It’s Just Modern SEO.
Generative AI search has promised to revolutionize the way people find information online. ChatGPT expanded from a chat agent into the SearchGPT prototype last month. Perplexity came into the picture. Bard grew into Gemini. We’ve come a long way! Now, venture capital firms are evangelizing the importance of Generative Engine Optimization for businesses. Requests for “GEO” are showing up in Digital Marketing RFPs. It’s a hot topic in recent quarterly earnings calls. What does this mean for brands, and how can SEOs adapt to this new world?
What exactly is GEO?
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing an entity to be featured in the responses generated by AI applications, features, and models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Google’s AI Overviews, Claude, and Perplexity.
My colleague Jordan Strauss wrote an excellent article earlier this year that breaks down early research around GEO. I recommend you check that out for a deeper dive into “how” to do GEO.
How is GEO different from SEO? How are they similar?
This is one of the more intriguing questions in modern-day digital marketing.
In SEO, our primary goal is to optimize a website and surface the right content to people searching for solutions in search engines. Yes, there’s more to it than that, but at the end of the day, we’re driving people directly to our website from Search.
GEO is broader than “website optimization.” The goal is (quite literally) to make something a part of the conversation. Conversational search and traditional search are familiar, but different. The inputs are similar, but the output of generative AI is less structured and varies more than a traditional SERP.
Search engines parse content and match it to people’s queries, then serve it up as a kind of dealer’s choice of where to go next. LLMs ingest content to learn, and use their understanding of entities to generate responses and recommendations; but they don’t often directly return the content they were trained on. Sure, they may cite a source in a response, but they’re not going to spit back a blog post verbatim. In this world, our carefully produced content serves a different purpose: to educate the LLM. The goal is to position any entity associated with a person’s question as relevant enough to be featured in a gen AI response.
Let’s consider the four pillars of SEO: On-Page (Content), In-Page (Technical), Off-page (Authority), and User Experience (Engagement), and break down how each of these functions in SEO and translates to GEO:
On-Page (Content):
- SEO: Your website is the destination, and your content is the trail people follow to find it through traditional search engines. Your unique content establishes your contextual relevance for search engines. Googlebot is somewhat limited in its ability to crawl and index web pages - it can be finicky in what it can/can’t understand. It understands written text best, and you need to make sure all the pieces of the technical SEO puzzle are in place to allow that to happen (more on that below).
- GEO: The conversation is the destination, and your website is the data feed that trains the LLM. But unlike Googlebot, many LLMs are multimodal and can ingest content in any form - written, video, images, audio. LLMs can learn from anything fed to them. People “find you” through the LLM’s generated response, and they might go on to a traditional search engine to search for you there - or, they might visit your website directly.
In-Page (Technical):
- SEO: Your website needs to be structured in a way that search engines can easily crawl and index your content.
- GEO: Your assets need to be structured in a way that LLMs can find and ingest your data. Assuming your website is part of most LLMs’ knowledge base, consider how easy it is for these models to access your data. Many of the traditional SEO rules apply. For example, structured data is the GEO equivalent to SEO-friendly site architecture. Make sure you allow GPTbot to crawl your site, and utilize Schema markup to make it easier for LLMs to understand your content..
Authority (Off-page)
- SEO: Officially, links. Pseudo-officially, brand mentions across the web (this old post on co-occurrence from Bill Slawski does a great job breaking this down).
- GEO: It’s logical to draw the conclusion that to be a part of the conversation in conversational search, you… need to be a part of the conversation. We know LLMs train on information across the entire web, including sites like Reddit and Facebook. Further, the more “official” content from your brand, (most likely) the better. A robust YouTube channel and active social feeds can further influence how LLMs understand your brand.
User Experience (Engagement)
- SEO: SEOs have long suspected that signals like click-through rate and bounce rate are factored into Google’s algorithms. Google has repeatedly denied that. But thanks to the search documentation leak and trial exhibits over the last year, we finally have our proof. User experience and on-site engagement impacts SEO performance.
- GEO: This is where we have the least information, but it would be logical to presume that if "being a part of the conversation" is a factor, the significance and popularity of those conversations is also a factor. Now, how does the role of influencer marketing potentially manipulate this pillar? That remains to be seen.
Wait, these sound pretty similar...
Yup. And that leads me to my point: GEO is modern SEO. Modern SEO is GEO.
The highest level goal of any Search marketing program is to be present wherever your audience is searching. You want your customers - wherever they are - to find you. You want to pull them in, give them what they need, and give them such a great experience that they tell others about it (and maybe even write a review).
How to optimize for Generative AI?
Wil published his Sea of Sameness concept a few months ago, with some tangible examples of how search engines responded to his testing. I highly recommend you read that post, but the TL;DR is: search engines respond well to truly unique, helpful content that drives engagement.
Now, keep that in mind and go back to Jordan’s post. Read about the things that drive visibility in generative AI engines:
- Citations and statistics
- Quotes
- Simplicity, readability and natural-sounding language
You optimize for Generative AI the same way you optimize for Google Search: by sharing unique POVs and creating experiences that genuinely help people. AIOs are 2024’s Featured Snippets - modern SEOs simply need to adapt to this new search landscape.
Seer is testing and measuring how to influence generative AI for our clients
As the saying goes, you can't improve what you can't measure. We’ve put our money where our mouth is in R&D to measure and learn how to influence generative AI results. Here’s a short list of what we’ve been cooking up:
- We were one of the first to release a way to track your brand mentions in ChatGPT, and are tracking this for all of Seer’s clients. We’re analyzing ChatGPT’s responses and feeding them back into generative AI for further analysis and deeper insights.
- And, we can track brand mentions and provide that same analysis in any LLM you’d like.
- We developed a reporting tool to monitor your brand against competitors in ChatGPT, and we’re already scaling this out to other models like Gemini.
- We partnered with Ziptie.dev to monitor AIOs for our clients, and are analyzing their impact to Paid and Organic CTRs (keep an eye out for a writeup of those results soon).
- We’re analyzing daily responses to understand the stickiness of brands, categories, or considerations to understand how long a brand can hold a “result” in LLMs. We’ll be publishing results of this analysis soon on our blog.
- We’re monitoring AI-driven search traffic for our clients, to understand which tools are sending users to their websites.
GEO is more than a buzzword; it represents the inevitable evolution of how brands engage with audiences in an increasingly AI-driven world. While the fundamentals of SEO remain, GEO demands that we rethink our strategies to ensure our content doesn't just rank but resonates. As we navigate the shift from traditional SEO to the broader realm of GEO, one thing is clear: the principles of search are evolving, but the goal remains the same—to connect with audiences in meaningful ways. The future belongs to those who embrace this shift, and we’re here to guide the way.
