GEO vs SEO comes up in almost every conversation we have with owners now. People in Sherman and Denison have heard that customers are asking ChatGPT for recommendations, and they want to know whether the SEO they’ve been paying for still counts. It does. But the job got bigger.
What SEO still does
SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of getting your website and your Google Business Profile to show up when someone types a search. For a local service business, that mostly means two places: the map pack, which is the three businesses Google shows on a map near the top, and the regular results underneath it.
The pieces haven’t changed much in years. Pages that say plainly what you do and where you do it. A site that loads fast on a phone. A Google Business Profile that’s filled out and kept current. Reviews. Links from other local sites. When someone searches “electrician Sherman TX,” that work decides whether they see you or the shop down the road.
What GEO means
GEO stands for generative engine optimization. The “generative engines” are the AI tools that write an answer instead of handing you a list of links: Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot.
Google has been moving this direction for three years. It tested AI answers as the Search Generative Experience in 2023, renamed them AI Overviews and rolled them out to US searchers in May 2024, then added AI Mode, a chat-style search, in 2025. By July 2025, Google said AI Overviews had more than 2 billion monthly users. That’s a lot of people reading an AI summary before they click anything.
GEO is the work of getting your business named, quoted or linked inside those answers. If someone asks, “Who’s a good pest control company near Lake Texoma?”, you want to be in the paragraph that comes back.
GEO vs SEO: where they actually differ
Most of the difference comes down to what winning looks like.
With SEO, you win a position. You’re second in the map pack or fifth on page one, and the searcher still does the choosing. With GEO, the AI does some of the choosing for them. It reads what it can find about local businesses, decides who fits the question, and names a few. Sometimes just one.
That changes what matters. A search engine will rank a page that’s decent and stuffed with the right keywords. An AI model is looking for facts it can repeat with some confidence: what you do, where, how long you’ve been doing it, and what customers say about you. If those facts are vague, or they contradict each other from one site to the next, leaving you out is the easy call.
The sources are wider, too. AI answers draw on your website, but they also lean on your Google profile, review sites, directories, local news and sometimes Facebook or Reddit threads. Your website is one witness among several.
And it’s harder to measure. Google Search Console tells you which searches you appeared for and how many clicks you got. Nothing like that exists for how often ChatGPT mentions you. You can test it by hand, and paid tracking tools have started to show up, but the picture is rougher than what SEO reporting gives you.
How to show up in AI answers
Very little of this is exotic. Most of it is SEO done properly, with more attention paid to saying things clearly.
- Answer real questions on your site in plain sentences. “We repair and replace home HVAC systems in Sherman, Denison and Van Alstyne” is something an AI can quote. “Your comfort is our passion” is not.
- Give each main service its own page and name the towns you serve. One vague services page makes it hard for any system to match you to a specific question.
- Add schema markup. It’s a bit of code that labels your business name, address, hours, services and reviews so machines can read them. Customers never see it.
- Keep your Google Business Profile complete and current. Google’s AI answers to local questions pull from profile details and reviews.
- Get reviews that mention the job and the town. “They fixed our AC in Pottsboro the same afternoon” tells an AI far more than “Great service!”
- Make your name, address and phone number match everywhere: your site, Google, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Facebook, Yelp and the chamber directory. The AI tools don’t all read from Google.
- Earn mentions off your own site. A story in the local paper, a sponsor listing on a youth league page, a chamber membership. Those are the signals that tell an AI other people vouch for you.
So do you need SEO or GEO?
Both, and right now they overlap heavily. Everything on that list also helps your regular rankings. We haven’t seen a local business do well in AI answers while its basic SEO was a mess.
Where we’d push harder than we did a few years ago is the writing. A lot of small-business sites were built to hit keywords, with sentences like “We are the best roofing company in Sherman TX for all your roofing needs.” That copy was never good. It’s worse now, because the reader on the other end is more and more often a model hunting for a straight answer.
For a quick gut check, open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask for a recommendation in your trade and town, worded the way a customer would say it. Note who comes up and what the AI says about them. Then ask about your business by name. If the answer is thin or flat wrong, that’s your starting point. We go step by step through that test in our guide to getting your Texoma business found in AI search, and our AI search optimization work runs alongside regular local SEO for clients who want both handled.