In 2025, the way people discover and engage with digital content has shifted dramatically. Traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no longer the only strategy that brings people to your website. Meet Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the emerging frontier for content creators and researchers looking to earn visibility through AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity.

If your organization hasn’t begun adapting its content strategy for GEO, now is a great opportunity. Here’s everything you need to know about what GEO is, why it matters, and how to start optimizing for it.

What is GEO and How Is It Different From SEO?

While SEO focuses on improving your visibility on traditional search engine results pages (SERPs) by using keywords, backlinks, and technical performance, GEO is about making your content the answer in AI-generated responses.

Rather than presenting users with a list of links as typically experienced with a Google Search, GEO centers on AI tools that synthesize information. These platforms use large language models (LLMs) to provide direct answers to a range of questions. Instead of competing for a top 10 ranking on Google, you’re aiming to be cited, summarized, or linked to by tools like Gemini or ChatGPT.

In short: SEO gets you found, GEO gets you featured.

Why GEO Matters in 2025

AI tools are no longer sidekicks to Google. They’re central players in how people research, compare options, and make decisions. As of May 2025, ChatGPT alone receives over 4.5 billion monthly visits, while Perplexity processes over 500 million searches per month. Google remains the dominant force in online search, with billions of daily visits from users worldwide. But with the direct integration of Gemini into search results, the way people find information is changing. Users can now get answers without ever clicking through to your website (this is called a “zero-click search result”).

Consequently, if your content isn’t showing up in AI answers, you’re missing out on a massive and growing segment of online visibility. Depending on what your website offers, this can be especially important for brand recognition and perception, traffic and lead potential, as well as establishing authority and credibility. In 2025, AI summaries are the new front page of search.

How GEO Works: What AI Tools Are Looking For

Each generative engine has its quirks, but several patterns are emerging across platforms:

1. Structure Matters More Than Ever

AI tools rely on clear, structured content. Use schema markup generously, particularly FAQPage, Organization, Article, and Product types. Structured data helps AI understand your content contextually, making it easier to reference in generated answers.

Tip: Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper is a great place to start reviewing your schema.

2. E-E-A-T Principles Still Rule

Google’s Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) framework, a core concept for SEO, now extends to AI tools like Gemini. Show credentials, cite data, link to reputable sources, and provide content authored by credible experts.

If you have certifications, awards, partnerships, or original research, feature them clearly. This shows your authority in your area of expertise.

3. Conversation > Keywords

GEO is less about keywords and more about natural language. Write in a conversational tone and frame your content in terms of questions and answers. Think: “What are the best family vacation spots in California?” instead of “California vacation destinations.”

4. Content Freshness is Key

AI platforms (especially Perplexity, which indexes content daily) prioritize content that’s up to date. Refresh evergreen posts annually and use a content calendar to help track when to review content. Be sure to prioritize articles with titles like “Top” or “Best,” as these perform well in answer generation, particularly on ChatGPT.

5. Visuals Are Increasingly Important

Gemini and Perplexity are both investing in multimodal search. Media assets like charts, videos, and well-optimized images can increase the chance of being featured. Also make sure your image alt text, captions, and surrounding content are descriptive.

6. Prioritize Performance & Mobile-Responsiveness 

Don’t ignore performance or the site’s mobile experience. A site that performs well on mobile will load quickly, display clearly on small screens, and typically avoids frustrating interactions (like unclickable buttons or pop-ups). Poor mobile performance (i.e. slow Core Web Vitals) can hurt your rankings, which in turn reduces your visibility to LLMs that rely on search results as part of their input sources.

Tool-Specific GEO Tips

Gemini (Google)

• Optimize for the Search Generative Experience (SGE) with crawlable content and Core Web Vitals in check.
• Use a hub and spoke content model to build topical authority. (This model organizes content around a central “hub” topic page that then links to related and more detailed “spoke” pages). 
• Regularly monitor impressions and click-through rates in Google Search Console. A dip in clicks with high impressions could signal that your content is being used in AI answers.
  

Perplexity

• With an emphasis on factual accuracy, source transparency, and user control over search scope, sources are essential! For your site, focus on citations and factual, digestible content.
• Use Question & Answer formatting to align with Perplexity’s research focus.
• Include multimedia assets and data points that back up your authority on a subject. And don’t just stop at video and images, charts, diagrams and maps are also great sources.
  

ChatGPT

• Embrace the feeling of personalization. With an emphasis on providing personalized recommendations to its users, ChatGPT seeks out phrases on websites like “top” or “best” that give the user the feeling of receiving personalized insights.
• Optimize your About Us page so that it clearly articulates your mission and values. ChatGPT often uses this to evaluate trustworthiness and authority.
• Strengthen your backlink profile to compete with high-authority sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, and news outlets frequently cited by the model.
  

Tracking GEO Performance

A consequence of AI summaries is that websites may see a drop in clicks and visits within their analytics, particularly a decrease in organic traffic month over month. With users getting the answers they need from AI-generated search responses, they may no longer need to visit your website to get information. However, those users who do click through often stay longer and discover more pages than they did previously.  

Additionally, websites may also see an increase in impressions or referrals from AI assistants. This data is increasingly important to track. 

So even if AI tools don’t always send traffic directly, you can still measure their impact. Here’s how:

• Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Segmentation: Create segments by referral source (e.g., chat.openai.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com) to track AI-specific sessions.
• Landing Page Analysis: AI tools often link deep into your site. Use GA4 to monitor which long-tail pages are receiving AI-generated traffic.
• Google Search Console: Identify FAQ-style queries with high impressions but low CTR. These may indicate your content is being summarized in AI answers.
  

Action Items for Digital Teams & Clients

1. Audit your existing content with these optimization strategies in mind. (Tip: You can even use AI tools like Gemini to identify optimization opportunities for particular pages).
2. Update schema across all major content types, especially Q&A and organizational pages.
3. Refresh your high-performing or evergreen content regularly, especially pieces tied to seasons, events, or top lists.
4. Revise your content strategy to include multimedia assets, structured data, and topic clustering.
5. Optimize your About page and author bios to strengthen trust signals for LLMs.
   

Final Thoughts

Optimizing for GEO isn’t just a trend, it’s a fundamental shift in how people find and interact with content online. As AI-generated answers become a dominant part of the discovery experience, your brand’s ability to show up in these spaces could mean the difference between gaining trust or going unnoticed.

By embracing schema, writing conversationally, and refreshing content with purpose, your digital presence can evolve to meet the moment, one where the best answer often wins over the best ranking.

Ready to optimize your content for AI-powered search? Let’s make it happen.

Today I learned about a military term that has come into the culture: VUCA, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. That certainly describes our current times.

All of this VUCA makes me concentrate on what is stable and slow to change. Its easy to get distracted by that which changes quickly and shines in the light. Its harder to be grateful for what changes slowly. Its harder to see what those things might even be. 

In the face of AI and the way it will transform all industries (if not now, very soon), its important to remember what AI can not yet do well. Maybe it will learn how to create a facsimile of these traits in the future as it becomes more “human” (trained on human data with all its flaws might mean it has embedded within it those traits we find undeniably human). However, these skills seem like the ones that can help us navigate the VUCA that is life today.

Be Curious

AI can ask follow-up questions for clarification, but it does not (yet) ask questions for its own curiosity. It asks when it has been directed to do something. It does not sit idle and wonder what the world is like beyond the walls of the chat window.

Humans and high-order animals have curiosity. We seek information and naturally have questions about our world — why is the sky blue? why does the wind blow? why do waves crash onto the shore?

In our operations, Oomph prides itself on Discovery. This is our chance to ask the big questions — why does your business work the way it does? why are those your goals? who is your audience you have vs. the audience you want? 

In life and work, curiosity is one of our best traits. This means trying new tools, changing our processes and habits for improved outcomes, and exploring something new just to see what it can do. Even with all the VUCA in the world, approaching uncertainty with curiosity keeps us open and engaged with what we can learn next.

Use Judgement

Another important human trait is judgement, and this continues to be invaluable as humans are needed to evaluate AI outputs. 

AI is very good at creating dozens, if not hundreds of outputs. In fact, probabilistic (not deterministic) output is the strength and sometimes weakness of AI — you almost never get the same answer twice.

Our human expertise is needed to curate these outputs. We need to discard what is average and unremarkable to find the outputs that are surprising and valuable. We need to use our judgement and experience to find the ideas that are applicable to the client, the project, and the moment. Given the same 100 outputs, the right ones might be a different selection depending on the problem we want to solve and the industry in which it will be applied.

Exude Empathy

In the world of design and creating software for humans, empathy is what drives the decisions we need to make. In the flow of vibe coding, our judgments will drive technical and architectural decisions while empathy drives interface design and product feature decisions. Humans are still the ones who need to find the problems that are worth solving.

The language on the page, the helpfulness of the tooltip, and the order in which the form elements appear are some examples of how empathy drives interactions. Empathy helps team members identify confusion and redundancy. 

Further, until we are designing for AI Agents and robots as our product’s primary users, we are designing for humans. This means we need to continue to ask humans for feedback, monitor human behavior on our sites and in our apps, and understand why they make the decisions they make. All of this continues to make empathy an important human trait to cultivate.

Make Connections

Mike Bechtel, Chief Futurist at Deloitte Consulting, gave a talk at SXSW this year about how the future favors polymaths instead of specialists. His argument boils down to this: AI is a specialist at almost anything but what humans have shown over time is that the greatest inventions and insights come from disparate teams putting their expertise together or individuals making new connections between disciplines. 

Novel ideas are mash-ups of existing ideas more than brand-new ideas that have never been thought of. And these mash-ups come from curious humans who have broad experience, not deep specialization. They are the ones who can identify and bring the specialists together if need be, but most of all, they can make the connections and see the bigger picture to create new approaches. 

Support Culture

No matter how smart AI gets, it doesn’t “read the room.” It doesn’t build relationships between others, react to group dynamics, or pick up on body language. In an ambiguous human way, it does not sense when something “feels off.”

In group settings, humans command culture. AI won’t directly help you build trust with a client. It won’t read the faces in the room or over Zoom and pause for questions. It won’t sense that people are not engaging and reacting, and therefore you need to change a tactic while speaking. AI is interested in the facts and not the feelings.

Broad team culture and the culture that exists between individuals is built and nurtured by the humans within them. AI might help you craft a good sales pitch, internal memo, or provide ice breaker ideas, but in the end, humans deliver it. Mentoring, supporting culture, collaborating, and building trust continue to be human endeavors.

Break Patterns

AI is very good at replicating patterns and what has already been created. AI is very good at using its vast amount of data to emphasize best practices with patterns that are the most prevalent and potentially the most successful. But it won’t necessarily find ways to break existing patterns to create new and disruptive ones. 

Asking great questions (being curious), applying our experience and judgement, and doing it all with empathy for the humans we support leads to creative, pattern-breaking solutions that AI has not seen before. Best practices don’t stay the best forever. Changes in technology and our interface with it create new best practices. 

The easiest answer (the common denominator that AI may reach for) is not always the best solution. There is a time and a place to repeat common patterns for efficiency, but then there are times when we need to create new patterns. Humans will continue to be the ones who can make that judgement.

Be Human

AI will continue to evolve. It may get better at some of the attributes I mention — or at best, it may get better at looking like it has empathy, supports culture, and mashes existing patterns together to create new ones. But for humans, these traits come more naturally. They don’t have to be trained or prompted to use these traits.

Of all these traits, curiosity may be the most important and impactful one. AI has become our answer-engine, making it less necessary to know it all. But we need to continue to be curious, to wonder about “what if?” AI shouldn’t tell us what to ask, but it should support us in asking deeper questions and finding disparate ideas that could create a new approach.

We no longer need to learn everything. All the answers to what is already known can be provided. It is up to humans to continue with curiosity into what we do not yet know.

THE CHALLENGE

OUR APPROACH

THE RESULTS