GEO is a newer term (and the jury’s still out on whether or not the term itself will stick), yet it’s garnering loads of attention - particularly when talked about with SEO. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of GEO before or have no idea what it entails; we’ll explain everything in this guide while answering the key question: Is it the new SEO for businesses?
GEO Explained
For those who don’t know this already, GEO stands for generative engine optimization.
It shares some similarities with SEO in the sense that visibility is still the main goal. However, the big difference is that GEO looks at AI visibility instead of your visibility within traditional search engines. It’s more to do with structuring your website content so AI systems pick it up and reference your website when users ask questions.
As an example, somebody could ask ChatGPT something and the generative AI will come back with an answer that might quote a specific source. Or, they could ask ChatGPT for recommendations and it will pull a few companies or websites from the internet. GEO ensures that your business/website is one of the ones an AI system talks about.
Why Does GEO Matter?
Generative engine optimization wasn’t spoken about even a few years ago. Over the past 24-36 months we’ve seen massive strides in the AI industry with all kinds of generative AI platforms becoming commonplace. ChatGPT is an obvious one, but you also have:
- Gemini
- Perplexity
- Grok
Moreover, almost every modern smartphone now comes with built-in AI functions that allow users to ask questions on the go. If you’re not set up for generative engine optimization, you’ll miss out on exposure through these search queries.
As these AI systems become more popular, more and more users decide to, well, use them!
The data backs this up, with 5.99% of all searches on desktop browsers coming from LLMs. That may sound like a lot - and it’s nowhere near the market share Google gets - but it’s over double the figure from the same time last year. It shows the increased demand for AI searches and how they’re slowly but surely becoming more and more prominent.
Additionally, there’s the presence of Google’s AI Overview, which puts generative search at the front and center of every Google search. When you conduct a normal Google search, you will sometimes see an AI Overview that gathers information from various sources to provide an answer to your query. It sits above the normal results, meaning companies that get sourced by Google’s AI see more visibility. This is arguably the biggest reason yet to worry about GEO and improve your generative search performance.
You also need to think about demographics and their feelings towards AI. If your business targets consumers in the teenage to 32-year-old market, there’s a much stronger chance that they’ll use AI to search for things. It puts more emphasis on boosting GEO because it’s where you’ll find your target market.
Is Improving GEO The Same As SEO?
You could take in all of the above information and still ask one key question: won’t your SEO strategies improve GEO anyway? That’s a common thought process from many business leaders, but it’s slightly more complicated than you think.
SEO primarily relies on various signals to trigger search engine bots and help them categorize and rank your content. These signals include:
- Relevant keywords
- Backlinks
- Website structure & technical features
It’s much more about creating a user-friendly website than anything else, mixed with some authority building through backlinks and off-site SEO.
With GEO, the focus fully shifts to authority and credibility. People use generative AI to ask questions or receive recommendations for different things. Therefore, AI will do its best to find the best sources of information for the user. This means the websites and businesses they pull from will have amazing content authority and provable credibility.
Improving GEO isn’t completely the same as SEO, though there is an overlap - mainly when it comes to optimizing content. In both cases you need to build authority through content that makes people trust your business. The difference is that SEO still requires additional signals to boost your ranking, while content alone can help you improve GEO.
There are also differences in what type of content works the best. For GEO, it’s more about creating content that answers questions or gives definitions. When paired with a PR campaign to boost credibility, you’re more likely to get singled out by the various generative search engines.
So, no, you can’t rely on a pre-existing SEO strategy to automatically help you become visible in AI searches. Likewise, you can’t use GEO to boost SEO.
Is GEO The New SEO For Businesses?
We posed this question in the beginning, and the short answer is no.
Claiming that GEO is the new SEO would imply that SEO is becoming defunct, but that’s far from the case. Evidence suggests that Google’s market share of global searches is declining, yet it still sits at 90.4%.
That’s…beyond dominant.
Despite the rise in AI searches across various platforms, traditional Google searches still account for the lion’s share of web traffic. It means you can’t afford to throw in the SEO towel just yet - but you absolutely should work on GEO alongside your normal search engine optimization strategy.
As we explained earlier, you can’t afford to neglect GEO because many of your customers or target audience members will use generative search to find things. The presence of AI Overviews in Google adds to this and forces you to try and wrestle your way into these summaries at the top of search engine pages.
GEO is definitely the future, but use it in conjunction with SEO for now.
