SEO vs GEO: The race to rank on ChatGPT

🫡 I’m on a mission to crack the ChatGPT ranking code

I’ve spent years playing the SEO game for my clients’ content strategies.
It used to be all about getting your site to rank on Google’s first page so you could win the click.

❓So, How do you “rank” in ChatGPT?

It’s a completely different game. I recently watched a webinar where they introduced a new concept: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization.)

In a nutshell:
🔎 SEO is about showing up in Google search results
💬 GEO is about showing up in the AI conversation.

SEO’s goal: Rank high in Google (or Bing) search results.
GEO’s goal: Be mentioned when ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or any LLM answers a question in your niche.

Both want clicks but GEO starts one step earlier.

You need to be part of the AI’s “mental model” of your industry before the user ever clicks anything.

For SEO, the playbook is familiar:
→Backlinks
→Keywords
→Technical SEO

But for GEO... it’s about something entirely different!
→Content structure: easy for AI to parse
→Consensus: your perspective aligns with other credible sources (or offers a credible counterpoint)
→Comprehensive coverage: no gaps that would make AI skip you

This means you can’t just optimize for Google anymore. You have to think about the whole internet, where large language models (LLMs) pull their knowledge from.

That includes your website, industry blogs, publications, podcasts, conference transcripts, and yes… even LinkedIn. Yikes!

It used to be that all that mattered was traffic and rankings.

But In GEO, you measure:
✅ Inclusion: are you even in the AI’s answer set?
✅ Accuracy: is the AI getting your facts right?
✅ Frequency: how often are you mentioned?
✅ Sentiment: is the AI talking about you in a positive, neutral, or negative way?

I’ve already seen ChatGPT mention things about companies that are flat-out wrong. Not malicious, but just inaccurate.

Part of GEO is feeding the machine correct data in as many reputable places as possible.

🧠 Learning about GEO made me realize:

If you’re invisible to AI, you’re invisible to the future of search.

Just like early SEO adopters dominated Google’s first decade, early GEO adopters will own the next wave of discoverability.

🍱 I’m now obsessed with figuring out how to feed ChatGPT and its AI friends the right diet so they’ll talk about my clients and talk about them accurately.

Because in the new search game, it’s not just about being found:

It’s about being included in the conversation.

Stay tuned as I figure this out.

I’ll share my tests, results, and strategies so we can crack the ChatGPT ranking code together.