GEO vs. SEO: What Genuinely Changes

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) gets sold as either "SEO is dead" or "it's just SEO rebranded." Both are wrong. Here's the honest split:

	SEO (Google/Bing)	GEO (assistants & agents)
Primary reader	Ranking algorithms over indexed pages	Retrieval + generation over machine-readable surfaces
Key files	sitemap.xml, robots.txt	+ llms.txt, llms-full.txt, x402, agents.txt
Success metric	Position, CTR, impressions	Citation in answer, correct description, agent-completability
Pricing display	Humans read your page	Assistants quote you verbatim — stale prices get repeated
Transactions	Human completes checkout	x402/agent rails decide if machines can buy at all

Where they overlap (most of it)

Crawlability, clean HTML, factual consistency, fast pages, real content — everything good for SEO stays mandatory for GEO. Nobody should "switch" from one to the other.

The genuinely new requirements

• Verbatim-quotable facts: assistants copy your sentences into answers. Ambiguity becomes someone else's confident wrong claim about you.
• Machine-facing price/product feeds: llms.txt with real buy-links, not a sitemap of PDFs.
• Agent-completable transactions: x402 manifest and checkout links that survive automated flows.

If you only do one thing this week

Make your pricing page static, factual, and mirrored in llms.txt. That single fix removes the most common failure mode we see: assistants quoting outdated or missing prices.