Let’s be honest: Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) sounds like the kinda buzzword Mike from marketing came up with to justify keeping his job.
But if marketers don’t develop strategies to combat AI’s growing dominance across the information space, it won’t only be Mike who suddenly finds himself with a lot of free time.
GEO is the current best practice for making your content legible to generative AI. Fewer people are clicking through Google to read full blog posts. They’re getting AI summaries instead. If your content isn’t showing up in those summaries, you’re invisible.
GEO is your shot at getting back in that conversation.
Understanding content as pieces
So what’s the fundamental difference between SEO and GEO? Traditional SEO wants traffic. GEO wants visibility inside machine-generated answers. Which means your content needs to work in pieces, not just whole pages.
Here’s how that works in practice. Say you’re writing a piece on retirement planning for men in their 40s who reside in the North of England. Instead of one long-form essay, structure it like a set of modular snippets: a punchy definition, a bullet list of examples, a short “Why it matters” paragraph. Think building blocks, not monoliths. AI loves clean, digestible chunks—and if it can’t find those, it’ll go find someone else’s.
Write, test, rewrite, etc
But, of course, it isn’t enough to optimise our content and cross our fingers that the AI gods smile kindly upon us. There’s much more we can do.
GEO allows you to iterate in real time, writing, testing, rewriting and testing again to ensure that the content you have put online is getting picked up by AI and used in a way that is advantageous to your broader marketing goals.
What information is AI bringing up when we ask about retirement planning for over 40s men in Yorkshire, say? What is it telling us about our competitors? How do we tweak our content to get more of what we want into an AI overview?
These are big questions but the answer to them reveals a lot about the future of content marketing. So let’s hope Mike’s along for the ride.