Ask HN: How Is AI SEO (Geo) Different from SEO?

We've recently started to think more seriously about SEO as a growth channel.

Since we're already getting multiple leads that self-attribute to AI tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT, we want to optimize for more of this. There are now tools that offer to help you do SEO for AI (GEO, generative engine optimization).

But what I'm wondering about is this:

Both ChatGPT and Perplexity ultimately use Google's or Bing's search index, which makes me think optimizing for conventional search engines is the way to go because it achieves the same thing?

The two differences I can imagine are this:

a) For non-search AI chats, getting included in the training data could be another objective, though the corpus of training data will ultimately surface the incumbents in any space.

b) An AI search product might use different queries that humans don't actually search for much (so there's little search volume), so optimizing for them could be more useful than before.

Have any of you made other experiences or know more?