It’s not enough for your website to have great SEO anymore. With the explosion in popularity of AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini, marketers and businesses alike now need to focus on a new way to optimize their content: GEO, or generative engine optimization.
What is GEO? And how can you position your website for success in this fast-changing search environment? Let’s take a closer look.
What is GEO?
Generative engine optimization is essentially an evolved form of search engine optimization (SEO), just modified for generative AI platforms. GEO focuses on optimizing the content and structure of your site so that it’s more easily found and cited by AI platforms. This improves the visibility of your site and helps you reach audiences more directly.
So, what can you do to boost your GEO? Here are three ideas that you can implement right away.
Create, unique valuable content
People are using AI platforms to hone and refine their search results—even more so than traditional Google Search—so you can give your website a leg up by providing in-depth, specific content that can’t be found elsewhere online. Focus on things that someone with firsthand knowledge and experience can produce, not something that can be copied and pasted from countless other sites. This could be anything from user-generated content like reviews and testimonials or case studies if you’re focusing on a specific brand or product.
See Google’s tips on creating “reliable, people-first content.”
Make visiting your website a pleasant experience
This sounds obvious, but both SEO and GEO prioritize a well-structured, easy-to-navigate website. It’s easier for bots to pull information from a page where everything is laid out clearly for visitors—and your users will appreciate it as well. Google outlines several ways to ensure a positive page experience for visitors, including making sure your content displays well on mobile devices, ensuring that main content and secondary content are easily distinguishable, and addressing any latency or lagging issues.
Meet the technical specs for search
Aside from providing helpful, digestible content for your website users, you need to make sure that your page meets technical requirements for search so they can be found, crawled, and indexed by Google Search and other search engines, including generative AI platforms.