The Core Difference
Traditional SEO answers the question: “Does Google’s algorithm see my page as relevant and authoritative?” The signals are primarily technical — PageRank, crawlability, keyword density, page speed, Core Web Vitals.
GEO answers a different question: “Does an LLM trust my page enough to cite it in a generated answer?” LLMs don’t use PageRank. They don’t evaluate backlink profiles. They evaluate the quality, structure, and entity coverage of the content itself.
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What Stays The Same
The fundamentals don’t change. Content quality, topical authority, and user intent alignment still matter — they just get expressed differently. A page that comprehensively answers a question for a human reader also tends to be well-cited by AI engines, because LLMs are trained on human-produced content.
Page speed, mobile responsiveness, and structured data remain important — LLMs can’t cite a page they can’t effectively parse. Technical SEO is the floor; GEO is the ceiling.
The 3 Biggest Shifts
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