A Clear Explanation of the Differences Between SEO and GEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) are both strategies for increasing website visibility in search. However, these two methodologies have fundamentally different approaches. To understand this difference, we first need to know how search engines and AI understand text.

How Do Search Engines Understand Text?

When a user searches for "delicious pasta recipe," the search engine converts this text into numbers. This process is called text-to-vector conversion, and search engines convert all website text into vectors the same way. Then they calculate the similarity between the user's search query vector and website vectors to find the most relevant pages.

How search engines convert text into numbers (vectors)

Why Search Results Have Rankings

If thousands of websites cover the same topic, how does a search engine rank them? It comprehensively evaluates various signals called ranking factors. The main ranking factors that search engines evaluate include:

SEO is a strategy to improve search rankings by optimizing these ranking factors. Keyword research, backlink building, and technical optimization are all efforts to improve these ranking factors.

How Is AI Different?

AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini work differently from search engines. When users ask questions, AI directly generates answers.

No, AI also ultimately converts information into 'numbers.' However, it's best understood as having evolved these methods to be much smarter and more complex. While traditional search engines converted individual words or short phrases into numbers and calculated similarity, AI has the following major differences:

1. Deeper Understanding of Meaning

AI converts the complex underlying meaning and intent of entire sentences, paragraphs, and even entire documents into numbers with much more nuance than just word meanings. For example, it can accurately determine through context whether the word "Apple" refers to the fruit or the smartphone brand and represent it numerically.

2. Creating New Content

AI can go beyond simply comparing numerical information to directly create new content based on that information. This is the most important capability of 'generative AI.' If you ask "tell me a pasta recipe," it goes beyond finding existing documents to create new sentences explaining recipe information based on what it has learned.

3. Learning from Diverse Information

AI learns from and understands much more diverse types of information, not just text, but also images, audio, and video, converting them into numbers. This allows it to find or provide information in richer and more varied ways. In conclusion, AI doesn't avoid converting information to numbers—it converts them in much more sophisticated and diverse ways and has gained the ability to not just find information but create new information. This is precisely why a new concept called 'Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)' has emerged, distinct from traditional 'Search Engine Optimization (SEO).'

GEO refers to the process of helping generative AI better understand information and create new things. Traditional search engines and AI search don't work completely differently, but AI understands meaning and context more precisely to generate answers. It evaluates relevance and trustworthiness with stricter standards that cannot be bypassed through workarounds. Therefore, we must optimize websites with stricter criteria for trustworthiness and relevance, rather than from the traditional SEO perspective of dealing with crawling bots.