What Is GEO? The Future of Search Optimisation

Search engine optimisation has been one of the most important aspects of digital marketing for a business. If a user can’t find your business through Google or Bing, it is unlikely they will ever find your business. That being said, something new is arriving, and that is Generative Engine Optimisation.

Why Is GEO Trending?

Search behaviour is rapidly changing, although it has gone through this phase previously. A user will more than likely search with a question rather than a keyword. GEO will then provide users with those answers. The generative AI systems will find this information from multiple sources before displaying it in a summary. If the content isn’t structured on a website, doesn’t have authority, and cannot be crawled by a search engine, it will likely never appear in the answers, despite the site ranking well for the related searches.

How Does GEO Differ From Traditional SEO

SEO’s primary focus is on optimising web pages so they can be crawled and indexed, which in turn, gets them ranking on Google and other search platforms. Compare this to GEO, which focuses more on knowledge representation and content clarity. The key differences are as follows;

• From keywords to concepts: GEO will emphasise topic authority, semantic relations and intent alignment over exact-match keywords.
• From pages to entities: AI will identify a brand, person, product, and idea as an entity. GEO ensures that these are clearly defined and consistently represented.
• From rankings to citation: In generative answers, content may not be linked directly; however, it can influence the response.

The Core Principals

To succeed in GEO, there are a number of things that you need to consider. This includes;

• Write for clarity and precision – AI models prefer content that is well-structured, unambiguous and easy to summarise. To do this, you will need the correct heading structure, concise explanations, and a logical flow to improve the chances of being mentioned.
• Demonstrate authority and expertise – this means to publish original content that has credible data and expert insights from qualified individuals. If your content is trustworthy, this will feature more in AI responses.
• Use structured data and schema – This is to make it clear what your content displays to search engines. That can be anything from a product, organisation, review or even tutorials.
• Maintain consistency across each platform – Brand descriptions, offerings and messaging should be aligned across the website, social profiles, press coverage, and knowledge bases to reinforce the entity’s identity.

Measuring Success in a GEO World

Measuring GEO is very different to SEO. It wouldn’t be rankings, organic session increases, and conversions also improving. This would be calculated through the frequency of brand mentions in AI-generated responses, accuracy of how your brand, product, or expertise is described. Additionally, you’d look at the share of your brand compared to competitors and finally, the referral traffic received from AI interfaces.

A lot of GEO platforms don’t provide the data for this yet, so audits will need to be completed with external and third-party tools.

Final Opinions

When it comes to GEO and integrating it into your business, there is a lot to take into account; however, it is still relatively new to the industry. The advantage of adapting earlier is that you are prepared for when GEO becomes more valuable to a business.

It’s important to understand that GEO won’t be replacing SEO; it’s only improving it. As AI-powered search becomes the default, yet this is quite far away currently. This is because when you search terms such as “Parking in Central London”, the AI overview doesn’t display the car parks that are available, which isn’t useful for a user who wants a car park. So like we said, it is very far away from what we want currently; however, there is still time yet for it to improve and understand what the user is searching for.