SEO to GEO: Optimizing Your Content for AI Search

Today’s customers are turning to AI-powered platforms, like Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, for quick, zero-click access to the information they need. These platforms synthesize information, deliver succinct and targeted answers, and often recommend relevant solutions and vendors, all without requiring users to click through to another website. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, optimizing your content for this new search landscape is critical to ensure your business makes it into the answer box.

Understand how GEO and SEO approaches differ

SEO and GEO are foundationally similar in their intent to connect users with the most relevant and trustworthy information. However, each has a distinct tactical approach to accomplishing this goal.

• SEO focuses on getting users to land on your page, engage, and explore further by leveraging an in-depth narrative, varied keyword use, and strategies to keep users navigating and consuming content.
• GEO aims to surface trusted, valid, and contextually relevant sources by enabling AI platforms to directly lift facts, explanations, and context from online content into AI answers.

While SEO prioritizes keywords and search terms in content, GEO prioritizes concise, answer-first modular blocks (e.g., executive summaries, FAQs, checklists) and clear attribution for easy extraction and citation. This difference means GEO-optimized content must surface core points immediately, typically in the first few sentences or bullet points, so that AI systems find and use the information with no ambiguity.

Optimize your content for AI discoverability

To succeed in GEO, content must now cater to two audiences: people searching for information, and AI platforms. For humans, this means answers appear upfront, with in-depth context and proof blocks organized for skimming. For AI platforms, content must be easy to parse into self-contained snippets that can be quickly understood and shared.

Here are five best practices for optimizing your content for GEO to ensure it becomes a trusted source that AI systems cite and weave into their responses:

1. Shift your focus from keywords to prompts and context.
   • Build a list of goal- or need-based questions that your target customers might use an AI engine to answer (e.g., problem, comparison, implementation).
   • Leverage AI tools to help quickly identify search topics for your brand and competitors.
   • Focus your content optimization efforts on topics where your products and offerings can provide a unique perspective or showcase category expertise.
   • Substantiate your approach by testing prompts and topics on a regular basis in the AI platforms.
2. Lead with an answer, then substantiate it.
   • Start sections with concise answers that clearly address the topic. Aim for a two- to three-sentence paragraph or a three- to five-bullet point executive summary.
   • Follow with deeper context for searches that need to dig into frameworks, steps, or proof points.
   • Keep optimized content on the main page, not buried in accordions or secondary pages.
   • Where applicable, include mini-FAQs or question-and-answer sets that can be consumed as stand-alone content.
3. Demonstrate expertise and consistency.
   • Use consistent nomenclature for company names, products, features, industries, and integrations.
   • Reinforce and cross-link to informational product pages, case studies, and external profiles.
   • Maintain bylines, bios, and last-updated information as AI platforms focus on content perceived to be built by people. Providing clear signals on who, how, and why content was made will help the LLMs determine how to place and rank the content.
   • Build out author or contributor bios to showcase vertical expertise, and highlight industry awards or publications.
4. Make content human-like and credible.
   • Integrate short, quotable blocks with client quotes, stats, or references, especially next to specific claims or perspectives.
   • Cite third-party sources where appropriate to strengthen perceived expertise, especially studies, facts, and numbers.
   • Leverage client voices by featuring short pull quotes and mini case study snapshots.
5. Craft short, reusable snippets.
   • Where applicable, present content in self-contained structured formats, like comparison tables and checklists, that improve readability for both people and AI engines.
   • Break long sections into scannable subheads with self-contained explanations to make them easy for LLMs to find and leverage.
   • Add FAQs and checklists to relevant pages and central hubs. Each question-and-answer set should be able to stand alone and be copy-paste friendly.

Implement best practices that benefit both GEO and SEO

While GEO has specific ways that it needs to be optimized, there are a few routes of optimization that will benefit both GEO and SEO efforts. While the way each type of search leverages content differs, GEO and SEO share foundational best practices that support higher rankings and answer visibility in any search experience.

• Quality and relevance: Both depend on trustworthy, people-first content that focuses on user search intent and delivers clear value.
• Crawlability and structure: Maintaining clean HTML, accessible headings, and logical organization, are important for both search and AI engines.
• Structured data: Optimized schema markup (e.g., FAQ, review, product, article) makes information machine-readable and easily extractable.
• Authority building: Reputable backlinks, citations, and mentions of vertical expertise benefit both SEO ranking and AI inclusion.
• Skimmable formatting: Headings, sub-headings, bullet points, and short paragraphs support easy navigation and the ability to create snippets of information.

Get started

GEO is modern SEO amplified by answer-readiness. It maintains the quality and authority standards of SEO while updating structures so that AI systems can easily cite your expertise. Aligning content layouts with AI expectations while maintaining SEO fundamentals helps your brand gain visibility in the answers your buyers actually read, regardless of the search platform.

If you’re ready to future-proof visibility across both SERPs and synthesized answers, we can help you keep your traditional SEO healthy while upgrading and optimizing your content for AI selection.

Contact us to start the conversation.

This article is part of a CMD series on staying competitive in the age of AI engines and LLM search.