What is GEO?

GEO stands for “generative engine optimization” and it is a recent term only formalized in November 2023. GEO is the process of optimizing your website’s content to boost its visibility in AI-driven search engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI (Artificial Intelligence) Overviews.

AI is driven by improvements in machine learning techniques and resources. There are now endless applications across various industries including healthcare, finance, transportation, and entertainment. This new era of digital marketing opens the door to an untapped market of possibilities.

How GEO and SEO Align, or Don't Align

While GEO involves a unique set of processes within digital marketing, it should be integrated with SEO, which serves as the foundational approach for enhancing online visibility. GEO and traditional SEO share core principles and practices, leading to considerable overlap between them. Traditional SEO techniques provide the essential groundwork for GEO, and together, they form a robust digital marketing strategy that optimizes your online presence.

GEO and SEO operate in different domains with distinct objectives and methods. GEO focuses on leveraging generative models and optimization to enhance systems or solutions, while SEO aims to improve online visibility and search rankings. Understanding how GEO and SEO align and differ will help you optimize your content for both traditional and AI-driven searches.

Transitioning From Search to Generation

Generative Engines (GEs) can generate accurate and personalized responses that go beyond a regular Google search. SEO matches keywords to user queries to drive traffic. GEO uses advanced AI to interpret the keywords and anticipates user intent more accurately, delivering multimodal responses. Unlike regular search engines that produce a direct link that is deemed most relevant to answering the question asked, this type of response combines information from various sources to give the most accurate and personalized answer to the query.

AI is changing the game, and it is pushing businesses to rethink how they approach their marketing strategies. Generative engines are the future of organic search. Gartner predicts that by 2026 traditional search engine volume will decrease by a significant 25%. That is why it is critical now more than ever to keep up with new developments and the ins and outs of GEO.