What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)

With the recent leaps in the field of AI-driven search, the digital landscape has been changing at a dramatic pace. With users putting more and more faith in AI tools over traditional search engines, many users are having their queries answered long before reaching your website, but instead taking their answers directly from AI engines such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini instead. 

A report by Authoritas even claims AI summaries within Google cut clicks through to websites from SERPs by up to 79%. But it isn’t all doom and gloom — an evolving landscape requires a shift in approach to best capitalise on new opportunities. For AI, this is the rise of Generative Engine Optimisation.

What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is incredibly similar to its search-based counterpart SEO. The primary difference is that rather than refining your website to appear within search engines such as Google and Bing, GEO instead focuses on ensuring your website content is easily discoverable and understandable by AI such as GPT, Claude, Gemini and the like.

By analysing the content which is most valued by generative engines, we learn how best to refine our own content to be favoured by AI tools and reach the widest possible audience.

The Growing Importance of GEO

The rise of GEO stems from drastic changes in user behaviour online — rather than browsing several websites for the answer to a query, more and more people are instead letting AI tools do the searching for them. 

When searching for long or detailed queries within traditional search engines, the lack of perfectly relevant results often causes the results to default to more broad and generic pages which don’t directly answer the users specific need. Whilst niche searches could previously have taken visits to several different websites to answer, generative engines will instead combine information from several different sources and compile a single precise answer tailored directly to the users need, in a fraction of the time. 

The direct knock-on effect of this change is that websites are often seeing much less traffic, as user queries can be answered without the need to visit your website directly. GEO looks to turn this potential loss into a gain instead — these generative engines look to give the best and most accurate answer possible to their users by seeking out content with the best quality, relevance and trustworthiness. Refining content to tick the right boxes for these AI tools can allow you to potentially bypass many of the big names who have dominated search for so long — letting you get your messaging in front of an entirely new and previously unreachable audience.

As AI powered searches continue to grow, rankings within SERPs (search engine results pages) are seeing significantly fewer clicks over time, with Gartner predicting search engine volume will decrease by 25% by 2026, and up to 50% by 2028. With such a seismic shift in how users behave, and the adoption of AI within search continuing to grow, companies which rely on their website to drive a significant proportion of their business will be forced to adapt and seek out new channels to replace this lost organic traffic with new generative search traffic instead.

How to refine for GEO

The core idea behind GEO is simple — create quality content that’s easy to find, easy to understand, easy to extract and easy to trust. To refine your content for these key factors you'll need to:

Make your content easy to find

• Clear structure — making your information easy to find involves using a clear, easy to digest structure without any unnecessary filler to bulk out the content. Working to a word count isn’t important; being clear and concise is.
• Easy to crawl — the page should allow indexing and have nothing blocking the content (such as JavaScript rendering, blocking bots or having content locked behind a login)
• Keep it clean — don’t make your page too flashy or add in unnecessary components. Having too much extra to load slows down bots and makes the important content harder to find.
• Internal linking — implement clear, descriptive internal linking from key pages to ensure the content is easy to find. The anchor text of your links should clearly and accurately describe the content of the target page — avoid sensationalised text or generic CTAs. Important pages shouldn't have a crawl depth higher than 3 (it should take no more than 3 clicks to find when starting from your homepage)
• Amplify your content — something as simple as posting your content on social media can drastically increase the number of eyes on it, as well as giving these bots another channel to discover your content.

Make your content easy to understand

• Page order matters — the most important information should be towards the top of the page. Don’t hide important information within the middle of paragraphs or start the page with meaningless or unimportant information — dive straight into the details without the fluff.
• Structure your page clearly — correct use of hierarchy within headers (H1’s, H2’s etc.) and use of bullet points or tables can clearly break the information down and allow a specific section to be found and extracted with a minimum of effort.
• Use a conversational tone — too often we see old school SEO practices bleed in, but many of these can be detrimental when targeting generational engines instead. Don’t work to a wordcount, don’t force in keywords and don’t write for a robot. You should always have your audience in mind — how will they phrase the question and what's the simplest and most effective way to solve their problem?
• Keep it concise — writing a lengthy piece which covers every possible snippet of information about a topic may be tempting, but it dilutes the relevance of the page and makes individual answers hard to find. Keep answers short, snappy and to the point.
• Keep it simple — writing for your target audience is important, but you don’t want to alienate a less technically savvy audience or confuse bots by using jargon or acronyms. If a term or concept can be easily misunderstood, explain it in layman's terms. This not only helps keep the content easy to understand but also proves you have not only the expertise to understand these topics, but also the skill to explain them simply.

Make your content easy to extract

• Adopt a question-and-answer format — this clearly signposts the intent which is being answered and makes the sought after information effortless to locate and extract.
• Implement structured data — structured data (such as FAQ, product or organisation) helps signpost the most important information on your page and provide clear context to help AI tools understand what information is provided, where it is and how it should be understood
• Use statistics — numbers are not only visibly appealing, but can get the point across in a fraction of the page space that it would take to explain in writing, and are often rewarded by generative engines as a result.
• Use multiple forms of media — some answers are best explained verbally, but others are much easier to answer visibly or via a video tutorial. Giving a mixture of media allows tools to pick the one it deems most useful for that user's specific query. The addition of these media types means it’s more important than ever to refine image alt-text and video captions or transcripts to accurately reflect the media’s content, to allow it to be understood and served correctly.

Make your content easy to trust

• Prove expertise — The best way to earn trust, for both people and bots, is to prove that you’re an expert in the topic you’re talking about. To encourage AI citation of your content, you should form clusters of interlinking pages all focused around a core topic that matches your company’s expertise. These related pages should be detailed, consistent, high quality and show first-hand knowledge and expertise — not regurgitated information from other websites.
• Build backlinks and mentions — just like in SEO, earning backlinks or mentions from authoritative, related websites is a hugely powerful indicator of trust. If the information on your website is being linked to, it shows that the author trusts you as an expert in your field and is willing to stake the quality and reputation of their own content on that trust. We find that the most effective way of earning powerful links from authoritative sources is with first-hand research, especially if this comes with quotable statistics which others can use within their own content. It can be a lengthy and potentially expensive undertaking, but is a hugely powerful tool when executed correctly.
• Use first-hand experience — AI is a tool used by almost everyone in today's digital landscape, which means that everyone is capable of simply crawling and regurgitating information that already exists. To stand out from the crowd you need to add value which no one else has — this means calling on the knowledge of your team to give first-hand accounts, publish new research or simply to explain and analyse existing data in new ways.
• Leverage your experts — your business is full of experts of all shapes and sizes, but some will be more active in their field than others. If your business or key members within your business have published papers, are mentioned on Wikipedia, are active on forums or simply active on social media – these are all excellent indicators of recognised expertise which can be linked to their profiles or the business as a whole by using linking or referencing within schema.
• Cite your sources — if you’re using information or knowledge from elsewhere, make sure to assign credit to the original source. Quotes, statistics or other relevant content from industry experts shows that you’re dedicated to providing the best and most thorough user experience — and adds depth beyond that which you can provide alone. As an example, this study (see what we did there?) shows that simply by adding sources, quotes and statistics, site visibility within generative engines increased by 30-40%
• Leverage social proof — third party trust signals will always be the most powerful. Including real user reviews or the icons, quotes or case studies of partners and customers are a way of proving that others have not only used your services, but actively trust you, are happy with your work and are willing to promote you as a result

What are the differences between SEO & GEO

Whilst there are some core similarities in the end-goal, getting the user the information they want in as little effort as possible, SEO and GEO have entirely different ways of achieving that outcome. This leads to fundamental differences in how they work, how users interact with your content and how you need to track success as a result. 

The core differences between SEO and GEO are;

How to refine for both SEO & GEO:

Refining your content to get the best of both worlds shouldn’t be too different from your current SEO practices, as there is large overlap in what signals are valued by both traditional search engines and AI tools. When creating your content, remember to focus on:

• Create quality content — In order to reach your user, you first need quality content to satisfy their needs. Create a content plan to ensure you’re creating the type of content your users need, ensuring this content is high-quality, relevant to the users search query and aligned with the existing principles of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust).
• Research keywords and tone — keyword research has always been a staple of SEO, but to extend the benefit to GEO you need to not only look at the rigid keywords you’ve been using previously, but the natural language and phrasing your audience is using to ask the questions.
• Don’t neglect technical SEO — ensure your website remains technically sound, user friendly and easy to crawl and navigate. This includes fixing any issues such as broken links, ensuring page load speed is optimised and correctly using headings and structured data.
• Build trust — give both your human and bot readers reasons to trust you by proving your expertise. This includes, but is not limited to; consistent use of first-hand data, building topic clusters of content related to your core offerings and creating author bios to leverage internal expertise.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?
Generative Engine Optimisation is the process of refining website content in order to be easily found, understood and extracted by AI tools, instead of traditional search engines, with the goal of being used within and cited by these tools. 

GEO is intended to capitalise on a growing trend of AI searches being used in place of traditional search engines, attempting to reach a new audience as well as re-engage with existing users who have changed their search behaviour.

How does Generative Engine Optimisation work?
When a query is first input, the first step is not too dissimilar to traditional search engines; a shortlist of results is chosen from the index of results available based on a number of criteria, such as keyword/ topic relevance, authority and credibility of the author and how fresh the content is (particularly for topics which aren’t evergreen), then filters these results to pick only the most relevant to the search and feeds these remaining results into the LLM (Large Language Model).

Once the LLM has the relevant data, it will construct a clear and detailed response which answers the users query as directly and comprehensively as possible, tagging the sources of key points of information alongside the relevant passages. The links included in these attributed sources are likely to be the primary source of new traffic from GE models.

Is Generative Engine Optimisation replacing Search Engine Optimisation?
GEO and SEO look to fill different niches so one will not replace the other, but rather the two should be used in tandem for the best results. For pages offering a product or service the goal is to get users to visit your website and complete a purchase, which will require SEO refinement. For pages looking to educate the user and answer specific queries leading up to that purchase, a direct website visit is not necessarily required — in this case GEO can more effectively distribute this information to the target audience.