What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the process of strategically optimizing your website and all your other online content to boost your brand’s visibility in AI-powered engine responses and AI-generated summaries.
Generative engines refer to AI-powered technology that creates new content, like text, images, code or other media formats in response to the user’s input prompt. The generative engines — like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s CoPilot — are trained on massive amounts of data that continues to grow with more user input. The key difference between a generative engine and a traditional search engine like Google is that generative engines create something new as their output rather than simply retrieving existing information like a search engine’s output.
Why Does GEO Matter?
Every big tech player — Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and more — has embraced this new wave of revolutionary AI-powered technology. Virtually every tech-forward company has their own AI-powered tools and features which have forever changed the way people search and access information online. In fact, Gartner predicts traditional search volume will drop by nearly 25% in 2026. Internet users have come to expect a more contextual and conversational approach to online search.
At its core, digital marketing has always been about being seen online and engaging with potential customers regardless of where their online search journey begins. As search behavior becomes more conversational than transactional, keeping up with the latest search tools is no longer an option.
How Is GEO Different from SEO?
GEO and traditional search engine optimization (SEO) have a lot of cross-over but aren’t entirely the same. Both have the same goal of boosting visibility and engagement online with a relevant audience that is actively searching for products and services you offer. They both utilize keyword strategy and prioritize presenting their searchers with high-quality content within a positive user experience. The main difference between GEO and SEO stems from the desired output. Since generative engines have an entirely different output, they require all-new data retrieval and ranking algorithms that we’ve never seen before, which includes:
- Contextualizing Content: While SEO optimizes meta data and keyword-rich content to improve search performance, GEO focuses on contextually-relevant content, enabling AI algorithms to properly crawl your website, summarize content and generate accurate responses.
- Understanding User Intent: GEO uses advanced AI to add context to the query and interpret a user’s intent more accurately, whereas SEO takes a much more exact-keyword match approach to each search query.
- Content Formatting: SEO optimizes content for traditional search results formats, including page titles and meta descriptions. GEO generates new content in a variety of formats.
Building Your SEO + GEO Strategy
With a lot of overlap, GEO and SEO are cornerstones of modern digital marketing in their own right. Traditional SEO best practices are the fundamental groundwork for GEO. Your GEO strategy should work as an extension of your SEO strategy:
Expansive Content Strategy
Both SEO and GEO require extensive keyword research that guides a comprehensive content strategy. Your new content strategy should aim for a balance that pleases both exact-march keyword queries for traditional search engines and long-tail keywords and contextual phrases — which you typically wouldn’t include in your content due to low search volume — that provide more information to conversational queries relevant to AI algorithms.
Content Accessibility
Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT work differently from traditional search engines like Google because they scan your content in real-time, rather than having a library of stored data (i.e. submitting your sitemap to Google). You have to allow AI crawlers access to your content in order to appear in AI search results.
Performance Tracking
In order to understand how your AI search performance is changing, you have to first understand the difference between the key metrics of SEO vs GEO:
- SEO tracks individual pages and keywords rankings along with other key organic search metrics that breakdown how people are finding you online.
- GEO tracks referral traffic from AI engines, along with AI response structure appearances to understand how AI-driven platforms prioritize and display your content.
User Experience Excellence
Both SEO and GEO efforts need to aim for the highest technical performance standards including fully responsive web design, page speed, secure hosting, clean data structure and more.
Off-Page SEO
What will likely change the most about your digital marketing strategy stems from off-page content sources. These new generative engines are not tied to a larger tech conglomerate’s ecosystem, so they pull from a much larger variety of resources. For example, Google will obviously prioritize Google Maps and Google Reviews, and the same goes for Microsoft’s Bing. Understanding how each AI search engine pulls their data from various sources will help you prioritize your off-page content optimization. Some examples of AI search engine sources include:
- Maps: Google will never prioritize Apple Maps over their own Google Map listings, but ChatGPT, Perplexity and others do utilize Apple Maps for their data.
- Reviews: In addition to Google Reviews, ChatGPT and other generative engines will pull from multiple review sources like Yelp and Facebook.
TL;DR: GEO is A New Digital Marketing Cornerstone
As AI search engines grow in popularity, tech-giants like Google have decided to embrace the AI-driven future. Generative Engine Optimization is the new cornerstone to staying dominant in search results as search changes rapidly. GEO should not fully replace traditional SEO; instead, your search engine marketing strategy needs to adapt by blending GEO and SEO together for a cohesive approach to your online presence regardless of how your audience is finding you online.
Ready to take your SEO and content strategy to the next level? Contact Katava Marketing today for expert guidance and strategies tailored to your business goals.
