Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)- Why is it considered the future of SEO?

 

Introduction

At this current time, you may well be wondering where to place your marketing efforts.

You might be wondering how to optimise for GEO?

What AEO is?

Wondering at the same time how important is SEO with the rise of AI making greater inroads into how search works.

Well, as always, Ryan Walsh at Walsh and Partners has you covered. I am a veteran of SEO, I have been continually learning about how

Google’s algorithms work since the days of Google’s PageRank, through to now, when GEO is now the buzzword on many marketing company owners’ lips at moment in time.

Let’s jump straight into what GEO is:

Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 05/06/2025

 

Table of contents:

• What is AEO- Answer Engine Optimisation?
• Why you should be writing high-quality content marketing
• How to better structure your content marketing for GEO and AEO
• How to come up with a marketing strategy in this new era of SEO, AEO, and AI

 

10-minute read

 

What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

In a nutshell, GEO or Generative Engine Optimisation is a further way of increasing your business’s visibility in AI programs such as Google AI Overviews, CoPilot, Perplexity, and Claude, as well as, of course, ChatGPT.

Marketing companies must now also consider how they can better optimise their content marketing for these systems, which are AI-powered driven search engines. These new engines are called “generative engines”. They may move away from the traditional search engine model of indexing pages using ranking factors. For example, before we, as SEO agencies, focused on link analysis and keyword matching, which remains essential- however now we are now examining advanced language models, known as LLMs.

 

What is an LLM?

LLMs are large language models that utilise a system called “RAG”, which stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation. What this means in simple terms is that, instead of getting your website to rank better in Google using conventional ranking factors (links etc) and taking a shopper to your page, things are now a bit different.

The shopper may not even visit your page. This is what SEO companies refer to as “zero-click searches”.

What AI is now able to do is “synthesise” or blend information from multiple different businesses’ websites, to then provide a very tailored and exact answer. Now you might be thinking, well, what’s the point in optimising for this type of answer, if it’s simply a blend of different businesses’ content marketing? The reason is that your business can be cited as a source, which can lead to a CTR, that’s “click-through rate”, potentially in the hundreds of thousands of visitors for high volume keyword, that is if the business is cited as a source for a commonly asked question.

Therefore, let’s say customers often ask a company the same question. If your business is mentioned as a source in a Google AI Overview answer let say, this could potentially mean your business receives many more visitors. Not only that, but these visitors are also likely to have more purchase intent, as they have asked a particular question that has been answered precisely via the AI in a synthesised answer in say a

Google AI overview answer. Therefore, if they click through to your website because you’re mentioned as the source of that answer, it means you’re likely to have an engaged visitor who is interested in your products or services.

Why SEO consultants need to optimise for AI and implement good white hat SEO

Google still dominates the search engine business by some margin.

However, there are also now Chat GPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Co-Pilot by Microsoft. This means that shoppers now have a multitude of ways to find and purchase products or services. Therefore, although marketing teams globally often won’t be able to spin multiple plates to optimise for every single LLM, what they can do is improve their content marketing futher, for example improving their E-E-A-T score, and their authoritativeness so that they stand a much better chance of appearing or being mentioned in the LLMs.

 

Should my team create a separate GEO strategy?

Well, the thing about GEO and AI, you have some companies/people stating that “SEO is dead” and that A.I will replace us, and companies need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to optimising your website for the LLMs.

But what if we said, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel?

What if we said that the same old SEO advice is needed? The work needs to have a high E-EAT score and be well-written. Good on-page SEO must be applied, and it’s essential to provide high-quality advice.

NLP and On-page SEO

We often talk about AI and GEO as if it’s something massively complicated. However, break it down into its component parts in terms of how LLM’s works, and it’s simply a large language model that has been trained on reading millions of business websites.

Therefore, just like search engine optimisation, what you have to consider is how you can get your website to be the one which answers the shopper’s question. Or, as an SEO consultant would say, how can you satisfy search intent? Now, one of the best ways of doing this is to write very high-quality content marketing. However, you must consider how the content marketing is written and is structured.

It all boils down to this, whether its SEO, AEO or GEO– has your business done as much as it can possibly do, to answer that question in the best possible way? Have you poured every bit of knowledge and effort you can in order to answer that query?

 

Good on-page SEO, FAQ style and NLP

When you read through a long article like this, it’s hard to sometimes skip to the part you want to read unless there is good on-page SEO (titles) throughout the article. Now, it is the same, in terms of how the crawlers (Googlebot), the scrapers, work when copying information for the LLM.

If the scrapers can better understand the page through the effective use of page titles and good on-page SEO, then this can help the LLM’s to better understand the content marketing. This means that your work is more likely to be synthesised and written into an answer presented by the LLMs if say Chat GPT or Google AI Overviews can better understand your written work.

 

Could long-form content be more useful?

You have to think about NLP (Natural Language Processing) for a second, shoppers are now asking much more complicated queries to Google and the LLMs.

Therefore, it could be argued that if you have a piece of content marketing that answers a question in-depth, using natural language, plus structured with good titles, then the LLMs have more content marketing to read from. Therefore this is why all of our articles tend now to be excess of 2000 words, as these pages tend to rank higher in Google’s organic results.

Where the search strings, or the queries, are now much more complicated, a piece of content marketing which precisely matches search intent (Google Hummingbird) and answers the question is much more likely to be used by the LLMs.

There is always the aspect of authority, and that includes mentions of your business, as well as links, which will also be noteworthy. However, if the content marketing is long-form and well-written, this allows the LLMs to have more content marketing, from which they can extract answers. Therefore, there are distinct crossovers between GEO and SEO, in that quality content marketing remains very important and needs to be written.

How does a business stand a better chance of being mentioned in a GEO answer?

Clear and well-structured page titles, making use of H1 through to H6 tags

This advice is as old as the hills, dating back to the basics of search engine optimisation, yet it remains essential.

Googlebot reads (crawls and indexes) your work. Well, the LLMs do the same, so it just makes sense to have good on-page SEO. This means using good titles, utilising H1 through H6, incorporating alt text, meta descriptions, and other relevant elements. The more “definition” you can add to the page, the more likely it is that Google plus the LLMs will understand the work, therefore, allowing your business a much better chance of being used in a synthesised answer. Thus helping to draw in more visitors from the LLMs.

 

Good readability of the work is therefore essential.

In a world of AI-written content, E-EAT is more critical than ever

AI can’t yet fix a plug, nor can it come out and fix your boiler. There, the LLMs rely on the firsthand experience of a real person to understand and then recommend a potential solution.

Therefore, just as Googlebot crawls and indexes information to update its “Knowledge Vault,” well, LLMs read a lot. When we say ‘read a lot,’ we mean they have reportedly read the internet.

However, the work that stands out, in terms of content marketing, is the work written by someone who truly knows what they are talking about. That understands Google E-EAT.

 

How can we best optimise content marketing for GEO

Your content marketing that you write in the future needs to be written with GEO in mind. Yet, what is also now important is that businesses revisit old blog posts and pages to improve their Google E-EAT score and enhance content marketing. Here are just a few of the different ways a business can improve its content marketing.

 

Relevant

Google and the LLMs and AI-powered answers are all about offering exact answers. Therefore, you have to consider relevance: how relevant is the content marketing? Have you gone off-topic too much? Have you provided the best possible answer you can to a query?

 

Stand out

Suppose you consider 1000 pieces of content marketing all saying the same thing, offering pretty much the same advice. Now, compare this to a piece of content marketing written by an expert; it’s longer, jam-packed with more valuable and helpful advice. It’s unique because it’s written by an expert who has over 25 years of knowledge on the subject. This work will stand out not only in Google’s organic results but also in the LLMs’ recommendations, as it is well-written and authored by an expert.

Therefore, this expert is a well-known person or entity in semantic search; as a result, their thoughts are more likely to be mentioned by LLMs and in organic results. The reason is that the Semantic Web will recognise that person as an expert. This could be because the person is mentioned by multiple businesses and their social profiles, such as on LinkedIn, show that they are an expert in that business sector.

 

Keep it up to date

It used to be the case with organic search engine optimisation that a piece of content marketing that had been live for a while could accumulate more and more backlinks. This results in the page becoming increasingly authoritative, thereby ranking higher in Google’s SERPs. However, what could happen, say in the days of Google’s PageRank algorithm, is that the information could be updated.

It’s widely thought that LLMs, plus now how Google’s algorithm works, is that businesses must keep their content marketing up to date. For example, citing old statistics, this won’t work. Therefore, part of the digital marketing agency’s job is to ensure that a business’s content marketing is kept up to date and relevant. When recent statistics and facts are used, it shows that content marketing is kept up to date; therefore, it is more likely to be cited by the LLMS.

 

How our agency can help:

Whether it’s SEO, AEO, or GEO, it’s all about getting your business seen by shoppers. This means the content marketing needs to be of good quality, as does the off-page SEO, as well as the technical SEO. We are one of the most experienced digital marketing agencies in Wales. Packages for SEO improvement start at $1,000 per month. We work with a wide range of clients.

 

About the author:

Ryan Walsh is the owner of this SEO agency. We have been working primarily with local Welsh businesses for over 10 years. We can improve your local and national SEO. We are also increasingly learning more about AEO and GEO and how this will impact our clients. We understand that zero-click searches will become increasingly commonplace and will reduce the number of visitors a business typically receives from its organic results. Therefore, companies must adapt and learn how better to optimise their website for AEO answers and GEO.

If you’re interested in partnering with us, please don’t hesitate to contact us today.