Everything you need to know about generative engine optimisation (GEO)
Charli
Marketing Manager
AI and generative AI are becoming increasingly prominent in every aspect of our lives – both as marketers and as consumers.
This, of course, includes how your customers and potential customers are using the internet to research solutions, products and services. Whether using a dedicated generative AI platform – like Perplexity or CoPilot – or interacting with AI overviews on major search engines like Google, people are finding new ways to get answers.
There’s a clear need – and an opportunity – for marketers to understand how they can maximise visibility in these emerging spaces.
Enter generative engine optimisation.
What is generative engine optimisation?
Generative search optimisation (GEO) is the practice of optimising your website’s content and structure to be digested and summarised by generative AI. The goal of this is to increase the visibility of your content on dedicated AI search platforms and AI overviews or features on search engines.
Generative AI search
In order to get a better understanding of what it means to optimise for generative search results, here are a few examples of them in action.
If you search for “What is WordPress?” on Google, you’ll see that an “AI overview” appears at the very top of the search results. This feature pulls from various sources to provide the user with just that – an overview – of the topic they’ve searched for, or a succinct answer to the question they’ve asked. Where the optimisation side comes in is the potential to be one of the sources the AI overview pulls from (in this case – Wikipedia, Hostinger and HubSpot are some of the sources it pulls from).
AI-driven search platforms like Perplexity work in a similar way, but display results slightly differently. A key difference you can see here with Perplexity is that it offers “follow-up” links within the response text – an opportunity to get more context and detail on a topic (we’ll get onto that later).
GEO vs SEO
Many principles, techniques and tactics apply to both GEO and SEO, but there are a few key differences. We’ll cover more on the tactics behind GEO later in the post, but here’s an overview of the key similarities and differences.
| Similarities | Differences |
| Objective
The main aim of both SEO and GEO is to increase the visibility and reach of your content so it’s discoverable by your target audience |
Content focus and structure
While content produced for SEO is usually focused on one keyword/phrase or several related ones, content optimised for AI search needs to consider wider context, citations, statistics and broader semantic topics. |
| Content quality
The cornerstone of both tactics is high-quality content that fits the profile of unique, helpful and trustworthy. |
Success metrics
In SEO, success is tracked and measured in SERP rankings and organic traffic. In GEO, it is more difficult to quantify appearances in AI overviews, and traffic may be measured both in terms of organic search and referral traffic. |
| Technical
It’s important for both SEO and GEO that your content is crawlable and your website provides a good user experience in terms of speed and performance. |
User intent
While search engine algorithms are usually essentially guessing at user intent based on a short search phrase, AI engines are going further by using advanced models to interpret and anticipate user intent more accurately, which means you also need to consider it more when producing content. That will be more likely to be picked up by AI overviews. |
Is GEO replacing SEO?
When generative AI search technology first emerged, there was much unrest and panic in the SEO industry about how this would impact “traditional” organic traffic – i.e. a user searches for a keyword, and the search engine displays the most relevant and trusted results, and you get traffic that way. If a user can get the answer they need from an AI overview or separate tool entirely, why the need to use bog-standard search? Gartner has projected that global traffic from search engines will drop 25% by 2026. So should we be concerned?
In terms of dedicated AI search platforms, it’s currently a little more unclear how much they have or will have an impact on traffic from search engines, but some preliminary research shows it’s not quite time to worry yet. In 2024, Google received around 373 times as many searches as ChatGPT. As these platforms gain more users, it’s important to remember some models are “closed off” – so don’t perform a search of the web and therefore don’t cite and link sources. This is where marketers and other content publishers might start to lose out. But it appears we’re not quite there yet.
So rather than “replacing’ SEO – GEO and SEO merge and crossover into one overarching strategy – and it all comes back to content.
How do you optimise your website for AI search?
As we’ve already touched on, there is plenty of crossover between SEO and GEO in terms of the techniques and tactics to optimise your website and your content.
Produce good content
Whichever version of the machine you’re trying to appease – the organic search algorithm or the generative AI model – it all comes down to content. High-quality, unique and helpful content will be rewarded, and will ultimately provide a better experience for users, making them more likely to turn into customers.
Producing high quality content that’ll fare well in both search and AI search results is a topic we could do a real deep-dive on, but just to cover off some fundamentals:
- Address user intent: understanding the intent of the user is just as important, if not more so, in optimising for generative AI. Think about what users need to get from your content, and use that to inform your writing.
- Pay attention to structure: prioritise key information early in your post/page, utilise headings and subheadings and ensure your content flows logically.
- Consider formatting: use formatting elements like bullet points, numbered lists, tables and multimedia to present information in the best possible way and improve readability.
- Remember E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) is Google’s framework for understanding high quality content. Have those 4 pillars in mind when you’re producing content.
- Keep messaging consistent: generative AI doesn’t just consider one page or post when it comes to contextualising your content as a whole.
Deciding what to target
Unlike SEO, which prioritises specific keywords and phrases, GEO focuses on conversational queries and contextual relevance. It’s closer to something called “entity optimisation” – an advanced SEO strategy where you optimise for “things” – people, places, concepts – rather than keywords.
Top tip. Find a keyword that gets a decent monthly search volume. Pop it in one column in a Google Sheet, Excel or Numbers. Then use a combination of Google “people also asked” and your brain to list questions related to that keyword. Do a bit of testing of generative AI responses to those questions, and use this to shape your content by offering more value and a unique perspective on that question. When you write your content, try and answer as many of those questions as possible with the main keyword as the central topic. That way you’re covering off SEO and GEO in one fell swoop.
Get your technical in shape
A frequently overlooked aspect of SEO which is equally crucial to GEO is the technical setup and performance of your website. Crawlability, load speeds and overall user experience impact your ability to “rank” or appear in AI overviews just as much as they do your organic search visibility. Here are some key technical considerations for both SEO and GEO:
- Website structure: having a well-structured sitemap from the offset with logical page and post hierarchy helps with crawlability as well as contexutalising your content.
- Site speed and performance: keep on top of your website’s performance and user experience in key areas like those covered by Google’s Core Web Vitals.
- Mobile responsiveness: a mobile-first or responsive website enhances overall user experience as well as improve search and AI search rankings.
Need more guidance and support on setting up and optimising your website for both search engines and AI platforms? Get in touch to find out how we could help.
Websites
Websites
