Generative Engine Optimisation: Making GEO Part of Your SEO Strategy

The search landscape is shifting – again. But this time, it’s not just another algorithm update or a tweak to how Google interprets E-E-A-T. What we’re experiencing is the rapid emergence of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) – a growing priority for marketing teams who recognise that SEO in 2025 is no longer just about ranking in the traditional ten blue links.

What is GEO and what makes it different from SEO?

Generative Engine Optimisation refers to the process of influencing how a brand appears in AI-powered search experiences – particularly those powered by generative engines like Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), Microsoft’s Copilot, Perplexity and ChatGPT’s Browse feature.

Today, users no longer just use search engines in the traditional sense for their informational needs. As consumers we have an abundance of different digital environments we can go to in order to search for information, products and services.

The latest advancement in digital technology adding to the existing search engines, and social media sites is these AI based tools.

These tools don’t just list web pages. They summarise. They synthesise. They choose which brands or sources to mention in a single, condensed output that users increasingly trust at face value.

From an SEO perspective, that’s a major shift in power. Your business can no longer just consider how to get exposure in search engines for “short tail keywords”. You have to now consider how your brand gets exposure when users are conducting conversational search, using longer tail searches through AI tools that will give custom information gathered from multiple sources online.

If your brand isn’t being named directly in a generative answer, you’ve missed an opportunity that your competitors have gained. No matter how well your site is technically optimised or how good your backlink profile looks, marketers now have to consider how to ensure key messaging is available to be crawled and indexed by AI tools as a part of their overall search strategy.

Marketers are now starting to ask how GEO is considered with wider SEO strategies when reaching out to agencies

Over the past 12 months, there has been a noticeable change in the briefs we get from clients. When being approached for seo audit services, brand marketers are not only asking  “how do we rank?”, but “how do we get mentioned in AI answers?”. This means another area of optimisation has to be considered with an SEO strategy to drive the exposure required within a new environment that users are turning to for search.

1. Entity building and topical authority
   We’re doubling down on building clear, structured content around specific entities – brands, products, people, categories – so they’re semantically connected to the topics that matter in our clients’ industries. This helps AI models identify relevance and trustworthiness at scale.
2. Citations and brand visibility
   We’re actively pursuing mentions in well-structured, high-authority sources – trade publications, industry round-ups, data-driven content – that generative engines are likely to crawl and pull from. This is where good digital PR is suddenly front and centre in SEO strategy.
3. Structured data and contextual framing
   Schema markup isn’t just for featured snippets anymore. Adding structured metadata, authorship signals, and clearly marked FAQs can all play a role in giving LLMs the “clean signals” they need to cite your content.
4. Answer optimisation
   Some of our teams now test prompt-output formats across ChatGPT and Perplexity to reverse-engineer what type of language, structure, or phrasing triggers a mention. This isn’t gaming the system – it’s learning the language these engines understand best.

Is GEO replacing SEO?

GEO doesn’t replace SEO, but it exists inside it and must be considered as a part of a broader SEO strategy. GEO isn’t a standalone activity; it’s a natural evolution. The core principles of SEO still apply and must be remembered. Building a site that contains easy to interpret, well organised information to aid a users journey. But the outputs we’re optimising for are changing. Previously an SEO strategy would be about achieving position 1 rankings in a target search engine as the primary goal. Today, we are now looking at how we can increase a brand’s exposure through search that covers traditional search engine experiences, but also different result types, and tools away from Google too. There is also a new result type, which is “cited” information or source, whereby an AI tool will cite a brands website as the source for the information it has collected and served back to the users query.

For marketers, the challenge is twofold: understanding how generative engines source their content, and then ensuring your brand is visible, credible, and structured in a way that puts it on the radar of those engines.

What Comes Next?

GEO is still in its infancy, but it won’t be for long. As search becomes more conversational and condensed, brands will need to move beyond keyword targeting and start thinking about answer targeting. That means being the source, not just the search result.

We’re already investing in internal tools to track generative mentions across platforms – something I expect will become a standard part of SEO reporting by the end of the year.

For marketers looking to future-proof their visibility, now’s the time to start thinking beyond Google’s SERPs and consider how your brand shows up when AI does the talking.