What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and Why Does it Matter?

Most people have heard of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – the practice of making your website easy for search engines like Google to find and understand. But as AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity start to change the way people search for information, SEO is evolving into something new: Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).

GEO is the next step beyond traditional SEO, but it’s important to stress that the fundamentals are still the same. Essentially, it’s all about ensuring that your website and broader brand appear when people are searching for information and products that are relevant to your business – no matter where they’re searching for it, be that Google or ChatGPT. While SEO focuses on ranking your website in traditional search results, GEO is about ensuring AI-driven tools can understand and interpret your content as well, so that they can use it to answer relevant questions and create responses. This shift means that optimising your content and website to rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs) isn’t enough anymore. Content needs to be discoverable and useful to AI systems as well as traditional search engine algorithms.

In this blog, we’ll break down what GEO is, why it’s becoming essential for digital marketing, and how brands can adapt to this new chapter in AI-driven search.

What is GEO?

GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, is the practice of optimising digital content so it can be discovered and used by AI tools when generating answers or responses. Effective GEO positions your brand, services and products within AI-generated results in engines like Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews. This marks a huge change for the work of SEO and digital PR professionals who have long worked to create content for brands in order to show up in traditional search engine results.

TechCrunch reported that ChatGPT has over 800 million active weekly users (as of March 2025). This signifies a massive opportunity for brands, because if you can optimise content for GEO, you can potentially reach millions of existing and new customers.

AI engines work by interpreting, summarising and combining information from multiple sources, to generate a concise response for the searcher. This means your content must be understandable, trustworthy and retrievable.

Some more old school SEO tactics like keyword stuffing or mass link building (e.g. by buying links) won’t help you here – but to be fair, they haven’t really worked in SEO strategies for ages anyway. Brands, marketers and PRs must instead work to produce content to really answer the questions of the searcher. Prioritising this may just help your brand to show up in those all important AI overviews.

The main principles informing GEO are:

Clarity: Any written content should be clear and use things like structured headings, which can make it easier for LLMs (Large Language Models) to understand and interpret accurately. Jargon-heavy writing will not help you here. Keep it simple!
Credibility: AI models are trained to use content from authoritative and verified sources. So, make sure to source any data and use named experts within your PR content in order to establish authority and credibility.
Consistency: A consistent brand message, named expert and sourced data builds trust and authority, which makes it more likely that AI models will use your content within information overviews.

There are lots of benefits for businesses and brands adapting to GEO, including:

Future-proof strategy: Traditional SEO and digital PR are evolving, and with AI search results dominating, it’s important to adapt and understand new practices in order to implement a future-proof and long-term strategy.
Brand authority: If AI models are consistently featuring you in overviews and answers, users will perceive your brand as an expert source, which improves brand authority and drives awareness.
Increased product placement: Aligning with AI-generated search can help you get your brand and products in front of new customers. Now, when people search for products, AI tools are linking straight through to brand websites and product pages, which is changing the way shoppers are making purchasing decisions.
Higher value content: Optimising your content for GEO means using better sources and data, which can improve both your AI citations and your traditional SEO efforts.
Be ahead of competitors: Early adaption to GEO gives your brand a competitive advantage.

GEO vs SEO

For so long, SEO has helped businesses climb Google rankings in the fight to page one. It has also driven traffic to websites and helped to convert clicks into customers for countless brands. But, as generative AI redefines the way we use search, we must adapt.

SEO is all about making your content visible to search engines like Google or Bing. These search engines trawl pages based on a series of signals like keywords, backlinks, metadata, mobile performance and user engagement. On the other hand, GEO focuses on generative engines. GEO is all about making your content understandable, trustworthy and retrievable by generative search engines that consolidate answers instead of listing links to other websites.

GEO understands how AI-driven platforms prioritise and display your content through tracking referral traffic from AI engines and cited sources. The question is no longer ‘can I rank first for that?’ but rather ‘can my content be used in the AI’s answer?’. So, you need to start thinking about creating content that's well-structured, factual and context-rich. It needs to be the kind of material that an AI model can easily quote or reference to support its answers.

It’s important to remember that SEO and GEO aren’t competing against each other, but are actually working in tandem to work for your digital strategy. SEO ensures your site is technically discoverable, but GEO ensures your site is discoverable by AI systems specifically. Together, they work towards the future of search, serving all algorithms and working to provide as much visibility as possible.

How can GEO performance be improved?

To start seeing these benefits for your own business, it’s time to make your digital strategy more GEO-friendly – and one of the most effective ways to do that is through digital PR.

We’ve already established that to perform well in AI answers, you need to make sure your brand is visible in the right places across the web. The more helpful, accurate, and widely referenced your content is, the more likely AI tools are to surface and cite your brand. Digital PR can help create and disseminate that content.

Here are a few tips to create GEO-friendly digital PR content:

Ideation

In the beginning stages of any campaign, competitor research is essential to help you understand how other companies in your industry are showing up to customers. Having a good understanding of your competitor’s activity can give you that edge. Identify the businesses that are being featured in AI search responses for some of your brand’s top queries and analyse their strategies, as well as any weaknesses.

Another step towards better GEO performance is through keyword research. Although traditionally associated with SEO strategy, you can find and identify keywords specifically relevant to generative AI queries. The focus here should be on conversational language and questions, through which you can directly address user intent and make your content friendly for LLMs which are looking for concise, straightforward information.

Content creation

When it comes to creating the content for your campaign, focus on your expertise. One of the most impactful ways to raise brand awareness and increase authority is through expert commentary and press releases. Within these, focus on user intent. What are people searching for related to your brand or product? What questions can you clearly answer to make the lives of your audience easier?

Generative search engines favour natural language over keywords. Keep this in mind when writing any copy for your outreach.

Expert comments also build trust and awareness signals which tells new and existing customers that your brand is an industry leader with real expertise.

Digital PR can directly impact generative search results when executed strategically. There are several effective ways to leverage expert commentary:

Incorporate expert quotes in press releases. Include a quoted spokesperson and link back to your “Meet the Experts” page or their LinkedIn profile to demonstrate authority and credibility.
Capitalise on reactive PR opportunities. Use services such as Synapse and ResponseSource to identify journalist requests for expert comments within your niche and respond promptly.
Proactively engage with relevant journalists. Reach out to offer expert insights or commentary that complement their ongoing stories. Clearly outline your area of expertise and how your input can add value to their coverage.

It’s worth reading our previous blog, where we went into more detail about how to position yourself as an industry expert and thought leader.

Outreach to journalists

When it comes to outreach, maximise your ability to influence generative results by targeting high authority, relevant news sites and journalists. Landing your expert comment or press release in a load of low authority, irrelevant blogs and news sites won’t help you here.

If you currently work in digital PR or marketing and have been stuck in link-building mode, now's the time to reframe your point of view when it comes to what PR success looks like.

One of Ahref’s top takeaways from a study into factors that correlate with brand appearance in AI overviews was that branded web mentions played the most important part. This aligns with what we are seeing across the industry – less of a focus on the link numbers and more on the credibility, relevance and authority of those links and brand mentions.

It’s also important to remember your SEO and GEO strategy must be aligned. You can combine your efforts through creating a unified content strategy. Through this, you can ensure all content follows guidelines for both SEO and GEO and is rich in context, sources, relevance and a few keywords for your brand. In order to meet the needs of both GEO and SEO you should also keep your website technically sound.

Key takeaways

GEO is not replacing SEO, it's just evolving. As reliance on AI-powered tools reshape how people search, traditional SEO tactics are no longer enough to boost brand visibility. GEO focuses on content that is understandable and trustworthy. When aligned with SEO tactics, GEO can help bring maximum visibility to your brand.
Focus on authority, clarity and consistency. Above all else, generative engines favour authenticity and natural, concise language. When drafting content for PR and marketing, clarity is key.
Aligning SEO and GEO is key. It’s important to remember that SEO and GEO aren’t competing against each other. The most successful campaigns have clear alignment of strategies and maximise visibility across traditional search and emerging AI engines.

At Motive PR, we have been working hard to produce our AI guide, a free manual all about the impact of AI overviews on search behaviour. To get your own copy of our guide, drop us an email at hello@motivepr.com.

To understand more about how we can help your brand’s GEO, please get in touch.