What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the process of optimizing your content so that it is prominently included in answers provided by AI-driven search engines and assistants. In other words, GEO aims to boost a brand’s visibility in generative AI search results – the responses synthesized by AI models like ChatGPT, Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), Bing Chat, Claude, Perplexity, and others [Adame, 2024]. Traditional SEO focuses on improving rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs), while GEO focuses on ensuring AI systems use your content when answering user queries. For example, if a user asks an AI assistant a question related to your product or expertise, effective GEO strategies increase the likelihood that the AI will pull information from your website or mention your brand in its answer [Simmonds, 2024].
Put simply, GEO extends the principles of SEO into the era of generative AI. It encompasses many familiar best practices from SEO – such as creating high-quality, relevant content and ensuring strong technical website health – but adapts them to how AI models retrieve and generate answers. The goal is to position your company’s content as a trusted source that these AI engines will reference. As one marketer explains, GEO involves making sure your digital content “maximizes its reach and visibility inside of Generative AI engines” when people inquire about solutions, products, or information in your domain [Simmonds, 2024]. In practice, that means crafting content that AI can easily interpret, and providing the context and credibility signals that make the AI more likely to include or cite your content in its responses.
From SEO to GEO: The Evolution of Search Optimization
To appreciate GEO, it’s helpful to understand how it evolved from traditional SEO. Over the past two decades, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been the cornerstone of online marketing—companies optimized their websites to rank higher on Google or Bing for relevant keywords. However, the way people search is changing. The rise of generative AI search engines and answer bots has introduced a new dynamic. These AI-driven engines do not just return a list of links; they generate direct answers by synthesizing information from many sources. This shift has profound implications for user behavior and content strategy.
SEO and GEO share the same ultimate objective: helping the right audience find your content. Both rely on quality content, keywords, and technical best practices to increase visibility online [Adame, 2024]. In fact, many SEO fundamentals (like authoritative content, fast load times, and mobile-friendly design) remain important in GEO. But there are key differences in focus and technique between SEO and GEO. SEO is about signaling relevance to a search engine algorithm so that your page ranks among the top organic results for a query. GEO, in contrast, is about signaling relevance and authority to an AI model so that your information is included in the AI’s answer composition. One industry expert described this as the difference between optimizing for a ranked list of links (SEO) versus optimizing for a synthesized answer (GEO) [Trovato, 2025].
In practical terms, the evolution from SEO to GEO means content creators must consider not just how a search engine will index their page, but how an AI will interpret and excerpt their content. SEO techniques like keyword optimization remain relevant, but GEO places greater emphasis on context and structure. For instance, where SEO might prioritize getting a featured snippet on Google, GEO prioritizes having content that an AI finds easy to quote or summarize accurately. This could involve providing clear definitions, concise answers to common questions, well-structured headings, and even schema markup that helps AI algorithms understand the content [Simmonds, 2024]. The underlying skills overlap, but GEO requires thinking one step further: “How will an AI read and use this content to answer a user’s question?” It’s an evolution, not a replacement, of SEO. As one commentator noted, you don’t throw out decades of SEO best practices; GEO is an extension of those techniques into the AI realm [Trovato, 2025].
How Generative AI Has Changed User Behavior
The rapid adoption of generative AI tools has fundamentally changed user search behavior. Instead of typing keywords into a browser and clicking through multiple links, more people are now asking questions directly to AI assistants and expecting a single, conversational answer. This shift is evidenced by usage statistics: for example, in 2024, ChatGPT’s traffic skyrocketed to the point that it reportedly surpassed Bing in total visitors, handling over 10 million queries per day [Young, 2024]. In other words, millions of users who might have once used a traditional search engine are now turning to AI models for answers. In general, users increasingly rely on generative engines for information, whether it’s getting advice, researching products, or learning about a technical concept [Trovato, 2025].
This behavioral change has two important implications. First, users are clicking fewer links. When an AI like Google’s SGE or Bing Chat directly provides a detailed answer on the search results page, the user has less incentive to click through to the source websites. As SEO experts have observed, if a “top-of-funnel” informational query is answered right in the AI-generated snippet, traffic to the underlying websites can drop significantly [Baird, 2024]. Users enjoy the convenience, but businesses risk losing the direct engagement they used to get via clicks. Second, user queries themselves are becoming more conversational and complex. People are comfortable asking a generative AI follow-up questions or very specific queries that they might not type into a standard search box. For example, a user might ask an AI, “What is the best project management software for a small tech company, and why?” expecting a nuanced, tailored answer. This means businesses need content that addresses detailed, long-tail questions in context, so that AI can draw on it to satisfy these deeper inquiries.
In summary, generative AI has ushered in an era of convenient, answer-centric search. Users get quick answers integrated from multiple sources, and they are beginning to expect this kind of rich, immediate result. For tech companies, this means that simply ranking on page one of Google is no longer a guarantee that your content will actually reach the user. If your information isn’t making it into the AI’s synthesized answer, you might be invisible to a growing segment of your audience. This change in user behavior is a key driver behind the rise of GEO – it’s a response to ensure that even when users don’t click links, your brand can still be present in the conversation happening via AI.
How GEO Works in Practice
GEO works by aligning your digital content with the way generative AI systems find and generate answers. To understand GEO in practice, it helps to know how these AI answer engines operate. When a user asks a question, a generative engine (like an AI chatbot or an AI-enhanced search) will: interpret the query, search a vast index of web content (and sometimes its internal knowledge base) for relevant information, and then synthesize a coherent answer drawn from one or multiple sources [Trovato, 2025]. The AI may also consider context like the user’s past queries or preferences, and it often strives to cite sources or at least ground its answer in existing content to maintain accuracy. The end result is a single answer or a conversational response, rather than a list of webpages.
Given this process, Generative Engine Optimization in practice means making your content a preferred source for the AI during that synthesis step. Key factors include:
- Clarity and Structure: Content that is well-structured (using descriptive headings, bullet points, concise paragraphs) is easier for AI to parse and extract facts from. For instance, a clearly labeled FAQ section or a definition at the start of an article can be directly used by an AI to answer a question like “What is generative engine optimization?” with minimal modification. Structured data (like schema markup) can further help by explicitly telling AI what the content represents (e.g., defining a piece of text as a “definition of GEO”) [Simmonds, 2024].
- Context and Relevance: Generative AI models aim to give contextually relevant answers. They don’t just look for keyword matches; they look for content that directly addresses the user’s query in a meaningful way. This means your content should be comprehensive around your topic areas and anticipate the questions users might ask. It should provide explanations, examples, and even counterpoints where appropriate. Optimizing for context could mean including related concepts and synonyms (for example, mentioning “AI search optimization” or “generative search visibility” alongside GEO) so that the AI sees your content as covering the topic broadly and in-depth.
- Authority and Accuracy: AI systems are more likely to use content that appears authoritative and trustworthy. This is similar to traditional SEO, but with some twists. It’s not just about having a high PageRank or domain authority; it’s about your content being recognized as reliable by the AI model. One way to foster this is to cite reputable sources and include data or quotes in your content. Interestingly, an academic study on GEO found that including statistics and references from multiple authoritative sources in your content can significantly boost the likelihood of it being picked up in AI-generated answers (one experiment showed a visibility increase of over 40% when content had such rich supporting evidence) [Aggarwal et al., 2024]. The takeaway is that content which reads like a well-researched resource tends to be favored by generative engines aiming for accurate answers.
- Technical Accessibility: Just as traditional search engines crawl your site, AI systems need to be able to find and read your content. GEO involves some technical SEO measures to ensure AI can access your information. This includes maintaining fast page load times and clean site architecture, but also new considerations like making sure your robots.txt isn’t blocking important resources that an AI assistant (which might use a search index or its own crawler) would need. Additionally, providing feeds or APIs of your content where possible can help future-proof accessibility as AI platforms evolve. Some companies are even exploring feeding their proprietary data to AI models—for instance, fine-tuning an AI with company knowledge or using plugins that supply real-time data to chatbots—to ensure the AI has the most up-to-date and deeply relevant information about their business [Young, 2024]. In general, the easier you make it for an AI system to ingest your content and understand it, the more likely your content will be used when relevant questions arise.
In practice, GEO might involve steps like auditing how your content currently appears (or doesn’t appear) in AI-generated responses, then taking actions such as rewriting certain pages to be more concise, adding an explicit Q&A section to address common customer queries, or ensuring your latest case studies and press releases are widely distributed (so that the AI has “seen” them during its training or indexing). It’s a blend of content strategy, technical tweaking, and proactive distribution of information. The end goal remains clear: when an AI is formulating an answer that touches on your area, your content is so well-aligned with the AI’s needs that it naturally becomes part of the answer.
Why GEO Matters: Benefits for B2B and B2C Tech Firms
Every tech company wants to be visible to its target audience. GEO is becoming essential for achieving that visibility in the age of AI-driven search. The benefits of GEO span both B2B and B2C sectors, though they manifest in slightly different ways:
Benefits for B2B Tech Companies
For B2B tech firms, Generative Engine Optimization is rapidly becoming table stakes for maintaining industry presence [Young, 2024]. Business buyers and decision-makers are increasingly using generative AI tools to research solutions, vendors, and best practices. Instead of browsing dozens of websites or downloading multiple whitepapers, an executive might ask an AI assistant something like, “What are the top cybersecurity platforms for mid-sized businesses?” If your company sells a cybersecurity solution, you want the AI’s answer to include your name and key strengths. GEO helps make that happen by ensuring your content (blog posts, product pages, thought leadership articles) is optimized to be pulled into such answers.
The benefits of GEO for B2B include:
- Lead Generation and Awareness: If an AI frequently cites your company as an example or source, potential buyers become aware of you even if they haven’t visited your website yet. It’s akin to word-of-mouth in the digital space. Being featured in AI-generated recommendations or explanations can put your solution on a prospect’s radar early in their research process. This can lead to more direct searches for your brand or even direct inquiries, effectively filling the top of your sales funnel.
- Thought Leadership and Trust: B2B purchases often involve high stakes and careful consideration. Companies that consistently appear in authoritative answers build a reputation as thought leaders. For instance, if a CTO repeatedly sees an AI reference a particular SaaS company’s research when asking about industry trends, that SaaS company gains credibility. GEO encourages you to produce the kind of high-quality, insightful content that AI will use – which is the same content that impresses human audiences. Over time, this reinforces your expertise in the market.
- Maintaining Visibility in Longer Sales Cycles: B2B decisions can take months and involve multiple touchpoints. Generative AI might be consulted at various stages – from initial learning, to comparing specific solutions, to troubleshooting concerns. GEO helps ensure your brand’s information is present at those touchpoints. In effect, it’s a way to stay “in the room” during the digital research phase of a long B2B sales cycle. Without GEO, even solid SEO performance might not save you from fading out of view if the prospect relies on AI summaries that omit your website. As one B2B marketing expert put it, optimizing for generative AI platforms is now critical to keep your brand voice heard in an AI-driven world [Young, 2024].
Benefits for B2C Tech Companies
B2C tech firms (and consumer-focused tech products) also stand to gain significantly from GEO, albeit in different ways. Consumers are using AI assistants for everything from troubleshooting device issues (“How do I fix my smartphone’s battery drain problem?”) to product discovery (“What’s the best noise-cancelling headphone under $200?”). If you operate in the B2C space, generative AI might be recommending products, giving how-to advice, or answering questions where your brand could be part of the solution.
Key benefits of GEO for B2C include:
- Brand Visibility and Preference: Appearing in AI-generated answers can massively increase brand exposure. For example, if an AI assistant answers a user’s query about “top productivity apps” and mentions your app with a brief description, that user just learned about your offering without ever going to an app store or reading a blog. Even if the AI doesn’t provide a direct link (some do, some don’t), your brand name being communicated by the AI is powerful. It can influence consumer preferences subtly; people tend to trust suggestions that come from an apparently neutral, authoritative source like an AI. GEO helps insert your product into those suggestion lists and informational answers.
- Customer Experience and Self-Service: Many tech companies strive to offer great self-service support and information to users. If a customer asks an AI “how do I integrate this software with Google Calendar?” and the answer is pulled from your knowledge base or support article, you’ve effectively helped the customer without them contacting your support team. GEO can thus be a way to amplify your support content and FAQs through AI channels. It ensures that accurate, brand-approved information is what the AI delivers, reducing the chance of misinformation. This not only helps the user at that moment but also reflects positively on your company’s helpfulness.
- Traffic and Conversions from AI: Some generative search experiences (like Google’s SGE or Bing’s AI chat in search) do provide source links or citations that users can click. Optimizing for generative search visibility means you’re more likely to be one of those cited sources, which can still drive direct traffic. Even without a link, a compelling mention can lead a consumer to manually search for your brand or product. In essence, GEO can funnel high-intent visitors to you, because if someone sees your product named as a top solution, their next step might be to visit your site or look up reviews. Companies already report seeing traffic coming from AI chat referrals in analytics, showing that GEO efforts can convert into real website visits and sales leads [Young, 2024].
- Competitive Defense: In consumer markets, if you’re not in the AI-generated answers, your competitors might be. Consider a scenario where a user asks, “Which smart home hub should I buy?” If the AI’s answer lists three of your competitors (and not your product), you’re at a disadvantage even if you had good SEO rankings for related keywords. GEO is important to avoid such exclusion. By proactively optimizing, you increase the odds that your brand is part of the story told by AI, rather than letting competitors dominate that space by default.
In both B2B and B2C contexts, the business case for GEO comes down to staying visible and relevant as the search paradigm changes. Companies that invest in GEO are effectively ensuring that their content keeps its share of the audience’s attention in an AI-mediated future. Those that don’t adapt could see a decline in organic traffic and brand awareness as AI-driven answers siphon engagement away. Ultimately, GEO matters because it protects and even enhances the digital visibility that companies have spent years building through SEO and content marketing, carrying it forward into the next generation of search technology.
How to Get Started with GEO
Implementing Generative Engine Optimization may sound abstract, but it can be tackled with a structured approach. Here are key steps for CEOs, CMOs, and marketing teams at tech companies to get started with GEO:
- Research the Generative Search Landscape: Begin by understanding how your audience might be interacting with generative AI. Identify the common questions prospects or customers ask in your domain – especially those they might pose to AI assistants. Traditional keyword research tools can help find popular queries, and you should also consider forums or community discussions to see what language real users use. Next, investigate how generative AI currently responds to those queries. For instance, use a tool like Bing Chat or Google’s AI search to ask a few representative questions related to your business. Do you see your brand or content referenced? Analyze which competitors or sources are being mentioned. This research provides a baseline “share of voice” in AI-generated results and highlights gaps. Early adopters of GEO often conduct an audit of AI results to map out where opportunities lie [Young, 2024].
- Optimize Your Content for AI Consumption: Once you know the queries and topics to target, review and refine your content so it’s ready for AI to use. This involves several sub-tactics:
- Answer Questions Directly: Ensure that your content actually answers the likely questions clearly and upfront. If a blog post’s introduction succinctly answers a “what is” or “how to” question, an AI can easily grab that snippet.
- Use Clear Structure and Metadata: Break content into logical sections with H2/H3 headings, bullet points, and summary paragraphs. Consider adding FAQ sections on key pages. Also implement structured data (schema markup) for definitions, FAQs, how-to steps, etc., which can give AI extra context [Simmonds, 2024].
- Maintain High Quality and Accuracy: Update any outdated information and back up assertions with facts or reputable citations. Content that demonstrates expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (think of Google’s E-E-A-T principles) is more likely to be chosen by AI. By elevating the quality and clarity of your content, you’re essentially making it a richer resource for the AI to draw from.
- Build Context and Authority Beyond Your Site: Generative AI models learn from across the open web. This means your on-site content is crucial, but so is your brand’s presence in other credible locations online. To boost your generative search visibility, invest in digital PR, thought leadership, and community engagement:
- Earn Mentions and Citations: Contribute guest articles to respected industry publications, get your experts quoted in news pieces, and seek inclusion in relevant research or reports. If multiple trustworthy sources mention your company in context with certain expertise or products, AI models will more strongly associate you with those topics.
- Leverage User-Generated Content and Communities: Participate where your audience asks questions – for tech companies, this might be forums like Stack Overflow, Reddit, Quora, or niche community sites. Provide valuable answers or content there (without being overtly promotional). Not only does this directly engage potential customers, it also means the AI training data will include instances of your brand providing answers. Some GEO strategists note that large language models are trained on platforms like Reddit and Quora, so having your insights present on those platforms can influence AI outputs [Simmonds, 2024].
- Social Media Signals: While it’s debated how much AI models currently incorporate social media, maintaining an active and consistent presence on LinkedIn, Twitter, or other platforms can’t hurt. High engagement and sharing of your content is a sign of relevance. Over time, AI systems might use these signals more explicitly to judge what content is popular or authoritative on a given topic.
- Strengthen Technical SEO for AI Discovery: Many technical best practices from SEO carry over to GEO. Ensure your site is easily crawlable by search engines (since AI bots often piggyback on search indexes). Submit updated sitemaps so new content is discovered. Improve page load times and fix broken links or errors—slow or problematic pages might be skipped by crawling processes. Another technical aspect specific to GEO is making sure content feeds are available. For example, offering an RSS feed or an API for your content can help if certain AI services allow direct content integration. Also, monitor your server logs or analytics for any unusual bot traffic that could be AI scrapers and ensure they aren’t being unintentionally blocked. By solidifying your site’s technical foundation, you make it more likely that your optimized content is actually seen and indexed by the generative engines [Young, 2024].
- Monitor, Measure, and Adapt: GEO is new territory, and measurement is still evolving, but you can put mechanisms in place now. Track referral traffic from known AI sources (for instance, some companies add UTM parameters to links that appear in Bing Chat citations to identify those visitors). Use analytics to watch for traffic spikes or patterns that correlate with generative AI usage. You can even directly ask AI tools about your brand (“What does [Your Company] do?”) periodically to see what they’ve learned or how their answers change after your optimizations. Some forward-looking marketing teams are customizing their analytics and CRM to attribute leads to “AI-generated referrals” where possible [Young, 2024]. While not all AI interactions leave a trail, even qualitative monitoring (noting whether your content is showing up in AI answers over time) can guide your strategy. Be prepared to adjust—if you find that an important question still isn’t surfacing your content, you may need to create a new dedicated resource or perhaps publish content in a venue that the AI seems to favor. GEO is an ongoing process of optimization. Just as with SEO, algorithms and AI models will evolve, so a culture of continuous improvement and learning is essential.
By following these steps, tech companies can build a solid foundation in GEO. The process involves cross-functional effort: content marketers, SEO specialists, PR teams, and web developers all have a role to play. Start small with a pilot project on a few key topics to demonstrate results, then expand your GEO initiative. Remember that every improvement—be it a clearer paragraph on your site or a new expert article published off-site—contributes to an ecosystem where the AI “sees” your brand more clearly. Over time, these efforts compound, and your content can become a go-to reference for generative engines answering questions in your industry.
Future Implications of GEO
As generative AI continues to advance, GEO will only grow in importance. We are likely at the early stages of a transformation in how information is sought and delivered. A recent McKinsey survey found that 65% of organizations were regularly using generative AI by mid-2023, nearly double the adoption from just ten months prior [McKinsey, 2023]. This rapid uptake suggests that AI-driven tools will soon be ubiquitous in both consumer and business contexts. For tech companies, this means search behavior may never fully return to the old normal — even more of your customers and partners will use AI assistants as a primary interface to information. Preparing for the future of GEO involves a few key outlooks:
- Deeper AI Integration into Daily Life: We can expect generative AI to integrate into voice assistants, augmented reality, and other emerging interfaces. Imagine a future where a manager can simply ask an AR glasses assistant for a real-time recommendation during a meeting (“Show me potential vendors for this software need”) and get on-screen suggestions. Or a consumer might use voice search in their car to ask about the best local tech store for a particular gadget. AI will anticipate needs and provide answers proactively, not just reactively [Adame, 2024]. Content optimization will need to extend to formats like voice (concise, spoken-friendly answers) and even visuals (ensuring your images have good metadata so they might appear in AI-generated graphics or AR overlays). GEO strategy will broaden to multi-modal optimization – text, voice, visual – so that your information is accessible however the AI delivers results.
- Hyper-Personalized Results: Future AI-driven search will likely personalize heavily, using user data to tailor answers. This means two people asking the same question might get slightly different responses based on their context. From a GEO perspective, it underscores the need to cover multiple angles in your content. If you have products that serve different demographics, ensure your content speaks to each (so the AI can match the relevant piece to the relevant user). Also, maintaining positive customer reviews and sentiment online becomes even more crucial; if an AI knows a user prefers highly-rated options, a strong corpus of customer praise for your product could influence whether it’s recommended. Essentially, the future GEO will intersect with customer experience management – your content and brand need to appeal to both a broad AI algorithm and individual user profiles.
- Continuous Algorithmic Changes: If you thought Google’s algorithm updates were challenging, consider that AI models like OpenAI’s or Google’s are also constantly evolving (and often less transparent). The criteria that determine which sources an AI trusts might change as researchers tweak models or add guardrails. We might see the rise of explicit AI content guidelines analogous to SEO guidelines today. Companies will need to stay informed about how different AI systems choose and credit sources. It’s possible that new standards (maybe even AI content indexing protocols) will emerge, and staying ahead of those will be part of GEO. In the meantime, the best hedge is to continue following core principles: provide accurate, well-structured, user-focused content. Those qualities are unlikely to ever be penalized, even as models change.
- Ethical and Competitive Considerations: As AI-generated answers become more prevalent, there will be debates around intellectual property and fair attribution. Tech companies should keep an eye on policies by major AI providers about citing sources. Pushing for transparent attribution is in the interest of content creators. From a competitive standpoint, if AI answers become the norm, companies might invest in ensuring their data is directly integrated into AI platforms. We already see examples: some businesses provide plugins or data partnerships to feed information (like stock prices, flight data, etc.) into AI assistants. In the future, we might have analogous arrangements for content – for instance, a documentation software company ensuring its help articles are part of a developer assistant AI’s knowledge base. GEO might then include managing such partnerships or integrations, beyond open-web optimization.
Ultimately, embracing GEO is about more than just adapting to AI; it’s about positioning your company for the next era of digital engagement. Tech leaders should view GEO as an opportunity to lead rather than lag. Those who invest early in understanding and optimizing for generative search will shape the narratives that AI delivers. They’ll be the brands setting the examples that others follow. As one industry thought leader succinctly put it: innovate, adapt, and lead – those who seize the GEO opportunity today will be the trailblazers of tomorrow’s digital world [Adame, 2024].
In conclusion, Generative Engine Optimization is rapidly moving from a buzzword to a foundational aspect of digital strategy. For CEOs and CMOs at SMB tech companies, GEO offers a way to maintain and even expand your reach in a world where AI-driven searches are becoming routine. By clearly defining GEO, understanding its roots in SEO, recognizing the user behavior shifts behind it, and taking practical steps to implement it, you can ensure that your business remains visible and competitive. The companies that thrive will be those that not only react to changes in technology, but anticipate and ride the wave of innovation. GEO is one such wave – and it’s time to start surfing it.
References (Indicative): [Adame, 2024; Simmonds, 2024; Young, 2024; Trovato, 2025; Aggarwal et al., 2024; Statista, 2023; McKinsey, 2023]
