Search marketing is undergoing its most dramatic transformation since Google’s inception. As artificial intelligence reshapes how people discover information, the familiar world of keyword optimization and link building is rapidly becoming obsolete. In its place emerges Generative Experience Optimization (GEO)—a new discipline that prioritizes semantic understanding, comprehensive content coverage, and authentic expertise over traditional ranking factors.
I was recently interviewed by o3 world to unpack this critical evolution. As an upcoming speaker at the 1682 Conference this fall, I explain why GEO presents both unprecedented challenges and remarkable opportunities for brands willing to adapt their approach to content creation, measurement, and search visibility in an AI-first world.
Question: You’ve been advising on the shift from traditional SEO to what many are calling GEO, or Generative Experience Optimization. What does that shift actually look like for brands, and why is it becoming so critical right now?
Answer: The shift from SEO to GEO represents a fundamental change in how brands approach search optimization. GEO is harder and less reliable than traditional SEO because it targets complex, stochastic, and rapidly evolving AI search platforms. So results are less predictable than traditional keyword-based ranking signals. However, GEO will be critical because GEO traffic converts better than traditional SEO traffic. Visitors arriving from AI-generated answers have higher intent since the AI has already synthesized information for them. So they are further along in the decision-making process when they land on your website.
Question: What makes content perform well in AI-generated results, and how should brands rethink the way they create, structure, and maintain content to stay visible in this new landscape?
Answer: GEO is fundamentally a content strategy discipline, not a technical discipline. Success comes from creating the most semantically rich, comprehensive, and authentically helpful content on a topic. Marketers need to get used to thinking in “semantic space,” not keyword space. IOW, the goal is to create content that comprehensively covers a topic/concept and its adjacent topics to activate more adjacent topics (to show up in more AI conversations) in the AI model’s abstract “latent space.”
Question: What technical strategies like schema, structured data, or internal linking matter most when it comes to making sure content is accessible and favored by AI systems?
Answer: While traditional technical SEO elements remain important, GEO success is fundamentally about content strategy rather than technical optimization. The focus should shift away from technical optimizations toward ensuring content is semantically rich and comprehensive rather than relying heavily on schema or structured data alone. With that said, there is some evidence that AI benefits from schema markup even though it doesn’t parse it directly. AI simply sees the schema markup as semantically significant structure in the document.
Question: How can marketers measure the success of GEO efforts, and what tools or methods are most effective for tracking whether content is showing up in AI outputs?
Answer: There’s a crucial measurement shift needed: move from traffic metrics to measuring incremental lift. Instead of focusing on top-of-funnel metrics, measure downstream business outcomes and demonstrate incrementality (i.e. show what happened WITH your GEO campaign versus what would have happened WITHOUT it). One tactic: Since direct attribution remains unresolved, combine quantitative and qualitative tracking by adding open-ended “How did you hear about us?” questions to lead gen forms to gain invaluable customer journey insights.
Question: As GEO becomes more central to digital strategy, how should internal teams evolve, and what new skills, roles, or workflows are essential?
Answer: Since GEO is a content strategy discipline, teams need to strengthen content creation capabilities focused on semantic richness and comprehensive topic coverage and insights from first-hand experience. Teams should also develop skills in using LLMs as market research tools to understand how AI perceives their brand, competitors, customer language, and authoritative sources.
Question: How can brands increase their authority signals in a way that boosts their presence in AI-generated content, and which external platforms or mentions matter most?
Answer: Use LLMs as intelligence gathering tools to understand how AI perceives your brand and the sources it deems authoritative. Focus on creating authentically helpful, comprehensive content that AI systems recognize as authoritative sources on topics. The key is semantic richness and genuine expertise and mentions in sources cited by AI, rather than traditional authority signals.
Question: What should companies be doing today to future-proof their content strategies across multiple AI platforms like Google, Bing, and ChatGPT?
Answer: Focus efforts on optimizing for ChatGPT for now and Google’s AI Mode for the near future. ChatGPT is the primary consumer AI platform currently generating referral traffic, while Google’s AI Mode is expected to become the most significant source of AI-driven traffic given Google’s dominance. We expect Google to switch over to AI mode as their default sometime in the next 12-18 months. However, proven, reliable strategies for generating revenue from GEO are still emerging. Current GEO tactics aren’t as reliable as established SEO playbooks are for traditional search engines.
The Path Forward
The AI revolution in search isn’t a distant possibility—it’s reshaping the digital landscape right now. Brands that recognize this shift and invest in comprehensive, semantically rich content will capture the most valuable audience: users with clear intent who are primed to convert. While GEO strategies may lack the predictability of traditional SEO, the potential rewards are substantial. Success belongs to those who start building their AI-optimized content foundation today, while the competitive landscape is still taking shape.
