GEO vs SEO in 2026: Where to Actually Put Your Content Budget

The traffic has split

In 2025, ChatGPT crossed 700M weekly users. Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude followed. If your buyer starts research in an LLM, your Google ranking is a downstream lagging indicator — not the leading one.

The new split - 55% of B2B research still starts on Google - 27% now starts in ChatGPT or Perplexity - 12% starts in Gemini or Claude - 6% in category-specific answer surfaces

The playbook 1. Answer 20 concrete buyer questions in long-form. 2. Ship structured data — Product, FAQ, HowTo, Article schema. 3. Add an `llms.txt` at your root. 4. Track citation share weekly.

What still works from classic SEO: authority backlinks, page speed, semantic depth. What's new: LLM crawl access, model-specific prompts, cited-source hygiene.