Brands shifted their focus last year from SEO and Google rankings to GEO and visibility on ChatGPT and other AI platforms, consequently prompting some thought leaders to decry that SEO is dead.
But is the whole SEO vs GEO debate a false choice? And as search further fragments, what does it mean for a brand to actually win the visibility game in 2026 and beyond?
SEO and GEO strategies and measurement can feel quite distinct. To get to the heart of whether SEO and GEO are an either/or scenario for brand discovery, let’s reestablish what makes them distinct.
The SEO win is a familiar playbook dating back 20+ years. SEO encourages marketers to optimize their content with keywords and make brand authority more measurable, attributable, and conversion-friendly. SEO tracks metrics such as keyword rankings, backlink volume, clicks, and sessions.
The GEO win is the new frontier in brand discovery. It rewards credible content that provides context with entities rather than keywords and succinctly answers specific questions. GEO signals trustworthiness when brands are mentioned or cited in AI-generated answers or summaries — without a click ever happening.
Instead of choosing between SEO and GEO, brands must recognize that they can overlap, especially across platforms. Especially for under-resourced teams, focusing on good SEO practices will have reverberating impacts for your GEO successes. For example, some AI models, like Google AI overviews and Perplexity, are more likely to ingest content that is also highly-ranked in SEO. Brands need a bit of both to adequately play the visibility and authority game.
SEO traditional metrics (like organic traffic, keyword rankings, conversion rates) remain essential, but marketing leaders should now add AI-specific metrics such as:
This is especially important as clicks have been hemorrhaged by AI overviews.
As of mid-2025, there was this consensus that brand mentions (via pickups) are the new backlinks. Not that backlinks don't matter, but brand mentions and pick-ups are the new bar. This means off-page SEO will remain more valuable than on-page SEO.
This new brand currency isn't a technical race. It’s similar to what brand marketers (not SEOs) have always worked toward– gaining trust, editorial presence, and distributed authority. The findings support this assertion: 95% of AI-generated citations come from earned media, and one credible news placement has far greater value than dozens of weaker backlinks.
💡Tip: With GEO, as long as a brand is mentioned in a news article, brands don’t need to worry if there is no hyperlink to their site. Since LLMs are text-based systems, the algorithm will measure brand authority even when mentions are unlinked, as long as brand names appear on trusted sites, such as news or third-party websites, your brand will still see the impact of being mentioned.
In this new GEO game, a brand’s share of voice (SoV) — or share of answer — gets a refresh, too.
Whereas traditional SoV looked at your share of impressions or keyword rankings compared to your competitors, GOE SoV looks ar your share of AI answers in your category compared to your competitors.
With GEO SoV, being ignored by AI is akin to being on page 5 of Google.
But brands that are present in AI citations or answers gain credibility before a customer ever reaches a website. GEO SoV can be gained through strong earned media and unique content. Especially when backed by proprietary data, content bylined by real people with distinct perspectives, and stories that prioritize quality and drive trust.
Stacker content currently reports measurements across eight AI platforms, including AI overviews. The three main ways we measure GEO SoV at the story level include:
💡Tips to Gain SoV and Measure it:
A single article syndicated through a trusted publisher can appear in AI search results within 24 hours. PR placements, news syndication, and data-driven brand journalism do more than just pad reputation plays anymore. They help build GEO infrastructure.
Like SEO, GEO loves fresh content that earned media provides. GEO also prefers comprensive information, original research, and expert insights-- essentially anywhere where they can provde the authority behind a piece of content.
AI tools often use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to determine which sources to retrieve and trust, prioritizing recent, high-quality sources. Content published on credible news domains with editorial oversight, such as Stacker, signals timeliness, credibility, and relevance, increasing the likelihood that AI systems will retrieve and cite those stories. RAG fueled SEO growth for years, but now it's being used to focus squarely on AI search visibility.
🔎 Stacker measures brands’ AI citation impact based on their search presence. Our reporting maps story-level AI citations back to the brand’s original stories and/or the syndicated versions of their piece.
Though, AIO is still hard to measure, since Google Analytics doesn’t show its traffic yet. So while we wait for an update, track AI-generated citation mentions where your mentions appear + SoV in AI summaries.
Despite the hype, traditional search activities still far outweigh AI tools in desktop visits in the US, according to the Datos and SparkToro State of Search Q4 2025 Report.
So right now, I don’t recommend swinging the wheel too hard towards GEO or making drastic changes, like reformatting all of your content to chunk for GEO.
This time of transition should add to your brand visibility efforts rather than replace what you’ve done historically. Many of your SEO strategies will still serve your GEO goals. But the time is now to improve your distribution strategy.
Far more citations come from third-party distribution than from brands, so emphasizing third-party distribution, as Stacker does, is well-placed to improve citation rates.
💡Tip: Focus 70% of your efforts on SEO and 30% GEO, and revisit quarterly.
Brands that win are the ones genuinely trusted by journalists, editors, and readers — because AI engines are synthesizing exactly that trust into their answers.
To succeed at both SEO and GEO, create content that:
But above all, prioritize third-party content distribution. Your content will only go so far if you don’t have an amplifier on board to help compound your brand authority.
TL;DR: With GEO, search fragmentation will continue, but brand visibility improved through earned distribution will win on both fronts.
If your brand can help answer questions and solve problems that people truly want and need — and be visible enough as that authority — you’re golden.
Kevin Fowler is Head of SEO at Stacker, where he leads SEO, GEO and data strategy. With over a decade of experience, he has built and executed search strategies for brands in finance, e-commerce, media and tech. He holds an M.S. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Angelo State University and has worked in SEO roles at CoPilot, Volusion, Wunderman, and CreditCards.com.
Photo Illustration by Stacker // Shutterstock // Canva