SEO gets your pages ranked in a list of links. GEO gets your brand named inside the AI answer itself. They overlap, good pages help both, but GEO is decided mostly on sources you do not own: Reddit, YouTube, reviews, niche sites and press.
Good content still wins. Clear pages that answer real questions, honest expertise, and technical basics like crawlability matter for both. In fact a large share of pages cited by Google AI Overviews also rank in the classic top 10, so strong SEO remains a foundation for GEO.
The unit of victory changes from a ranked link to a named recommendation. AI answers are assembled from multiple trusted sources, so third-party proof, community discussion, reviews and independent mentions, carries more weight than another page on your own domain. Structure changes too: AI lifts short, self-contained answer blocks, so the first sentences of a page matter more than ever.
Keep the SEO foundation, then shift new effort to the citation layer: real presence on Reddit and the forums of your category, video that gets transcribed, reviews on the platforms AI checks, and direct-answer pages for each buyer question. That mix moves both AI answers and, in time, classic rankings.