SEO+

Answer engines powered by large language models are reshaping how buyers discover brands, but the path to visibility still runs through strong technical foundations, human-centered content, and relentless testing. If you get your site crawl-ready, structure content for both humans and machines, and measure where AI-driven referrals are already coming from, you’ll be ahead of competitors who are still guessing. Recommit to technical fundamentals: schema, titles, descriptions, clean crawl paths, and LLM-aware files like llm.txt. Shift from keyword stuffing to answer creation: FAQs, summaries, and intent-driven content beat volume for GEO (generative / answer engine optimization). Mine your own data: use Google Search Console and Analytics to see real questions and AI referral sources, then build content around them. Structure every article: executive summary, core content, and targeted FAQs to make your pages easy for both users and models to parse. Turn AI into a draft assistant, not an autopilot; always have a human editor guard the brand voice and remove “written for machines” tone. Treat LLMs as a new channel, not a replacement: SEO best practices are still the entry ticket to being cited by answer engines. Experiment, review, refine: launch, monitor behavior and conversions, then double down on what actually drives qualified traffic. The GEO Readiness Loop: A 6-Step Playbook for AI-Driven Visibility Fortify the Technical Spine Before you think about GEO, fix what’s broken under the hood. Clean up crawl errors, ensure fast load times, implement schema markup, and provide titles and meta descriptions that clearly communicate each page’s content. LLMs still rely on structured, machine-readable signals to understand and surface your content. Make Every Page Answer a Real Question Use Google’s “People Also Ask,” your Search Console queries, and on-site search data to identify the questions your ideal customer actually types. Build pages and sections that respond directly, in natural language, with depth and clarity. GEO rewards brands that become the best answer, not just the best-optimized keyword cluster. Structure Content for Humans First, Machines Second For each key topic, use a simple pattern: an executive summary at the top, the whole narrative body, and a short FAQ section at the bottom. This makes it easier for visitors to skim, for search engines to understand topical focus, and for answer engines to extract concise, quotable responses. Deploy AI as a Drafting Partner, Not a Replacement Leverage tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to brainstorm outlines, generate first drafts, and rephrase complex explanations. Then pass everything through a human editor who understands your brand voice, audience nuance, and subject matter. The goal is content that reads as if it came from a practitioner, not from a template. Instrument, Observe, and Attribute AI Referrals Set up your analytics to surface answer engine referrals—watch for sources like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others in your referral reports. Combine that with behavior metrics (time on page, scroll depth, conversions) to understand which topics and formats are already winning AI citations and traffic. Iterate Based on What the Market Confirms Once your foundations and structures are in place, test variations: new FAQ sets, city- or service-specific pages, and different calls to action. Invest advertising or promotion behind the pieces that convert, retire what doesn’t move the needle, and let data—not hype—drive your GEO roadmap. From Classic SEO to GEO: What Really Changes and What Stays Dimension Classic SEO Focus GEO / Answer Engine Focus Leadership Takeaway Core Objective Rank individual pages for specific keywords in traditional search results. Be cited as a trusted answer source within AI-generated responses. Stop optimizing only for positions; optimize to become “the definitive answer.” Content Strategy Keyword-targeted blog posts and landing pages with on-page optimization. Question-led, intent-driven content with summaries and structured FAQs. Direct teams to start with buyer questions and discovery journeys, not just keywords. Technical Signals Robots.txt, XML sitemaps, meta tags, and basic schema markup. All SEO fundamentals plus explicit markup, FAQ structures, and LLM-aware files (e.g., llm.txt). Fund technical SEO as a prerequisite to any AI visibility initiative, not a side project. Leadership-Level Insights: Turning AI Search into a Strategic Advantage How should marketing leaders think about GEO without chasing the latest acronym? Treat GEO as an extension of disciplined SEO, not a replacement for it. The same fundamentals—clean architecture, relevant content, clear signals—still rule, but the bar for authority and clarity is higher. Your mandate is to make your brand the best possible source when a model is trying to answer a nuanced buyer question. That means focusing resources on authoritative, question-driven content and rigorous technical hygiene rather than scattering budget across trendy tools. What’s the most practical first move for a CMO who hasn’t “optimized for LLMs” yet? Start with an audit that connects three views of your presence: a technical crawl, your Search Console queries, and your current AI referrals. This triangulation shows whether your site is easy to understand, what people actually ask to find you, and where AI tools are already pointing to your content. From there, pick one or two priority journeys—for example, a high-value service or product—and rebuild those pages with summaries, clear headings, and targeted FAQs. Where does authenticity show up when AI can write endless content? Authenticity shows up in specifics: real examples, original viewpoints, and language that sounds like a human who has done the work, not a generic explainer. AI can help you produce more, but leadership must enforce a standard that everything published reflects lived experience, explicit opinions, and useful detail. That often means pairing AI-generated scaffolding with subject-matter experts who add nuance and stories that models can’t fabricate from thin air. How can teams avoid over-indexing on tools and under-investing in strategy? Set a simple rule: every AI tool evaluation must start with a documented use case tied to a measurable outcome—faster production, better conversion, more profound insights. Then cap the number of core tools your team can use and standardize workflows around them. The goal is to create leverage, not noise. When you pair a limited, well-chosen stack with explicit content

AI search and agents aren’t a side channel anymore—they’re reshaping how content is discovered, interpreted, and acted on. The leaders will be the ones who retool their content, measurement, and technical infrastructure for bots first, humans second, without abandoning fundamentals. Reframe blog content goals: influence AI answers and agents, not just drive sessions and pageviews. Structure every article for machine comprehension—clean HTML, clear headings, TOCs, FAQs, and hyper-specific scenarios. Invest in visibility to AI crawlers with log analysis or tools like Dark Visitors, plus disciplined robots.txt governance. Continuously update your content library; “fresh” now means 3–6 months, not 3–6 years. Return to qualitative research—customer interviews, reviews, and forums—to fuel particular, ICP-aligned topics. Accept imperfect attribution; watch direct traffic and conversions as leading indicators of AI-driven discovery. For e-commerce, monitor early “agentic commerce” moves from major retailers before overbuilding your own stack. The GEO Loop: A 6-Step System for AI-Ready SEO Recalibrate Your Goal From Traffic to Influence For two decades, the mental model was simple: publish a strong blog post, rank, earn traffic. AI answer engines fracture that equation. Your content now has to succeed even when it never generates a visit. The new goal is influence—shaping how large language models and agents respond—so leadership teams must stop judging content performance only by sessions and clicks. Architect Content for Bots First, Humans as Validators LLMs parse structure, signals, and specificity. That means disciplined use of headings, scannable sections, tables of contents, and embedded FAQs. Humans will still land on your pages, but increasingly to verify sensitive topics such as finance and medicine. Design the top of the page to answer what a human wants to confirm, and the deeper sections to give bots the nuance they need to learn. Go Hyper-Specific Around Real People and Real Context Prompts are personal: “I’m a parent of three kids under ten, traveling in August with a tight budget.” Content must mirror that specificity. Instead of broad, generic posts, create tightly focused articles that speak to narrow scenarios, personas, and constraints. These pieces may never be “big” traffic winners, but they are disproportionately powerful training signals for AI systems. Re-Engineer Your Legacy Library for AI Crawlers Your back catalog is either invisible to AI or quietly training it against you. Systematically refresh high-value articles: sharpen structure, add scenario-driven sections, and update examples or data. Frequent, meaningful updates increase the odds that AI crawlers revisit and incorporate your content, especially now that “old” can mean anything not touched in 3–6 months. Instrument for AI Discovery and Access Control You can’t optimize what you can’t see. Implement monitoring—via log files or tools like Dark Visitors—to identify which AI bots and agents hit your site and which URLs they favor or ignore. Use that visibility to refine robots.txt, disallow low-value or sensitive sections, and gently steer crawlers toward the content that best represents your expertise and offers. Embrace Imperfect Attribution and Lead With Judgment We’ve been trained to live and die by dashboards. AI breaks that comfort. Direct traffic and direct conversions are trending up across many sites; a non-trivial portion is likely AI-influenced yet unattributed. Executives must relearn how to make informed bets by combining directional data, trend watching, and qualitative signals, rather than waiting for pixel-perfect attribution that may never arrive. SEO vs GEO vs Agentic Commerce: What Actually Changes? Discipline Primary Objective Core Tactics Key Leadership Question Traditional SEO Earn rankings and organic traffic from search engines. Keyword targeting, on-page optimization, backlinks, technical crawlability, and site speed. “How do we grow qualified organic sessions and conversions from Google and other engines?” GEO / AEO (Generative/Answer Engine Optimization) Influence AI-generated answers and recommendations. Structured content, hyper-specific scenarios, FAQs, frequent updates, and AI-bot accessibility. “How do we become the source AI systems rely on when our ICP asks complex, contextual questions?” Agentic Commerce Enable AI agents to research, compare, and transact on behalf of users. Machine-readable product data, protocols such as emerging agentic commerce standards, robust APIs, and inventory and pricing clarity. “When an agent shops for our ideal customer, what data does it see, and can it complete the purchase without a human?” Leadership Insights: Hard Questions for an AI-Search Future How should our content strategy shift if the majority of our best articles never generate visible traffic? Answer: You have to decouple “value” from “visits.” Define a portion of your editorial calendar explicitly for AI influence—pieces aimed at answering nuanced, ICP-specific scenarios that are unlikely to rank broadly but are highly likely to be surfaced in AI responses. Success metrics shift from sessions to downstream indicators: lifts in direct traffic conversions, higher close rates from prospects who “came in informed,” and qualitative feedback from sales about prospect knowledge and terminology. What does it practically mean to “write for bots first” without degrading human experience? Answer: It means treating structure as a first-class strategic asset. Start with a clear outline mapped to intent clusters and real prompts, enforce semantic headings (H1–H3), build a table of contents that reflects how someone might query an AI, and embed concise FAQ blocks written in natural question form. Then layer in human-friendly narrative, examples, and stories. The page reads well to a person, yet is immediately digestible to crawlers and models. Where should we start if our blog is already hundreds of posts deep and mostly generic? Answer: Don’t try to boil the ocean. Audit your top 20–40 URLs by revenue influence, not by raw traffic. For each, ask: Does this reflect our current ICP, our current offers, and the specific situations people actually face? Then prioritize a wave of updates: sharpen the focus on one persona per article, add scenario-driven sections, improve internal linking, and ensure technical cleanliness. You’ll get more AI leverage from 30 sharp, current pieces than from 300 aging, vague ones. How can we bring qualitative research back without slowing the team down? Answer: Make it a lightweight, recurring habit instead of a giant “research project.” Have marketing, sales, or success conduct three to

When we think about the next big leap in digital marketing, it’s always fascinating to consider how emerging trends and technologies will change our approach. Today, we’re focusing on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which represents the cutting edge of SEO as we know it. This concept stems from conversations with industry experts who have spent decades perfecting their craft and adapting to new methodologies. GEO is essentially the next iteration of SEO, and it builds extensively on the principles we’ve practiced for years, adding layers of artificial intelligence and machine learning to the mix. But how do we make our content more accessible and recommendable by AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and other large language models (LLMs)? Let’s break it down. The Foundation and Next Steps First off, the fundamentals of modern SEO remain crucial. Keywords, long-tail keywords, latent semantic indexing (LSI), relevant content, interlinking, and social signals still form the bedrock of an effective SEO strategy. Even with the rise of AI, these elements ensure that your website is discoverable, engaging, and authoritative. GEO, however, takes things a step further. While traditional SEO helps search engines index and rank your website, GEO optimizes it for AI-driven models. It’s about making your content not just searchable but also ‘understandable’ by sophisticated AI algorithms. AI pulls vast amounts of information from the web and seeks to deliver the best possible user experience by mimicking human thought processes. Human oversight remains crucial to ensure that the information presented is accurate and reliable. Key Components for Adapting to GEO To adapt to GEO, several key SEO components need to be fine-tuned: Authority and Authenticity: Content needs to be well-cited and authoritative. AI models prioritize information that is not just correct but also extensively verified. Adding author bios, citing sources, and linking to authoritative sites help in this respect. Structured Data and Schema Markup: Schema markup remains vital. Whether it’s author tags, menu schemas, or product information, structured data helps search engines understand your site contextually and offers richer search results. User Engagement: Engagement metrics such as dwell time and bounce rates are critical. AI models evaluate how users interact with your site and prioritize sites that keep users engaged. Multimedia elements like infographics and videos can substantially enhance user engagement. Linking practices also require attention. External links should direct to high-authority domains like Wikipedia or industry-specific authoritative sources. This adds credibility to your content, crucial for AI-driven engines. Interlinking your own content to create clusters is another effective strategy. This practice helps organize your content thematically, immensely beneficial for any AI model trying to understand your site’s focus and depth. Enhancing User Experience and Content Quality User experience design plays a crucial role in GEO. Websites must be user-friendly, visually appealing, and easy to navigate. Page load speed, mobile responsiveness, and intuitive design are critical factors contributing to an excellent user experience. AI models prioritize websites that offer seamless experiences to users, making UX design an integral part of your GEO strategy. High-quality content that addresses the needs and queries of users will always be a priority. It’s essential to produce content that is not only informative but also engaging and relevant. Long-form content, detailed guides, and well-researched articles tend to perform better, especially when optimized for GEO. Consistently updating your content to reflect the latest information and trends is also key to maintaining its relevance. Social signals, such as likes, shares, comments, and mentions, can significantly impact your website’s authority and visibility. Building a strong brand presence on social media platforms and encouraging user interaction can indirectly enhance your GEO efforts. Authentic engagement with your audience on social media can lead to increased traffic and brand recognition, which are important factors for AI models when ranking content. Staying Ahead with Monitoring and Adaptation Staying on top of GEO means continually educating yourself and adapting to changes. Follow trusted sources like Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, or Search Engine Roundtable for the latest updates and trends. Testing different AI tools and understanding their nuances also help you stay ahead. Different tools like Gemini and Google Bard, especially for mobile searches, offer unique insights compared to desktop-based searches. Testing various AI tools and understanding their differences can provide a comprehensive view of GEO. In conclusion, while the basics of SEO are essential, the future lies in adapting to Generative Engine Optimization. It’s not merely about ranking higher but making your content more relevant, authoritative, and engaging for both users and AI models alike. Understanding what GEO is doing, where it’s coming from, and how it impacts your industry is crucial. Thank you to Chad Calimpong for his invaluable contributions to this blog post. His insights help us all pave the way forward in the fascinating world of GEO. Watch the Marketing in the Age of AI Podcast Featuring Chad Calimpong: youtu.be/GxtD8v4x6Q0