the number of backlinks was much weaker (0.218). In the same article Ahrefs stresses that this is a correlation and does not prove causation.

This is a different job from classic SEO link building: the goal is not links but having the brand's name appear in the right context, in industry publications, on comparison sites, and on complaint and review platforms. Which sites are read also varies by engine; our article who AI reads about Turkish brands explains this with our own measurements.

Next step

Check your site item by item

The checklist gathers, with the reason for each, what is checked so that AI crawlers can read and quote a page.

Open the checklist

Diverging work 2: quotable writing

SEO content is written to rank for a keyword; GEO content is written so that a section stays accurate when it is quoted on its own. Giving the answer in the first sentence, opening each paragraph with its subject, and writing figures with their unit, date and source are all part of this difference.

This work usually does not require opening new pages; it means rewriting existing ones. We set out the full set of rules, with a checklist, in our article how to write content that AI quotes.

Diverging work 3: repeated measurement

In SEO, rankings are relatively stable from day to day and can be tracked regularly with a rank tracker. In GEO, because the same question can produce different answers, a single measurement can be misleading. That is why measurement itself is a fixed line item of GEO work: the same questions, the same engines, at regular intervals.

For this measurement to be honest, responses that could not be measured must not be counted as zero. If an engine returned an error, what you have is not the information "you were not mentioned" but missing information. We explain how to do this step by step in our guide how to measure brand visibility.

How should you split the budget? Decide by measuring

We do not give a ratio in this article saying "put this much into SEO and that much into GEO". Budget shares in surveys published outside Turkey are collected from companies in those countries and from the search habits of those markets; they cannot be generalised to Turkey. We do not know of a reliable ratio for Turkey, and recommending a ratio we do not know would mean giving a made-up number.

Instead, the decision for your own brand can be made with this loop:

1. Measure today. Measure each engine separately with the Turkish-language questions a buyer would ask, without your brand name; check technical access too.
2. Find the weakest link. Is the problem in access, in the writing, or in off-site sources?
3. Change one thing. If you change everything at once, you cannot see which change worked.
4. Measure again with the same questions. If the questions change, the difference may come from the questions rather than from your work.

Depending on what the measurement shows, the weight shifts like this:

This table is not a promise of results. Only the next measurement, made with the same questions, tells you which change worked.

Frequently asked questions

Is GEO replacing SEO?

No. Google writes that the basic requirement for AI Overviews and AI Mode is that the page is indexed and eligible to be shown with a preview, and that is the job of technical SEO. GEO adds off-site mentions, quotable writing and regular measurement of answers on top of it.

If I rank first, will I also appear in the AI answer?

There is no guarantee. In Ahrefs' August 2025 study, on average only 12% of the URLs cited by AI assistants were in Google's top 10 results for the same query, and the share varied by engine. This study was not done with Turkish-language questions; you can only see the answer for your own brand by measuring.

How much budget do companies in Turkey allocate to GEO?

We do not know of any reliable Turkish data on this. The shares in surveys from outside Turkey were collected in other markets, so they cannot be generalised to Turkey. Setting your share by measuring your current position and then measuring again with the same questions is a sounder approach.

Is backlink work useless for GEO?

In Ahrefs' analysis, the number of backlinks showed a weak relationship with being mentioned in Google AI Overviews (0.218), while the number of pages on the web mentioning the brand's name showed a much stronger one (0.664). These are correlations and do not prove causation. Links remain important for SEO; for GEO, getting the brand's name mentioned in the right context should be treated as a separate job.