From SEO to GEO: Adapting For the Era of AI Search
Enviably able SEO consultant. Less able pilot / chef. Undiscovered ‘Jamie Vardy’. Liverpool fan (until next two decade famine begins).
A quote that used to feel like hyperbole. Now, feels like a fair warning, especially if your job involves helping people find things online:
“AI has the potential to be more transformative than electricity or fire.”
– Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google
The way we search is changing. Fast.
In the space of a year, we’ve seen chatbots go mainstream, AI Overviews rolled out across Google, and platforms like TikTok and YouTube becoming the first stop for everything from tutorials to holiday ideas. People are asking more detailed questions. They expect conversational answers. And they’re not always starting with Google.
This isn’t just a shift in algorithms, it’s a shift in behaviour. And for brands, it means rethinking how visibility, trust, and conversion really work.
Welcome to the age of GEO: generative engine optimisation. It’s not just the next version of SEO, it’s the next era of how people search – and how brands show up when they do.
GEO boosts your brand’s visibility in AI-driven search programmes like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. It helps your content show up in AI results for queries linked to your products, services or expertise. As search habits shift, ranking in these responses is crucial – not just to be found, but to connect meaningfully with potential customers. The aim? More traffic, better engagement and loyal fans who keep coming back.
Traditional SEO: Built for clicks and rankings
For years, SEO has been about understanding, and outsmarting, Google’s algorithm. You’d get your technical foundations right, sprinkle in the right keywords, chase a few backlinks, and watch your rankings climb.
If you landed in position one, job done. That position meant traffic. And that traffic meant conversion. Simple, right?
But the system we were optimising for relied on users making a choice – skimming titles, judging snippets, clicking through. You controlled what people saw by controlling your website.
Those days are slipping.
Search that summarises, not just links
Now, search doesn’t just point people to answers. It creates them.
With AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and the rest, users are being served complete, synthesised responses – with or without a click. These systems pull from multiple sources and generate something new. There’s no ten blue links to scroll through. There’s just an answer.
For brands, that means you can’t just think about ranking anymore. You have to think about influence, how your content shapes the answer, even if your link isn’t the one getting clicked.
And it’s not just Google. People are skipping search altogether, going straight to YouTube, TikTok, or AI chatbots to ask their questions. Places where they expect to see or hear the answer, not read it on a blog.
This is the essence of GEO. You’re no longer optimising for a search engine’s crawler, you’re optimising for generative models. The goal isn’t visibility in the traditional sense, it’s being useful enough, trustworthy enough, and clear enough to be included in the answer itself.
What GEO means for brands
Here’s the big shift: it’s not just about SEO anymore. It’s about reputation, clarity, and authority, wherever and however your brand shows up.
That means:
- Being the source, not just in the search results.
- Building brand trust across platforms, not just on your domain.
- Ensuring content is structured and written in a way AI can understand, interpret and reference.
Your product page still matters when someone’s ready to buy – but by then, it might be too late. If they’ve already asked TikTok how to solve their problem or turned to ChatGPT for brand recommendations, you’ve missed the moment that shapes trust. Today’s real opportunity is influencing those early, intent-driven questions – long before a user lands on your site.
We’re not just talking about search engine optimisation anymore, we’re talking about search experience optimisation – what it feels like to encounter your brand across every channel people use to search.
How to adapt your strategy for GEO
A few years ago, ‘optimising’ meant making one page rank for one keyword. That’s not going to cut it anymore.
Here’s what to focus on instead:
- Create structured, user-first content that’s actually helpful, not just written to hit keyword volumes. Schema markup still matters, and not enough brands are using it.
- Strengthen your brand signals with a consistent presence across brand PR, digital PR, social, and expert content. Trust is built across platforms, not just on your site.
- Answer real questions in a tone people can relate to. Think less about ticking Google boxes, more about being the expert people want to hear from.
- Work cross-functionally – SEO doesn’t own GEO. This involves content, PR, brand, social and product teams working together to show up consistently in every format, on every channel.
And for what it’s worth, most brands already have the content they need. They just haven’t optimised it for this new experience. Often it’s about humanising, not rewriting – making things more conversational, more visual, more real.
Connecting the dots
We’re not treating GEO as a bolt-on. It’s built into how we work.
Our approach connects the dots between SEO, content strategy, digital PR and brand PR – helping you earn credibility across the places people (and machines) now go to find answers.
Whether that’s optimising your product pages for Google’s new shopping grids, helping your brand appear in AI Overviews, or building the kind of authority that gets your content cited by large language models, we’re on it.
If your content isn’t showing up in these new answers, you won’t just lose visibility, you’ll lose relevance.
Jump on the change
Search is no longer about just ranking higher, it’s about showing up smarter.
The brands that lead in this new landscape will be the ones who adapt fast – who create content that works for people and platforms, and who understand that visibility now means more than just blue links on Google. GEO is where search is going.
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