They overlap more than the marketing for either one admits. A page nobody can crawl fails at both, structured data serves both, and if you have done real SEO you have already done a good share of this. What differs is the shape of the answer, the thing being judged, and whether you can measure any of it.

That makes this a worse story than "SEO is dead" and a more useful one. It is the question every shop owner asks when this subject comes up, so it is worth answering properly rather than in the direction that sells something.

If you have not read what decides whether an assistant recommends you, that page is the ground this one stands on.

What is genuinely the same

Worth stating first, because the differences only make sense against it.

Crawling is the same requirement, and sometimes the same crawler. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode are parts of Search, and that the control for them is your robots.txt rules for Googlebot. Microsoft says Bing, Copilot and its grounding results run on one crawling and indexing foundation. So for two of the places your buyers ask, the crawler you were already thinking about for SEO is the crawler that decides this too.

Structured data serves both. The same schema.org Product block that makes a rich result eligible is the part of your page that states a price and a stock status without ambiguity.

Being unreachable fails at both. A blanket Disallow: / is equally fatal either way, and it is the most common serious fault in this whole subject.

So a shop with clean technical SEO starts this from a long way up the hill. That is the honest version, and anyone telling you that your SEO work counts for nothing here is selling you something.

Difference one: there is no list

SEO is a game of position within a list. Ten results, then more, and position eight still gets clicks from people who scroll.

An assistant answers with two or three shops and a sentence each. There is no page two, no position eight, and no long tail of people who scrolled far enough to find you. You are in the answer or you are not, and the gap between third and fourth is the entire difference.

This changes what "improving" means. Moving from 15th to 9th in a search result is real progress you can see. There is no equivalent move here. You are either over the line where an assistant is confident enough to name you, or you are not.

Difference two: the thing being judged is a product

SEO is mostly done at the level of a page, a site, or a domain's reputation. The question is whether this site deserves to rank for this term.

An assistant is answering a question about a thing to buy. It is choosing products, and then naming the shops that sell them. A shop can have strong domain authority and still lose, because the question was about wide fittings under €150 and its product page does not say what the fitting is.

This is why general AI-visibility tools, which mostly report on how often a brand is mentioned, answer a different question from the one a shop has. A brand mention is not a product recommendation.

Difference three: there is no rank to track

SEO has rank tracking because a ranking is a fact that holds still. Ask Google the same question twice and you get the same page of results.

Ask an assistant the same question twice and you may get different shops. That is not a fault, it is how these systems generate text. It means there is no number to put in a report and watch. What you can do is ask a question several times and count how often you appear, which is a frequency rather than a position, and a much blunter instrument than a rank.

Anyone selling you an "AI visibility score" as if it were a rank is selling you a frequency dressed as a fact. It can still be useful. It is not the same kind of number, and treating it as one leads to chasing noise.

Difference four: the visit is hard to attribute

SEO has Search Console: impressions, clicks, queries, positions, for free, from the source.

Here, some assistants send a visitor with a normal referrer and some send one with nothing attached. A shopper who reads a recommendation, then searches your name, then arrives, looks like ordinary branded traffic. The recommendation that did the work is invisible in your analytics.

There is one good exception worth knowing: Bing Webmaster Tools reports which of your pages get cited in Copilot answers, and which queries pulled them in. It is free, and it is real citation data rather than an inference.

Difference five: the paid slot is new, and it is separate

The most common thing people believe about this subject went out of date in 2026.

There used to be no way to pay your way into an assistant's answer. Now ChatGPT carries ads, labelled as sponsored and visually separated from the response, shown to people on the free and Go tiers. They reached 31 European markets in August 2026, and Poland is among the countries OpenAI now lists as available.

The distinction matters more than the news does. OpenAI says the ads run on separate systems from the chat model and that advertisers cannot shape, rank or alter its responses. So the split is the one you already understand from search: there is an unpaid answer and a paid slot beside it, sold separately, and buying the second does not get you into the first.

Everything else on this page, and everything else we write, is about the unpaid half.

So what do you actually do differently?

Less than the framing implies, and in a different order.

The first moves are shared with technical SEO: be crawlable, have complete structured data, have pages that load. If those are wrong, fix them, and the fix counts twice.

What changes after that is what you write. SEO rewards a page that covers a topic thoroughly enough to be the best result for a search term. An assistant rewards a page that contains the specific facts a question was made of. Those pull in similar directions often enough, and in different directions sometimes: the answer to "what is the waterproof rating" is a number and a standard, not four paragraphs about the brand's heritage.

The honest summary is that this is not a replacement for SEO, not a separate discipline, and not a rebrand of it either. It is a different output shape sitting on top of a lot of the same infrastructure, and it fails in ways SEO does not measure.

Questions people ask

Should I stop doing SEO?

No, and nothing on this page suggests it. Search is still where most shopping journeys start, and the technical half of SEO is a prerequisite here rather than a competitor to it.

Will my SEO agency handle this?

Some will and many will not yet, and the way to find out is to ask whether they check your product structured data field by field and whether they know which crawler governs AI Overviews. Those two answers tell you quickly.

Is "GEO" or "AEO" a real thing or a marketing word?

Both, for now. They are mostly new names for this subject, coined by tools that wanted a category to sell into. The underlying problem is real even where the vocabulary is inflated. GEO is the one exception worth knowing about, because it came out of an academic paper rather than a pitch deck. Which of these words carry information is a short piece of its own.

Does domain authority help?

It appears to help less than in search, which is the one piece of genuinely good news for a small shop in this whole subject. A well-described product from a shop nobody has heard of does get named beside much larger competitors. We would not want to put a number on how much less.

If I fix this, will my Google rankings improve?

Possibly, as a side effect, because several of the fixes are things Google also rewards. Do not do it for that reason. Structured data governs how a result is shown and what it is eligible for, rather than where it sits.

Where we come into it

The overlap above is the reason we can be useful without asking you to abandon anything you already do. The first things we check are things a good SEO would also check, and if your shop passes them, we will tell you so.

What is left is the part no SEO tool reports, because it is not a ranking question: which of your products an assistant will not commit to, what it says about your competitors when it declines to name you, and which of those gaps is costing you the most.

That is what Shop on Radar does. We explain how to fix what we find. We do not touch your shop.

We are not open yet. Join the waitlist and we will tell you when we are.

Why AI visibility is not SEO