AI is here. LLMs (Large Language Models) and generative engines are essentially ubiquitous. Google is pushing ‘AI search mode’ and AI overviews. People are using ChatGPT and comparable models to find information they used to go to Google for. Referral traffic from these services to websites is increasing. SEMrush’s research projected that annual visitors from AI search could overtake traditional search by 2028.
So, how do you retain visibility and relevance in the new AI arena? What’s this process called?
It seems a leading acronym has emerged – GEO – which stands for ‘Generative Engine Optimisation’. With much of its roots in traditional SEO, we’ve seen a number of our clients gaining significant visibility across AI outputs, so let us walk you through the landscape and how to integrate this into your ongoing digital efforts.
Heads up – this post assumes you have some basic level of understanding of SEO and AI concepts. If you need anything clarified, feel free to reach out to us!
GEO Auditing – Are you set up for success?
GEO is grounded in SEO good practices – ensuring that your website is crawlable and digestible by machines. If you haven’t even done the basics for SEO, you will struggle to optimise for ChatGPT, AI Overviews and other AI-powered discovery platforms.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that the big dog right now in 2025 is ChatGPT with an 82% reported market share in July, which has a partnership with Microsoft and their flagship search product, Bing. So, you could reasonably say that optimising for Bing is helping you optimise for ChatGPT, especially when you consider reports that 87% of SearchGPT citations match Bing’s results.
By analysing and auditing your website’s SEO fundamentals – its performance, how its content is structured, how you use signals in headings, titles and meta descriptions, and whether you’re using structured data and schema markup – you will know where your weaknesses may lie for GEO.
Also, consider the intent-based nature of LLMs. Back in the day, people focused on very specific keywords to optimise for search on their pages, reusing the same term over and over. Nowadays with modern search engines and LLMs, they know that words are interchangeable but the intent is the same. So, are you focusing on producing helpful content that answers questions and solves problems, or are you just trying to stuff one keyword into everywhere it kind of fits?
Content and Structure for Generative Optimisation
Following on from my previous note, your focus for GEO should be on producing generally helpful and original content.
Don’t just ask your favourite AI tool to create you a blog post about [topic] and paste that in – all it’s doing is regurgitating the same information. There’s probably organic search competitors doing the same thing, which is a race to the bottom, a slow march towards the ‘dead internet theory‘ where all content is just bots talking to bots. Maybe we’ll go outside more then at least?
You’re a human. You’re interesting. You’ve got unique experiences and viewpoints. You can always learn. Research, understand, digest, and share.
What ties in to this closely is answering questions. Take your favourite keyword research tool, plug in a top keyword and look at the questions it provides as a starting point. The type of prompts and searches people plug into AI tools are longer than typical searches on Google or Bing. So, look at longer-tail keywords, and try to give rich, clear, useful answers. I’ll attempt to do exactly that, at the end of this post.
Brand Mentions, REPUTATION AND EEAT
This part is trickier and a bit more theoretical.
Let’s say I have a brand of candles in the UK. My potential customer might go to ChatGPT and ask ‘what are the top rated and most popular candle brands in the UK? Provide a top ten and their website links’. How does ChatGPT answer this?
Of course, it’s trained on a LOT of data, which could include listicles from reputable publications, ratings on Trustpilot, it might know how often certain brands show up on big homewares store catalogues, etc. That would all help towards understanding the AI’s confidence in the reputation of a brand. Brand mentions were found to be the top correlating factor with better visibility in AI overviews.
Unlinked mentions may also factor into this – how often is a certain brand mentioned on websites, in YouTube videos, social media, in printed media and any other location, where each mention of the brand in a relevant context can count as a vote of approval. There’s no easy shortcuts to getting lots of these, PR and organic growth will help, but it will also be pretty evergreen once you’ve got a good reputation.
EEAT is a concept that’s been around in SEO for a while now and it means Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. There’s extensive information out there about key concepts of this, and it’s what Google looks for in a website because it sums up what’s valuable about unique, original, human content. There are aspects of your website which can improve how its perceived in this regard – so consider adding these in to help.
Performance Tracking – Referring Traffic from ChatGPT + Other Engines, Citations and Types
This seems like a new nut people are trying to track – how do you know you’re doing well in AI outputs?
The easiest and most obvious thing is looking at your analytics software like Google Analytics to understand how much traffic is referred to yours from popular AI platforms like chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and more – and how this is trending over time. Most people in 2025 are seeing these referrals steadily increase.
We’ve also seen great results for clients where, having followed good SEO practices consistently, they are seeing a lot of pages being referenced and used to generate AI Overviews at the top of Google’s search results pages. So you could easily track the % of keywords which you get an AI Overview for.
Finally, the landscape continues to develop, but there are plenty of tools emerging to help track citations your website gets on popular LLMs, so take a look at some of the big players to see what suits you.
GEO – In Conclusion
Overall, GEO is founded in SEO but with a shift in perspective. Keep your finger on the pulse, follow best practices, and create useful content. Don’t forget to join up your other marketing efforts (like PR) with your search visibility efforts, and utilise you or your organisation’s expertise to keep publishing original insights your audience love.
In the era of the machines, it’s still important to stay human-first.
If you want a free, no-obligation chat about your GEO efforts, feel free to reach out and book a consultation call with us. We help clients every day to make an impact online, and we love new challenges.