Prompts vs keywords — why GEO is different from SEO

TL;DR — SEO optimises for keywords. GEO optimises for prompts. The distinction sounds semantic; in practice it changes what you write, how you measure it, and which channels move the needle.

Keywords are a bag of words. Prompts are a question.

An SEO keyword is a search term:

• best crm for real estate

A GEO prompt is a fully-formed question — often ten to twenty words long, often conversational, often loaded with context:

• What's the best CRM for a small residential real estate team of five agents that already uses Google Workspace and doesn't want to pay for Salesforce?

Users type prompts into AI engines because they're expecting an answer, not a list. That single fact ripples through everything downstream.

Why the difference matters

	Keyword	Prompt
Length	2–4 words	8–25 words
Intent	Category-level	Situation-specific
Best asset	Landing page targeting the keyword	Content that fully answers the question
Success looks like	Blue link, top of page	Named in the answer, cited by the engine
Volume data	High-quality tools	Sparse — we generate & sample
Refresh rate	Weekly	Daily

How we generate prompts

For every project we auto-generate prompts your buyers would actually ask. We use your website content, industry, competitor set, and the surface area of your product to draft prompts that are:

• Real long-tail questions, not one- or two-word keywords
• Unbranded — we do not stuff your brand into the prompt, because that inflates your visibility score with false positives
• At least six words — anything shorter behaves like a keyword, not a prompt
• Comparable across engines — the same prompt is scanned on all seven engines so the score is directly comparable

You can add, edit, or remove any prompt in the Prompts tab.

What "winning a prompt" means

For each prompt we track two things per engine:

• Mention rate — how often your brand name appears in the answer
• Citation rate — how often one of your URLs is cited

A prompt is "won" when both are high across the engines you care about. That's what the visibility score rolls up.

The mindset shift

Stop asking "what keywords should we rank for?" and start asking "what questions should we own the answer to?" Then write pages that answer them completely, in the first paragraph, with the structure AI engines love to quote.

That's the entire game.