SEO is changing. With the advent of artificial intelligence, search engines are using the new technology to boost user engagement on their sites without sending visitors directly off to the Web for the answers to their queries.
This is just the latest in the ongoing push to keep searchers on search engine pages rather than on the Web.
With Google and Bing taking the lead in using AI in their existing search engines, a new breed of search engine is emerging—the Generative Engine.
Sites like Perplexity.ai, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot serve up answers to their users in a whole new way.
These tools cite their sources, and that is where Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) comes into play—getting your site listed as a cited source with the hope of gleaning traffic from searchers who want to learn more.
So, What Exactly Is GEO?
Generative Engine Optimization focuses on making content more accessible to AI-powered generative engines.
These generative engines extract information from online content to answer user questions.
The generative engines are powered by large language models (LLMs), which process and understand the web content they scrape to provide meaningful, contextual responses.
Generative engines have four main functions:
- Understanding and processing user questions
- Utilizing user-specific data like preferences and past interactions
- Finding relevant content across their knowledge base
- Combining multiple sources into clear, cohesive answers
With more people getting their information directly from the AI results, your sites must be cited in the answers provided by the Generative Engines.
AI’s use in search is relatively new. AI has only taken a visible hold on the search engine result pages (SERPs) within the last few years, taking valuable real estate from traditional organic search results.
This change completely upends user behavior and how businesses get found online. But it’s happening whether we like it or not. This is where GEO comes in.
So, Is SEO Dead?
Not in the least! SEO is experiencing a pivot point in its history. Optimizers need to think more holistically about how content is written and optimized, and writers need to craft compelling articles that contain information people are looking for. With any luck, the GEs will suck in the content and cite it.
Matt Cutts, the former head of the Google Web Spam team, has always said to write for people rather than for Google. This is more true than ever.
Google and other search engines are good at connecting the dots between entities (people, places, things) related to each other. Links aren’t as important as they once were. Now, I’m not saying to completely stop focusing on getting high-quality links—not at all—but there’s more to the equation.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
Keep writing good content. Develop a content strategy that involves quality content that helps users. Don’t block AI bots from scraping your content, especially if it’s written for them to serve up to searchers.
In the end, this is just the ongoing evolution of search. And we need to either adapt or walk away.
