Anyone who has some professional experience with digital marketing or web development will have heard of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. SEO has been around for nearly as long as search engines, helping businesses craft webpages to have them rank higher and therefore be seen by more potential clients. With the recent advent of GenAI search engines, however, people find information differently than they once did, necessitating tools like GEO. Of course, this begs some questions: what is GEO and why is it so important in today’s digital environment?
What is GEO?
Coursera defines GEO, otherwise known as generative engine optimization, as “the practice of structuring and refining your digital content in a way that performs well on artificial intelligence (AI) search and answer engines,” adding that “this aims to make your content discoverable and easily interpreted so AI-generated responses can incorporate it effectively.”
GEO was developed as a necessary response to changes in the ways people searched for information online. For over 20 years, one of the only ways to find a website or locate specific information on the internet was to do so through a search engine by entering keywords related to the subject of interest. The search engine would then take the user to a list of websites containing those keywords, thus connecting visitors with businesses.
The search process has changed in recent years, however. People are increasingly turning to AI engines to find information online since the large language models (LLMs) they are built on tend to go a step further than standard search engines and provide a complete and thoughtful response as opposed to a simple list of links.
Since LLMs often take traffic away from websites, businesses implement GEO so that their webpages are easier for AI engines to find and cite, ideally redirecting some traffic back to their site.
Comparing GEO to SEO
Both GEO and SEO work to drive traffic toward a company’s website. In fact, they often work best when complementing each other since traditional search engines remain the most popular method of finding information online. Additionally, many AI engines use most of the same search processes as traditional search engines, so websites built to cater to standard searches should already have some success in attracting LLMs.
GEO adheres to many of the same principles as SEO, favoring clear content that answers questions, cites sources, contains structures like headings and FAQs, and includes links and brand mentions. All of these elements, in addition to multi-modal assets and cross-platform presence, make a website’s material more appealing to LLMs.
GEO differs from SEO in that it adds a layer of activity specific to AI engines. Marketing teams often have to track citations, mentions, and share of voice across a number of LLMs to ensure responses on those platforms reflect desirable brand perception. GEO also typically requires that teams learn multiple AI-related skills, including workflow automation, embeddings and similarity, NLP/semantic search, and prompt design.
GEO Best Practices
Given that GEO is still fairly new, especially when compared to SEO, it can be difficult to intuit what would and would not work when implementing GEO into a website. The best way to learn is by doing, but there are several established best practices to bear in mind before committing oneself to optimizing a webpage for generative engines.
First and foremost, take into account that LLMs provide and make use of longer, more complex keywords than traditional search engines. While SEO content might favor fragments like “desk microphones for beginner streamers,” GEO will likely prefer a full statement or question like “which desk microphones are best for a beginner streamer?”
AI engines also prefer language presented in a conversational tone. As such, GEO content should be written in a style that mirrors how someone would naturally ask and answer a question in a conversation. Writing in this way makes it easier for LLMs to use the content to create an answer.
Lastly, be prepared to do some technical optimization for AI crawlers. AI engines prioritize clear, well-defined sections of content for them to quote in responses. To accommodate this style of searching, sites need to be clear, fast, and easy to scan through.
There are many ways to tweak webpages to make them more AI-friendly, but some of the most straightforward involve designing for skimmability and optimizing for speed. For instance, AIs can better lift material from a page if it is structured using short paragraphs, clear headings, and FAQ blocks. Additionally, AI systems typically do not stay on a page for more than a few seconds, so pages need to have fast enough load speeds to give AI bots what they need before they time out.
Updating Tactics to Stay Competitive
The rapid pace of technological advancements today can sometimes make it feel impossible to keep up with the latest developments in industry practices and methods. GEO is one such advancement that can easily come off as overwhelming or inaccessible at first, but in the same way that people learned and eventually mastered SEO, so too can people master GEO to stay competitive and help people find what they need when they need it.
