Two different contests
SEO asks the engine for a position. You optimise a page so it ranks in the results list, and the user decides whether to click. GEO asks the model to keep you in its answer.
That difference is not cosmetic. In SEO, the competitor is the page directly above yours. In GEO, the competitor is whatever the model already believes, and your job is to change that belief with evidence it can verify.
What still matters from SEO
- Crawlability and rendering: if a model cannot read the page, nothing else counts.
- Structured data: it disambiguates what your page is about.
- Page-level clarity: answers that sit near the top of a section get quoted more often.
- Internal linking: it tells a retrieval system how your facts relate.
What becomes newly important
- Extractable statements: sentences that survive being lifted out of context.
- Attribution: claims tied to a named source are cited; unsupported claims are skipped.
- Entity consistency: conflicting descriptions across your pages split your entity.
- Freshness: models prefer sources they can date.
The practical consequence
Most teams do not need to abandon SEO. They need to treat content as evidence rather than as copy. A page written to persuade a reader is often useless to a model that wants a verifiable fact.
Write the claim, attach the evidence, and state the boundary. That structure serves both audiences at once, which is why it is the cheapest place to start.