SEO vs GEO: what manufacturers must change
SEO optimizes for the click. GEO optimizes for the citation. Both coexist, but the levers and KPIs differ.
SEO assumes a human opens a results page and clicks a link. GEO assumes an AI summarizes the answer and only cites a handful of sources. That difference rewrites a manufacturer's content playbook.
Objective
SEO: rank #1 on a query. GEO: be cited (and cited accurately) in the synthesized answer. A #5 ranking on Google can still be cited by Perplexity if the page is structured and factual.
Content format
SEO rewards long semantically optimized pages. GEO rewards short, factual, dated blocks with lists, tables and FAQs — directly reusable by the model.
KPIs
SEO: impressions, CTR, average position. GEO: number of citations in ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity, presence in AI Overviews, share of voice on buyer queries.
What a manufacturer must add
A complete Organization JSON-LD card, technical FAQs (capabilities, standards, lead times), one page per region × sector pair (pillar pages), and a glossary of trade terms. That is the bare minimum to become a citable source.
Key takeaways
- → SEO and GEO coexist — they do not replace each other.
- → GEO content is short, factual, structured and dated.
- → Measuring GEO requires testing buyer queries across multiple engines.
FAQ
Is SEO dead?
No. Google still dominates transactional queries. But on supplier-comparison queries, AI engines already exceed a 25% share in North American industrial B2B.