What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
If you work in digital marketing at all, then your feed is full of artificial intelligence and ways to get your brand featured in responses drafted by AI. In short, everyone is asking what generative engine optimization (GEO) is and how they can use it to rank in AI overviews.
Our team at MorganMyers has gone from an SEO agency to a GEO and SEO agency, using both approaches as a way to strengthen our clients’ appearance online and ensure the right content reaches the right audiences. Here’s what we deploy when we focus on generative AI in marketing and communications work.
What is Generative Engine Optimization?
Generative engine optimization is structuring all of your content, including your website, social media and your organic PR, to ensure it is easily read, understood and incorporated by AI search tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. GEO is another way of saying generative engine SEO, or the tools, approaches and structures that make your content easy to read by an AI. It’s become increasingly important as consumers and audiences start to shift their search preferences from the standard “10 blue links” approach pioneered by Google to summaries and comparisons in AI overviews that provide contextually relevant information without having to review several sites at once.
The adoption of AI is coming quickly with over 60% of U.S. adults using AI for search at least part of the time. That number increases to 74% of those under 30, meaning your audiences on the younger side are already used to the idea of content coming in an interactive paragraph rather than a scrollable page.
GEO By Any Other Name
GEO is one way to talk about generative AI for marketing, but there are many other terms emerging that go more in depth on specific aspects of ranking in AI search. If you’ve ever asked yourself, “What are all of these AI terms and definitions?,” then this is the list for you.
| AI Term | Acronym | Definition |
| Generative Engine Optimization | GEO | Structuring your brand content to ensure it is easily read, understood and incorporated by AI search tools. |
| Artificial Intelligence Optimization | AIO | Using AI to benefit workflows. This could involve using an AI tool to locate keywords or personalizing your content for your audience with an AI writing partner. |
| Answer Engine Optimization | AEO | Ensuring your content shows up in answers from AI search, specifically in conversational questions with multiple interactions. |
| Search Experience Optimization | SXO | A term common in SEO that has become important to GEO. SXO describes the way you want users to feel when they use your website. This is important as AI responses adjust based on user preferences. |
| Search Generative Experience | SGE | A term popularized by Google before the rise of AI Overviews. Generally refers to the AI summaries appearing on the same page as traditional search results. |
| Large Language Model Optimization | LLMO | Similar to GEO but covers technical approaches that can change how a large language model views your brand. Can include fine-tuning, growing authority and text sequencing. |
SEO vs. GEO
With all this discussion around how to rank in AI overviews, search generative optimization and the AI trend of the week (multi-modal search results anyone?), it can be easy to prioritize GEO over SEO, or treat them as one and the same when developing your content strategy. Instead, the best approach is to treat each as important and able to reinforce the other. SEO remains the ground floor for any brand to get noticed online and having a proper approach to keywords, search ranking, long-tail keywords and other topics remains a key part of our work with brands such as Post Consumer Brands™. GEO expands on this work to focus on the relationships, concepts and structures established by a strong SEO strategy in a way that makes it easy for an AI search engine or a human to understand everything from your products to how you rank above your competitors. In other words, content marketing, for a human audience and an AI audience. We’re seeing a real comeback for content marketing as a way to build brand authority and expertise in specific industries. This time around the toolsets and strategies underpinning content marketing are changing, and the opportunities to reinforce your brand’s position across all digital touchpoints with your audience is growing. What worked before has value, but it needs to be paired with the new ideas powering AI based discovery.
We incorporate SEO and GEO at the same time — designing our client websites with a question/answer format easy for AI to understand and informing those questions with keyword research from our SEO specialists. In many cases, our clients cover a niche area, meaning that traditional keyword search still reigns supreme. When that occurs, we change up our tactics, prioritizing SEO but preparing client webpages and social for GEO as tools like ChatGPT become better and better at understanding niche industries.
We believe it’s important to start with definitions, so questions like “What is generative engine optimization?” can be answered early and clearly. Once you have that knowledge, you can go more in depth on how GEO can be used in your organization, including ways social media shows up in AI overviews to how your brand is defined not only by what you produce at a corporate level, but also by the thought leadership pieces and employee testimonials that AI tools review each time someone searches for your organization. It’s a new frontier — one where the digital presence of your organization will rise and fall based on not only the keywords you use, but the way AI tools read and understand every single piece of digital content that you produce.
If you’re interested in taking the next step on GEO, reach out to our team today.
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