The time has come: Your clients’ websites don’t just need to rank higher in search engines anymore. They need to rank higher in Generative Engines, too. And that’s why, beyond Search Engine Optimization (SEO), they now need GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).
When Google first introduced Search Generative Experience (SGE) and began integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into search, many thought this might finally mark the long-discussed “death” of SEO.
But no – LLMs haven’t replaced SEO. Rather, they’ve become a key part of how search engines work.
And in this guide, we’ll give you the action plan for each of the major changes!
What Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?
GEO helps your content stand out to AI models like Gemini, Perplexity, and OpenAI’s GPT, which have changed how search engines process and understand content – for the better.
Yes, GEO is still a relatively new term and not nearly as established as SEO. Some SEOs even question whether we need another acronym. But for now, GEO is the most accurate way to describe optimizing content specifically for AI-powered search experiences.
Instead of just matching keywords or counting backlinks (though these are still important), LLMs use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to get the meaning and context behind a query. This lets search engines deliver responses that aren’t just based on rankings but are generated by AI to be more helpful and intuitive.
For professionals, this means shifting the focus from chasing important keywords to creating content that’s naturally structured and answers the intent behind the query. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you can start offering GEO services to your clients.
How Is GEO Different from SEO?
Where search engines once specialized in indexing and retrieving information (in the form of links) from the web, GEO now focuses on turning the information in those links into relevant, easily consumable answers.
GEO serves results based on how well content matches user intent in a natural, structured way (that’s easy for AI to process).
Yes, keywords are still involved in the process, but context matters more. A study of 405,576 AI Overviews searches by Surfer SEO found that AIOs only mention exact keyword phrases 5.4% of the time.
This tells us that the end goals for GEO – traffic, visibility, sales – are the same as what we’ve been striving for with SEO. Only the strategies are (slightly) changing.
Key GEO Strategies for Agencies to Rank in LLM-Powered Search
Does the rise of AI-driven search engines mean your SEO efforts are useless now?
Not at all. SEO is still very much alive and it should be practiced alongside GEO.
Even though AI overviews have reduced the number of clicks on SERPs, people are still using search results to find what they need. In fact, many GEO strategies (like E-E-A-T) align perfectly with foundational SEO tactics.
Optimizing content for generative engines also means you’ll be better at answering your clients’ questions, which improves their experience on their site. Again, sounds a lot like what SEO was always supposed to be about.
Optimize for Long-Tail and Conversational Queries
AI overviews are more likely to appear for queries with three to four words, compared to shorter one- to two-word queries.
There’s an explanation for that: Long-tail and conversational queries tend to be informational in nature, and AI overviews are triggered by informational search intent 99.2% of the time.
Another thing you’ll notice is that answers in AI overviews are often longer. LLMs excel at understanding natural language and as a result, they analyze the entire question and craft well-structured, clear answers that are helpful to the user.
Here’s a clear example featuring the AI Overview result for the query “What is the best day to book a flight?”
Notice how the overview is a mini-article in itself. Notice also how natural-sounding the answers are (“while Sunday may be statistically better…”).
The more comprehensive, conversational, and well-explained your content is, the better it’ll feed LLMs.
That’s why professionals must shift their content strategy to prioritize long-tail, conversational queries so that their content is structured to answer real user questions directly.
Action Plan
✅ Answer specific questions in a conversational format
Instead of littering articles with exact-match headlines like “The Best Email Marketing Tool 2025,” create content that answers targeted questions like:
- “Which email marketing tools work best for B2B companies?”
- “How do I automate email sequences without sounding robotic?”
Those are real questions real people ask. Sure, important keywords should still be there (best B2B email marketing tools, how to automate email sequences) but now you’re free to add them more loosely!
✅ Use semantic search optimization
LLMs recognize synonyms, related terms, and variations in phrasing. Both LLMs and search engines can tell people looking for the best day to book flights often mean to book them when they’re cheapest.
This is proof that instead of repeating a keyword, you can focus on using different ways to express the same concept to align with how people phrase their questions.
Need more proof? This is the #1 SERP result for the same flight query:
So, if you're optimizing for “best time to book a flight,” also include phrases like “cheapest days to fly,” “when to book flights for the lowest price,” and “best days for flight deals.”
Vital GEO Strategy: Use Structured Data and Entity Markup
Beyond reading and categorizing text, LLMs analyze relationships between entities (key pieces of information like people, places, things, or concepts) to understand the context.
As IBM puts it, the standardized format of structured data makes it simpler for machine learning (ML) algorithms to process.
While ML can work with both structured and unstructured data, structured data is much easier for AI to handle because it’s organized and clearly labeled. It helps them build knowledge graphs, linking different pieces of information to understand how entities are connected.
To sum it up: structure your data!
Action Plan
✅ Implement schema markup to define key entities and content types
The schema you choose depends on the type of content you're working with and how you want search engines and AI models to interact with it.
That said, marking up key sections of your clients’ content – like questions and answers – has become increasingly important. After all, LLMs often pull answers directly from structured Q&A content.
There are different types of schema you should use to mark up your content. For example:
- Article schema: It tells AI that your content is an article, making it easier to show up in news feeds or general searches about a specific topic.
- Product schema: Perfect for eCommerce sites. It highlights product details like price, availability, and reviews, so search engines can pull this information right into search results or rich snippets.
- FAQ schema: It clearly organizes questions and answers within your content, making it more likely to get picked up and featured by AI.
You could tag a question like “When was Pablo Picasso born?” with FAQ schema and provide the answer within the markup, specifying his birth date as October 25, 1881.
Source: Google
Provide In-Depth, Authoritative Content for Generative Engine Optimization
Ever since Google expanded on E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trust) with an extra E (Experience), there’s been a strong focus on original content.
And this concept isn’t new! Back when Brian Dean from Backlinko introduced the Skyscraper Technique, we were already starting to realize the importance of creating valuable, in-depth content that would attract backlinks and boost SERP rankings.
While those strategies were incredibly effective at their time, they now serve a different purpose: they’re essential for making sure both LLMs and traditional search engines understand and prioritize your content.
That said, there's a common misunderstanding here.
Some people think, “Let’s just tell the content team that all articles need to be 5,000-word guides now.”
That’s not the approach, especially if you’re not willing to do the deep work.
Content that stretches information for the sake of hitting a word count is just as low-quality as thin content. LLMs can spot it since they analyze structure, coherence, factual accuracy, and topic relevance, easily distinguishing between useful pieces vs. poorly structured, repetitive, or inaccurate ones.
You can create comprehensive content on the shorter side – IF you strategically link them to supporting content. This is internal linking in action, and it helps both LLMs and crawling bots understand the relationship between different pieces.
Action Plan for Adapting Your Content to GEO
✅ Create pillar content that covers broad topics and supports detailed subtopics
Pillar content is the main guide to a topic, with supporting articles digging into the finer details. For example, a pillar page on “Local SEO Strategies” could link to specific subtopics like:
- How to Optimize Your Google Business Profile
- Local Link-Building Techniques
- How Reviews Impact Local Rankings
Each supporting article explores the subject further while linking back to the pillar content, creating a clear, interconnected structure for LLMs.
✅ Ensure your content is well-researched and backed by authoritative sources
- Cite credible industry sources wherever possible (e.g., Google Scholar, academic research, trusted publications).
- Use data, statistics, and expert quotes to support claims. Remember: AI models are more likely to pull content from credible sources.
SurferSEO did their research and noted that “while it's best if your website is considered credible enough to be cited (by Google’s AI Overviews), linking to other authoritative sources can also help.”
You know what’s even better? When the credible source is you (or your clients). Look into your data and conduct research. Proprietary information will win in our data-driven era.
Integrate Multimedia Content
Some LLMs, known as M-LLMs (Multimodal Large Language Models), can handle images, videos, charts, and even audio.
The newest GPT-4o and Gemini are two examples.
When search engines understand both text and visuals, they prioritize pages with rich, engaging content. Take Visual Question Answering (VQA), for example: when asked about an image, an M-LLM analyzes both the picture and the question to provide a relevant answer.
In a perfect example, Data Iku, “When asked ‘What landmarks are visible in this cityscape?’ an M-LLM might accurately identify and list prominent landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and the Sydney Opera House.”
As these models get better at processing mixed media, adding visuals to content helps AI understand it better. The more comprehensive, varied, and accessible your content is, the more likely it is to appear in AI-driven search.
Action Plan
✅ Include relevant images, videos, and interactive elements in your content.
- Use infographics, charts, and tutorial videos to improve engagement.
- Add step-by-step visuals for complex topics.
For an article on the best keyword research methods, you could include:
- Annotated screenshots showing keyword research tools in action.
- A short explainer video summarizing the process.
- A visual comparison chart of different keyword research methods.
✅ Optimize multimedia content for search
- Add alt text to images to help AI better understand their content.
- Use descriptive filenames (e.g., “best-local-seo-tips.png” instead of a weird “cats123fg” filename)
- Don’t forget to add captions to videos so AI models can extract text-based context from those, too.
Focus on User Experience and Engagement
“SEO and UI/UX are not mutually exclusive; they are interwoven elements that should complement each other,” renowned SEO Strategist Jenn Matthews writes for Search Engine Land.
LLMs also assess how users interact with your content. If they quickly leave, struggle to navigate, or don’t engage at all, AI models interpret this as a sign of low-quality content (even if it is the most informative piece of content produced since the first Michelin guide.)
On the other hand, a fast-loading, well-structured page with clear sections and interactive elements will hold attention and be seen as more valuable.
Action Plan
✅ Improve site speed and mobile responsiveness
- Google now recommends a load time of under 2.5 seconds for a good user experience. To stay on top of this, it's crucial to keep an eye on your clients’ sites’ performance using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights.
- Test mobile-friendliness using tools like SE Ranking’s Mobile Friendly Test to ensure content is readable and navigable on all devices. Here’s a booster for you: mobile traffic accounts for 81% of AI Overview citations.
✅ Make content easy to digest
A 300,000+ keyword study by Ahrefs found that well-structured content gets the most attention in AI Overviews.
If your information is easy to scan, AI can pull out the important stuff with less effort – just like humans can:
- Use bullet points or numbered lists to highlight key points.
- Break up text with headings and subheadings for better flow.
- Keep paragraphs short and add visuals like images or charts to keep things engaging.
- Stick to clear, simple language. AI prefers content that’s easy to understand.
✅ Enhance navigation and UX across the board
- Integrate intuitive menus and clear call-to-actions (CTAs) so users don’t struggle to find information. If they struggle, you know where they’re headed.
- Keep your pages well-designed, uncluttered, and easy to digest.
Learn GEO-Style Rank Tracking
Tracking AI-driven traffic is a bit different from traditional SEO, but tools you already use, like GA4, can help you monitor how your clients’ content is performing in AI-powered search.
Here’s how you can start tracking AI-driven traffic with GA4:
- Make sure you're tracking all your referral sources in GA4, especially traffic from AI tools like chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai, and other AI-powered search referrers.
- Set up custom segments to filter and analyze traffic specifically coming from these AI-driven tools. You can identify traffic from sources that show up in AI Overviews.
- Keep an eye on how referral traffic from AI tools evolves over time. If certain pages are driving traffic from tools like ChatGPT or Bing AI, that’s a sign your content is being pulled into AI-generated responses. Then, compare this traffic with your organic search data to spot any emerging patterns.
- Look at how users coming from these AI tools behave on your site. Are they staying longer or interacting more? This can give you an idea of how well your content is resonating with AI-powered results.
For a change, you can also manually test AI search engines. Run searches using relevant topics to see how often your content, brands, or entities appear in AI-generated responses. This will help you identify where AI might be favoring competitors, so you can adjust (and win).
Burst the Google Bubble – You Should Be Ranking on Bing now, too!
Bing has often taken a backseat in SEO strategies, and we’re all guilty of not caring about it that much. But things have shifted. With OpenAI’s GPT incorporating Bing Search as a major source, Bing's role is just as important as Google’s.
If a page ranks well on Bing, it has a better shot at showing up in AI-generated search results, particularly when users rely on ChatGPT’s web mode.
By the way: Data from Seer Interactive shows that over 87% of SearchGPT’s citations matched the top results from Bing when the same question was asked. Most of these citations were from the top 10 positions, but it’s worth noting that page 2 still plays a role – many citations appeared in positions 11-20.
As for Google, it had a lower 56% match. So, if Bing wasn’t on your radar before, it should be now! Not just because of its search market share, but because it directly affects the AI-driven results you need to optimize for.
Optimizing for Bing Search: A Few Practical Tips
Optimizing for Bing isn’t all that different from Google. Quality backlinks, helpful content, and solid keyword research all still matter. But now, with AI-driven search tools relying on Bing’s search data, giving Bing a little extra attention can pay off. Here are a few things you can do.
Add Bing Webmaster Tools
Just like Google's Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools gives you insights on how your site is performing on Bing. Simply verify your website to start tracking rankings, spotting SEO issues, and getting improvement suggestions. It’s free, quick, and worth your time.
Claim Your Bing Places Listing
Bing often already has your business info listed, so claim it to control how your brand shows up in local results. Go to Bing Places to quickly search for your business. If it’s there, claim and verify the listing. If not, create one in minutes. Verifying your listing (by phone, email, or postcard) protects your business info and helps Bing show your brand accurately in local searches.
Focus on Exact Match Keywords and Domains
Although we talk about keywords being less heavyweight when it comes to GEO, Bing still rewards exact-match domains. A prime example comes from Neil Patel, who noticed this pattern in a random search:
Source
That said, he proceeds by pointing out that you should still use keywords naturally in your content and not just stuff them for the sake of ranking. Needless to say, buying exact-match domains isn’t recommended, either.
GEO Is the Natural Next Step for Your SEO
As you’ve seen, SEO and GEO have a lot of overlap. You don’t need to stop your SEO efforts; instead, you can expand on them and generate more revenue.
Here’s a recap of the best strategies for effectively blending SEO and GEO:
- Create content that works well for both traditional search engines and AI-driven platforms. Focus on high-quality, relevant content that follows best practices like E-E-A-T.
- Do keyword research that covers traditional search terms, long-tail keywords, conversational queries, and contextual phrases that AI can easily understand.
- Make sure your website is technically sound for both SEO and GEO. This includes optimizing for things like page speed and mobile-friendliness, and using structured data so AI can process your content easily.
- Use insights from both SEO and GEO data to refine your approach. Understanding how they work together will make your content SERP and LLM-friendly.
You don’t need to stress about keeping up with every single change in SEO and GEO at all times. These LLMs are constantly being tested and updated in real time, so there’s bound to be something new every day.
Stay updated, consider the original and proprietary value delivered in your content, and you’ll be good.
And with that said, if you’re an agency, don’t wait until you feel "ready" to offer GEO services – because, honestly, you never will. These tools will keep you sharp as you go, and there’s no better time to start than now.
