What is GEO and Why It’s Replacing Traditional SEO
TL/DR: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the strategy and practice of ensuring your brand, content, and data are discoverable, prioritized, and accurately represented in AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Claude. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on search engine results pages (SERPs) and keywords, it’s not about clicks or ranking, but about presence. As AI tools become the default entry point for discovery, optimizing for AI is how your brand becomes and stays visible. GEO asks: How do I show up in the new way people search?
What Is GEO?
A new strategy’s in town: the emerging practice of structuring your digital footprint to be easily interpreted, summarized, and surfaced by AI systems, not just search engines.
We call this Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), a form of AI Search Optimization focused on increasing visibility and accuracy in tools like Google’s SGE, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. In short, GEO ensures that these tools can reference your business and its value proposition in the answers they generate. It helps you:
Be found at all
Show up with the correct information
Two things that traditional SEO can’t guarantee anymore. GEO has emerged out of necessity as a direct response to the rapid evolution of AI-driven search and an evolving understanding of LLMs and their priorities. As a developing practice in an era of seemingly constant change, it demands ongoing attention, iteration and adaptability.
GEO vs Traditional SEO: A Quick Comparison
| SEO | GEO |
|---|---|
| Optimizes your brand/data to show in search engine results | Optimizes your brand/data to show in AI results |
| Aims to drive clicks through ranking | Ensures your brand becomes part of the answers, whether users click or not |
| Focus on keywords, backlinks, click-thru rates | Structured, cited, and understood by AI tools |
| Unlinked mentions on other websites have very little impact | Unlinked mentions on other websites have a significant impact |
What GEO Optimizes For
Optimizing your digital presence for AI Search is the practice of optimizing:
Your content
Your data
Your brand presence
…for how LLMs gather, structure and prioritize what they surface in response to queries made in AI searches.
Good LLM Hygiene Includes:
Structure: Properly structured data and schema that make your content machine-readable
Consistency across platforms: Entity-based content that connects across the web
Presence across platforms: Being where AI models source information
Freshness: LLMs place value on updated content and sources
Monitoring: Tracking brand mentions in AI tools and adjusting accordingly
Training: Data inputs, such as datasets or API feeds, that shape how AI learns about your brand
It's not just about keywords anymore—it's about context, credibility, and clarity across the digital ecosystem.
Why Traditional SEO Isn’t Enough Anymore
Traditional SEO was built for one paradigm: ranking in the top 10 blue links on Google. But that’s not how people are discovering information anymore, especially since Google’s AI Overviews are not including the top 10 organic search results and Google unveiled ‘AI Mode’ in May 2025.
1. Zero-Click Search Is the Norm
The rise of zero-click solutions is why almost 60% of Google searches end without a click. Users either refine their prompt or find their answer directly in a featured snippet, AI Overview, or Knowledge Panel.
2. AI Overviews Are Rewriting the Rules
Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and tools like Perplexity.ai summarize and synthesize content in real-time. That means:
They may never show your site or cite your site
They prioritize trusted, structured and clear sources
They prioritize sources that are easy to parse, verify, and link to entities
3. People Are Asking AI Tools First
Search behavior is changing. Instead of short seed keywords (like: “best dog food”), users are asking long-tail, specific questions (like: “best organic dog food for older pugs”), and increasingly go straight to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
Google remains the dominant search player (for now), but even when users are Googling, AI is now the default on SERPs with AI Overviews, and Google is moving more toward that direction with their introduction of AI search in May 2025.
This shift is part of a broader trend in how search behavior is adapting to AI tools—where discovery is driven less by keywords and more by context, conversation, and relevance.
If your brand isn’t showing up in their answers, you’re invisible to an entire audience segment.
Is Ranking Dead?
Not entirely. Rankings still matter in some contexts—especially for transactional queries. But visibility today is less about where you rank and more about where you appear in AI-generated content.
Don’t cancel your PPC campaigns just yet, but do keep a closer eye on their ROI.
Traditional search rankings still matter in some cases, especially for transactional queries or when users scroll past AI-generated answers. But the reality is that more and more users are not making it that far– they’re getting what they need from an AI Overview, a featured snippet or a conversational tool like ChatGPT without ever clicking a link, which means your brand could be ranking on page one and still be invisible if you're not included in the AI-generated summary.
Conversely, you could never rank but still show up in a top AI response because your brand is mentioned, cited, or structurally easy for LLMs to absorb. In this new era, ranking is just one outcome. Visibility is the goal.
How AI Search Works and What You Can Optimize
AI tools don’t just crawl websites. They interpret like we do, which is part of the reason it’s hard to wrap our minds around the accuracy and depth. They read, summarize, learn, and generate answers based on a blend of:
Training data: (public data, books, websites, Wikipedia, etc.). The training data each of the popular models uses varies, as does the refresh rate, but they keep a historical record akin to Google’s indexing to reference. Want to go deeper? Here's how to feed LLMs with structured data and public signals.
Real-time crawls and APIs: When a query necessitates current data as a response, some models will crawl the web in real time.
Feedback loops: (likes, votes, citations, conversations)
These systems don’t just index, they interpret and create a composite understanding of a topic. They decide whether your brand or data is worth mentioning based on how well you’ve trained the ecosystem to understand you.
This is why familiar sources and known entities matter to AI tools—they form the foundation of trustworthy responses.
While GEO focuses on ensuring your brand is visible and correctly presented in tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Perplexity, LLM Optimization addresses the upstream question: how do these models learn about your brand in the first place?
It’s the practice of shaping how language models interpret, remember, and represent your business across responses.
The Three Pillars of AI Visibility
Presence: Do you appear in high-quality, AI-readable sources?
Structure: Is your content optimized with schema, clear headings, and context?
Reputation: Are you cited, linked, and referenced consistently across credible platforms?
5 Things Marketers Need to Start Doing Differently
We’ve laid out the three pillars of AI visibility, but what does that mean in practice? GEO requires marketers to adopt a fundamentally new mindset and toolset. Here are five key shifts that align with our pillars:
1. Structure content for machine use (not just human readability)
This is a mindset shift: your content isn’t just marketing—it’s training data. Formatting for readability is still important, but AI tools need structure to parse and cite content accurately. That means:
Using schema markup consistently
Clear headings and content hierarchy (H1, H2, H3)
Provide summaries, tables, and definitions for easy reuse
2. Prioritize consistency and Entity clarity across the open web
AI tools build context from what they find across the internet. Inconsistent descriptions or outdated content create noise. To be clearly understood, your brand should:
Use the same name, description, phone and positioning across every platform
Align with known entities (people, places, industries)
Avoid fragmentation by consolidating duplicate listings or conflicting bios
3. Shift KPIs from traffic to AI citations and presence
Clicks are no longer the only indicator of performance. Track:
Mentions in AI-generated answers (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity)
Inclusion in Google AI Overviews
Citation frequency, not just referral traffic
This shift means marketing teams need to value visibility even when there is no click.
4. Treat your brand as a dataset AI can learn and pull from
If you want to be part of the answer, you need to be a source. That means:
Publishing accurate, structured, reusable content
Feeding public datasets or APIs where relevant
Creating clear, factual, linkable content that helps AI tools explain who you are and what you do
You’re not optimizing for the algorithm anymore—you’re optimizing for the answers.
5. Zero-Click Ready Your Content
Write for inclusion, not just traffic. You’re no longer writing just for readers, you’re writing for language models. That means more evergreen clarity, structured and reference-style content, and content that gets reused, not just clicked.
Answer common questions in-line
Treat impressions in AI responses as brand-building opportunities
What To Do Now
Here’s a quick-start checklist to begin optimizing for AI search:
Add and audit structured data (schema) on your site
Make sure your brand is mentioned across authoritative third-party platforms
Publish expert-driven, entity-rich content with context, not just keywords
Track your visibility in AI tools (ChatGPT, Perplexity, SGE, etc.)
Feed public datasets or APIs where relevant
One Last Thing
AI Search Is Not the Future—It’s the present.
If you're still only optimizing for SERPs, you're missing a massive shift. AI-powered discovery is already here, and it rewards brands that build presence, not just optimize for clicks. And searchers are following suit—it’s changing how people find, engage with and trust brands.
Like SEO, it’s not an overnight shift, it’s a long-term strategy. AI search visibility builds over time. The compounding advantage of AI search visibility means early movers will be top-of-mind when it matters most. Once a model “knows” you as a trusted source, the more likely your data will be used and you’ll be cited. AI search visibility is sticky: get in early, set up a process, and you stay in.
Remember: GEO isn’t about beating the algorithm. It’s about becoming part of the answer. The question isn't whether AI will replace traditional SEO. It's whether your brand is ready to be discovered the way people search now.
FAQs
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You can start with foundational steps like auditing your structured data and aligning messaging across platforms. But building sustained visibility in AI tools often requires deeper strategy, entity alignment, and content structuring—areas where working with a specialized partner can give you a meaningful edge.
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AI tools prioritize content that’s structured, credible, and clearly connected to known entities. If your brand appears in trusted sources, uses schema markup, and maintains consistency across the web, it becomes easier for AI systems to understand and include you in generated answers.
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Success means your brand is cited or mentioned in AI-generated answers, even when no one clicks a link. It’s about being part of the response and over time, this builds brand recognition, trust, and top-of-mind visibility where users are increasingly turning for answers.
