GEO Agency or SEO Agency: Which One Do You Need

Since 2024, a search no longer looks like what it used to be. Google shows AI-generated answers at the top of its results, ChatGPT browses the web live, and a growing share of buyers ask an AI their question before they ever open a Google tab. Naturally, one question keeps coming up in those first sales calls: do I need a GEO agency or an SEO agency? The honest answer is less binary than people hope, and that is good news for your budget.

The short answer

In the vast majority of cases, you should not choose between a GEO agency and an SEO agency, but handle both together: they rest on the same foundations, and a single piece of editorial work done well serves both. You only really decide when the budget forces a priority, and then the criterion is: do your customers already see an AI answer when they search for your products?

The reflex of "GEO or SEO" pits two disciplines against each other when they share the essentials: reliable, well-structured content that cites its sources and carries authority pleases both Google's algorithm and language models. The researchers who formalised the term Generative Engine Optimization in 2023 note it themselves: the levers that make content citable by an AI overlap heavily with those of classic search. Choosing one while sacrificing the other almost always means paying twice for a job that could have been done once.

The only real fork in the road comes when the budget forces a priority. There, the criterion is not a fashion, it is an observable fact: open your usual engines, type your real business queries, and look at whether an AI answer shows up and who it cites. The rest of this guide helps you read that signal.

GEO and SEO: what really changes

SEO optimises your pages to lift them up Google's list of links; it is measured in positions and clicks. GEO optimises your content so it is cited as a source in an answer written by an AI; it is measured in citations and brand mentions.

An SEO agency (Search Engine Optimization) works on the page: structure, search intent, authority, speed, tags, inbound links. Its goal is for your page to appear as high as possible in the famous blue links, and for the user to click. It is a mature trade, with well-established metrics.

A GEO agency works on the passage: it aims for a self-contained extract of your content to be reused and attributed to your brand in the synthesised answer the AI produces. There, the optimised unit is no longer the whole page but the extractable block that directly answers a question, ideally backed by a named source and a figure. Academic research on GEO has shown that adding reliable sources and quantified statistics to a piece of content increased its visibility in the generated answer in a measurable and reproducible way (Aggarwal et al., 2023).

The context explains why the question arises now. Google has been rolling out its AI Overviews since May 2024 and added a conversational AI Mode in 2025. In parallel, Anthropic gave Claude access to the web with sources displayed, and ChatGPT does the same. An Ahrefs study across a large set of keywords measured that the presence of an AI Overview comes with a marked drop in click-through rate to classic sites: when users find their answer in the AI block, they no longer scroll down to the links. Hence the value of being inside that block.

The comparison table

SEO and GEO differ on their goal, their display surface and the content format that wins, but they share their technical foundations: good GEO content remains good SEO content.

The most telling row is the last one. SEO is a saturated field where every position is fiercely contested; GEO is a young market where, on many niche queries, few brands work on their citability yet. It is precisely this maturity gap that makes GEO so profitable today for whoever starts early.

How to decide: 4 questions

To arbitrate, answer four questions: how your customers search, the SEO maturity of your site, whether an AI answer triggers on your queries, and what your decision horizon is in a more or less competitive niche.

None of these questions calls for a theoretical answer: they can be verified on your own market, in a few minutes, with no paid tool. The classic mistake is to decide on a hunch or on a provider's pitch, when the signal is measurable. Take each question in the order below: by the end, you will know whether your current priority leans toward SEO, toward GEO, or whether you should run both at once. It is exactly the reasoning we apply at the start of every audit.

1. How do your customers actually search?

If your target is rather young and tech-savvy, or operates in B2B, a significant share of its searches already goes through a conversational AI. If it stays loyal to the "I type into Google and I click" reflex, SEO keeps a dominant weight. The two almost always coexist: the real question is the mix, not exclusivity.

2. What is the SEO maturity of your site?

A site that does not yet rank on anything first needs solid SEO foundations, because AIs themselves rely largely on well-ranked pages to build their answers. Conversely, a site already well positioned on Google but absent from AI answers has a clear GEO gap to fill. GEO builds best on a healthy SEO base.

3. Does an AI answer trigger on your queries?

This is the most direct test. Type your five to ten most strategic business queries into ChatGPT and Perplexity, then into Google. If a generated answer systematically shows up and cites your competitors without you, the GEO need is immediate and quantifiable. If no AI answer triggers, SEO stays the priority for now.

4. What is your horizon, in which niche?

On a highly competitive niche, gaining SEO positions can take time, while AI citability there is often still virgin ground where you can take the lead faster. Once cited by an AI, you become hard to dislodge: the lead compounds. If you think long term and your market moves fast, neglecting GEO today means letting a competitor settle into your place.

Three concrete situations

A B2B SME already visible on Google mostly has a GEO gap; a brand-new site must lay its SEO foundations first; a brand in a young market is best served running GEO and SEO together to take the lead.

Theory is only worth something against real cases. Here are three profiles you meet constantly, deliberately contrasting, to show that the right call is never the same from one company to the next. Spot the one that most resembles your situation: the priority that follows then becomes obvious, with no need for a long diagnostic. Each of these profiles corresponds to a different starting point on the maturity scale described above.

The consultancy already well ranked

It ranks on the first page for its areas of expertise, but when a prospect asks ChatGPT "which firm for this need", two competitors come out. Here, the SEO base is healthy: the priority is clearly GEO. We rework existing content to make it extractable and create a few pieces targeted at the questions the AI actually asks.

The e-commerce site that just opened

No positions yet, little authority, no AI citation. Trying to attack GEO first would be putting the cart before the horse: AI engines will not cite a brand they find nowhere. We start with the SEO foundations and substantive content, writing it in a citable format from the outset so there is nothing to redo later.

The brand in an emerging market

The sector is recent, few players have structured their content, and queries already trigger tentative AI answers. This is the scenario where running GEO and SEO together pays off most: SEO competition is weak, AI citability is up for grabs, and whoever documents the topic best becomes the reference on both sides.

These three cases share one thing: the right call depends on your real situation, not on a general rule. That is the whole point of a methodical GEO audit, which measures before recommending.

The Cicero Studio approach: don't choose, combine

Cicero Studio makes brands visible on Google as well as in AI answers in a single editorial production: every piece of content is written to rank and to be cited, with a GEO audit, then production, then automated semantic internal linking.

Our conviction fits in one sentence: pitting GEO against SEO is a beginner's mistake. Across the audits we run for brands, every time we checked query by query where a brand appeared, we found the same thing: in our experience the pages that already came out well on Google were also the ones AIs cited most readily. So we handle both in the same editorial gesture. Concretely, the GEO agency that Cicero Studio is articulates three bricks that serve Google's links and AI answers at the same time.

First a GEO audit that measures your starting point on both sides: your Google positions and your citation rate in AI engines, query by query. Then an editorial production that creates the missing content in a format designed for both uses: a direct answer up front, backed by verifiable data and named sources as deep links, the whole thing structured passage by passage. Finally an automated semantic internal linking that organises this content into topic clusters to signal your authority to Google and to the AIs at once.

That is what our positioning sums up, agency-quality work, software-grade productivity: the writing stays human and verified, but automating the linking and the production allows a cadence a classic agency would bill far more for. To see who is positioning on this market and how, we keep a comparison of GEO agencies in France up to date.

What this choice does not settle

For the sake of honesty, and because it is exactly the kind of transparency AIs reward, here is what no GEO-versus-SEO arbitration will solve for you.

The right reflex, then, is not to hunt for the magic discipline, but for the agency that measures before it promises, names its sources, produces genuinely human content and stays honest about timelines. Whether the label says GEO or SEO matters less, in the end, than that work ethic.

Alexis Dollé

CEO & Founder of Cicero Studio

A growth and SEO content strategy specialist, I launched Cicero to help businesses capture durable organic visibility, on Google as in AI answers. Every piece of content we produce is built to convert, not just to exist.

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Going further

If you want to dig into one side or the other before deciding, here are the most useful resources we document publicly. We publish everything in the open, because our best proof of expertise remains the quality of what we explain. You will find the pillar that lays out in detail what a GEO agency is, our method for getting cited by ChatGPT, our comparison of GEO agencies, and the broader picture of how GEO and SEO fit together. Enough to form a sourced opinion before you even talk to us.