GEO Is Superseding SEO

Generative artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Elon Musk’s Grok, Perplexity, and a host of others have taken the world by storm, affecting industries and individuals in impactful and unforeseen ways. Many of these impacts are proving to be extremely disruptive.

One example: the effect on traditional search. Google has long been the search behemoth, with no other search engines even coming close. And while tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and others don’t yet dominate, they’re definitely nipping at Google’s heels.

ChatGPT was the first such tool, having been released in late November 2022. Today, 80 percent of people rely on AI-generated summaries for at least 40 percent of their searches, according to Bain & Company.

“The rise of AI-powered assistants like ChatGPT and Siri have significantly altered our search behaviors and patterns,” says Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush, a provider of marketing software. “While traditional search is often exploratory and choice-based, AI-driven search is more conversational and recommendation-based. As a result, marketers have had to shift beyond [search engine optimization] to also focus on [generative engine optimization (GEO)], especially as its influence continues to grow.”

The spread of genAI adoption has been rapid and extensive, says Adam Ortman, a consumer psychologist and founder of marketing agency Kinetic319. “The adoption of AI, practically overnight, is fascinating to me because over the course of a 12-month period, millions if not billions of people are using it every single day for a wide variety of things.”

From work-related applications to personal inquiries about everything from health and fitness to creating travel itineraries and asking for financial advice, genAI is a force to which marketers have been forced to adapt and to move quickly to understand and adopt.

What Is GEO?

As marketers have moved to adapt to these new tools, one quickly emerging strategy that they’ve added to their marketing arsenal is GEO. Also referred to as answer engine optimization (AEO), and AI optimization (AIO), GEO is a new way of thinking about how consumers and B2B prospects find their way to companies’ websites.

“GEO is about getting your brand included inside AI-generated answers, not just ranked in traditional search results,” McKenzie says. While traditional SEO is geared toward boosting sites for rankings and clicks, GEO optimizes “for mentions, citations, and recommendations.”

In fact, McKenzie says, “in many AI-driven experiences, users never click at all. The decision happens inside the answer. That fundamentally changes what visibility means.”

As a result, companies’ websites are no longer the first place searchers find themselves when looking for information, products, or services.

“As AI answer engines and agents are the first stop and mediator for more of the buying journey, marketers must adapt to the new AI-first reality,” says Jessica Keehn, chief marketing officer at SAP Customer Experience. “GEO extends SEO, leveraging all of the goodness of SEO investment in structured brand and product data with an even greater reliance on retrievable and trustworthy information that’s easy for AI systems to surface with confidence.”

In this GEO-powered environment, McKenzie says, contextual authority, sentiment, and third-party validation take on a more critical role. “This is because AI systems act as intermediaries that filter and synthesize information, prioritizing citation-worthy content that’s supported by evidence and trusted sources.”

Because of this, he says: “Brands that are consistently cited by trusted sources—major publications, strong communities, authoritative platforms—get reused more often. If an AI system isn’t confident about who you are or what you’re credible for, it avoids mentioning you altogether. Entity clarity and third-party validation are prerequisites for inclusion.”

Chris Walker, founder of Legiit, an AI-powered, freelance marketplace and marketing platform provider, says that GEO differs from SEO in the following ways:

• GEO is about context rather than keywords. AI engines look for authoritative, structured, and semantically rich content that can be summarized and delivered in conversation.
• GEO requires transparency.Companies need clear data markup, FAQs, and well-structured knowledge bases that AI can parse.
• GEO rewards credibility.AI systems prioritize sources with consistent signals of trust, such as citations, reviews, and expert content.

“Maintaining authoritative signals across multiple platforms increases the likelihood of being surfaced in AI-driven answers,” Walker says.

What Can Marketers Do?

As search patterns shift, there are a number of things marketers can do to remain relevant and findable.

“To balance an effective SEO and GEO mindset, marketers and brands must combine keyword-matching while structuring content to focus on authoritative, extractable data modules that solve specific user constraints,” McKenzie says. “Search visibility success is now measured by ‘share of model,’ which is how consistently AI cites your brand across conversational, decision-stage prompts.”

There are three important strategies that marketers should adopt to succeed in this new search environment, Keehn says. These strategies, which are about improving sites for AI agents and large language models (LLMs), include the following:

• Ensure that product is enhanced to become explicit, machine-readable, and complete, with rich attributes that LLMs can reason over effectively.
• Shift toward short-form semantic summaries, on which LLMs rely for ranking, reasoning, and distillation.
• Integrate insights and problem-based tagging into product metadata, enabling AI agents to match products to real customer questions, ensuring companies are discoverable, relevant, and competitive in agent-driven journeys.

The good news for marketers: The new search environment doesn’t require that they move entirely away from traditional strategies.

Content Strategy Doesn’t Need an Overhaul

It’s not necessary or advised for marketers to completely overhaul their entire content strategy. Instead, McKenzie suggests, there are a few things they can do to get on the right track. These include the following:

• Website content should be structured for citation.Use question-based headings and provide complete, stand-alone answers immediately following the question. That helps AI pull data from your website, leading to backlinks.
• Prioritize specific data, as AI models favor verifiable data for citations. Replace vague statements with clear statistics, original research, and case studies.
• Establish authority with clear author credentials. Authoritative sources are important to AI systems, so it’s important to keep expert names and organizations tied to their statements.
• Keep content up to date and refreshed.Recent information is prioritized over older results.

For AI-generated search, Ortman says, Q&A formats work well. “In our tests we actually saw that they increased visibility in chatbots by about 55 percent because you’re basically making it easy for the AI to answer a question that someone may have.”

Interestingly, many of the elements that help companies position for an AI-driven search environment mirror traditional drivers of PR and media coverage.

Andrew Miller, a digital marketing strategist and founder of GrowthExpertz, points out that “mentions in reputable publications, podcasts, academic or industry research, and expert roundups carry disproportionate weight. In many ways, GEO looks more like a fusion of SEO, PR, and thought leadership than a stand-alone discipline.”

Today, Miller says, “most generative systems still rely heavily on publicly available, crawlable content, reinforced by signals such as brand consistency, expert attribution, and third-party validation. That means marketers should not abandon SEO fundamentals but they should expand their playbooks.”

Companies also need to move beyond keyword-stuffing to focus on becoming quotable sources, McKenzie suggests. They can do this in the following ways:

• Positioning executives as quotable sources.“By securing guest spots or interviews where a leader can provide direct, definitive answers to common industry questions, that executive is positioned as an authority on the subject,” he says, noting that “AI looks for these authority signals to inform responses and provide credibility.”
• Prioritizing natural language in public materials. “Blog content and press releases should use question-based headers that mirror how people talk to AI,” McKenzie says. “Structuring content for direct answers makes it easier for AI to extract your content as a stand-alone snippet for a user’s query.”

“PR has always been important to SEO. That’s not necessarily new,” Ortman says.

One thing that is different, though, he says, is how people show up on lists. “When your company is included in a list of something like ‘top 10 tech brands in 2026,’ that list might not be prioritized in any specific order. Number one isn’t any better than number 10.” But, he says, ChatGPT and other AI engines will only look at the top one through five. So, where you land on these lists matters. And that requires having your PR teams or representatives being able to land you among those top items.

Another viable opportunity is optimizing your own website’s search capabilities to help users quickly find what they want.

Your Own Website’s Search

The path to most websites today isn’t direct. Instead of a Google search that leads people to your site, today many learn about you through ChatGPT or a similar tool. If they click on the link to bring them to your site, their expectation is that they’ll find the information or answers they need quickly.

As Nadjya Ghausi, chief marketing officer of SearchStax, says: “By the time consumers reach your website, they’re already conditioned to zero-click mode. They don’t want to dig. They want to ask. Which means that once they land, your search bar is the experience. If the answer isn’t fast, intuitive, and accurate, they’re gone.”

Website search, Ghausi says, “is becoming a strategic driver.” But it’s a shift that “no one’s talking about.” For CX leaders, [digital experience platform] architects, and digital experience teams, she says, “it’s a core contributor to engagement, conversion, and customer satisfaction. It’s your first and final impression. It’s where trust is won or lost.”

When done right, Ghausi says, website search becomes more than a feature. “It becomes a feedback loop, a source of insight, a signal for what content to improve or create next, and a direct path to deeper engagement and first-party data that is more valuable now than ever.”

The search environment and the capabilities of genAI tools are constantly shifting. Marketers need to stay on top of new developments while continually monitoring the effectiveness of their strategies to find the right balance for their needs.

Measuring, Monitoring, and Mastering

Both SEO and GEO are important, McKenzie and others say, but companies must find the right balance between them. That demands establishing specific goals and objectives and monitoring the right metrics to determine how traffic is coming to your site, how you’re showing up in both traditional and AI-driven search, and where improvements should be made.

“The bedrock foundation of anything that we really pursue with our clients has to be with analytics,” Ortman says. “In my opinion, if you can’t see it and measure it, you can’t impact it.” Without insights into where customers and sales are originating, you can’t direct your efforts appropriately.

The foundational question that every company needs to answer is “are you showing up?” Ortman says, and then, “how are you showing up and why?”

At a minimum, McKenzie says, companies should be tracking their AI citation rate. “This is the percentage of queries where your brand is cited. You’ll also want to monitor share of voice (SOV) compared to competitors to gauge how you’re ranking in search queries, especially as search platforms like Google continue to prioritize AI overviews for search results.”

And how do companies do that?

Ortman says traditional SEO tools aren’t as useful for AI-driven search analysis. “With these new GEO chatbots, it’s a black box,” he says. “You don’t get any of that type of metric.”

That said, for those who don’t have access to agencies or others to help with their analysis, Google Analytics is a good choice. “It’s free. You can see if traffic is coming from AI chatbots.” It can give you “a little bit of visibility,” he says.

“The basic principles that make SEO and GEO effective are relatively similar,” McKenzie adds. “The primary issue I see is publishing unhelpful content that lacks expertise, offering no real value or expertise.”

GEO shouldn’t be approached as a “trick or optimization hack,” Miller says. “In reality, it rewards what good marketing should have been doing all along: clarity, credibility, and usefulness at scale.”

Ortman agrees. “The foundations of SEO are still intact. You’re wanting to have a website that is easily navigated. You’re wanting to produce content that is valuable, interlinked, maybe linking out to an appropriate piece of content, whatever that may be.” 

Linda Pophal is a freelance business journalist and content marketer who writes for various business and trade publications. Pophal does content marketing for Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and individuals on a wide range of subjects, from human resource management and employee relations to marketing, technology, healthcare industry trends, and more.