What is GEO? (And Why Are They Rebranding SEO Again?)

All I hear about when I read my emails or login to LinkedIn is people shouting that the growing popularity of LLMs is going to kill SEO as we know it for good.

If you’ve been in the digital marketing industry for any amount of time, you know that this happens almost every time new technology comes out.

• Mobile Search was going to kill SEO in the earliest 00s
• Voice search was going to kill SEO in 2011
• Featured Snippets and Answer Boxes were going to kill SEO in 2014

Are you getting my point yet?

SEO will never die. Because at the core of it, people will always need to search for answers, and companies will always need help being found.

So how worried should we be? And how much will GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) actually change the way we think about SEO?

Key Takeaways

• AI is changing the way we talk about SEO but not the fundamentals of how we optimize for search.
• GEO is more all-encompassing than “traditional SEO” but a good SEO has always recognized how all of this plays together.
• It is more important than ever that SEO has a powerful seat at the table when it comes to your entire marketing strategy.

The Rebranding Problem: Optimizing for AI

There are so many new names and acronyms that people in the industry are trying to make happen – seriously campaigning harder than Gretchen Wieners trying to make Fetch happen.

There’s:

• AIO – A.I. Optimization
• AIOO – A.I. Overview Optimization
• AEO – A.I. Engine Optimization
• GEO – Generative Engine Optimization
• GAIO – Generative A.I. Optimization
• AISEO – A.I. Search Engine Optimization
• LLMO – LLM Optimization
• LLMEO – LLM Engine Optimization
• EIEIO – The refrain from a lovely farming song my toddler won’t stop singing

The problem is that none of these acronyms describe the goal better than good ole SEO (Search Engine Optimization, but you knew that!) because at the core of it, LLMs are operating as a sort of search engine with a different process and scale. 

The difference is: now we’re optimizing for an engine that generates its own information from what it has learned from you and others, rather than just returning what it collected. 

So I think if we are rebranding, which we shouldn’t, GEO is the most accurate substitution here.

Fundamentals of GEO

Starting with the basics: GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization, and it is not replacing SEO or killing SEO or whatever other clickbait rumor you’ve seen. In fact, SEO legend Marie Haynes just published a large-scale study that focuses solely on the thesis that GEO may ultimately prove to be nothing more than a distraction.

So what is the solution for dealing with LLMs?

The solution is good SEO! It was yesterday, it is today, and it will be tomorrow. This does not mean we shouldn’t be updating our strategies to optimize for new search engines; it’s just important to understand what is actually going on with these platforms and what they value. We need to understand that because of how these platforms work, they will never fully replace good traditional marketing strategies (no matter how much VC capital they raise).

So what do LLMs value, and how does that compare to traditional SEO? To optimize for visibility in LLMs (a.k.a do GEO), you need to have a handle on four major areas:

• Content Depth & Topical Coverage
• Technical Crawlability & Website Processing
• Brand Reputation & Social Proof
• Experience-Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T)

These were always things that a good SEO was thinking about, but they were not always areas that SEO had much control over compared to the rest of the marketing department. But now more than ever, it is crucial that your SEO team is front and center when it comes to dictating your marketing strategy. 

Content Depth & Topical Coverage

LLMs process large amounts of information and distill it down into bite-sized chunks. So the number one item on our list is something that should not surprise you at all: the content on your site is one of the most important factors in your GEO strategy. The good news here is that this factor is almost completely under your control.

If you want to be the number one source of information about your service area or area of expertise, you better be able to demonstrate that expertise in writing. You also better be able to demonstrate it again and again and again.

Now, every good SEO since the beginning of time will tell you that you need content on your site to be able to rank/earn citations/perform in search engines – that hasn’t changed, and I don’t think it will. What changed is that now content generation and maintenance must be core tenets of your marketing strategy. Your site should answer every question your target user may have about you, your products and services, and your industry. If they can’t get it from you, your user will go to someone else. If an LLM can’t find it on your site, they’ll get it from someone else or make it up.

In addition to LLMs potentially hallucinating incorrect information about your brand, there is also an endless pool of AI-generated content across the internet. With the major influx of this AI slop, it’s incredibly essential that you produce content that meets the criteria of the three Us: Unique, Useful and Up-to-date.

Technical Crawlability & Website Processing

As of right now, LLM crawlers are much less technically savvy than Google’s bots at crawling and processing websites.

LLM bots crawl and pre-train their systems much less frequently than search engines, they have trouble processing anything other than HTML and are less motivated to improve the way that these bots process information (they’re not maintaining a quality index – they can just move on or hallucinate the answer they need).

It’s more important than ever that your site is technically sound and that you eliminate all roadblocks to crawling. But if you work with websites, you know that SEOs have been doing our best to remove crawl barriers and make sites easier to use since the beginning of time. A focus on Technical SEO isn’t new, but the way it looks is changing.

E-E-A-T: Experience-Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness

Google introduced the term E-A-T (Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) in 2014 in its Search Quality Rater Guidelines and in 2022 it added Expertise. While this is Google-specific guidance, the principles are still extremely relevant for LLMs.

Here’s the bottom line: LLMs and search engines are trying to serve the most useful and helpful content to their users because their reputation, and your continued engagement with their tools, depends on it. On top of the tons of helpful content on the web, bots are now being asked to crawl, evaluate and process a lot of spammy AI-generated content. Without sending intentional signals delineating your E-E-A-T, your content is likely to get lost in the wave and deprioritized for bigger and more well-known brands.

LLMs want to know that you know what you’re talking about and the best way to prove this on your own site is by, well, telling them. Have a copywriter detail your brand’s story, how long you’ve been in business, and who your employees are. Document any and all signals so that these bots understand you are a company of humans for humans and are not fellow bots.

Brand Reputation & Social Proof

One of the most important factors for LLMs is your online brand reputation, admittedly one of the most difficult to control. How real people see your business goes back to why E-E-A-T is so important: Can we trust you? (aka will users be mad at us if we suggest you?).

The fortunate thing is that this system seems to work as intended: do good and honest work >>> get good and honest results. However, we know things are more nuanced than that. It’s not enough to have a technically sound website, a large content library, and a well-developed brand; you also have to get other people/systems/brands vouching for you.

And before you start, I didn’t write this entire post to sell you a washed-up backlinking strategy. Backlinks are still important, but there’s much more nuance now than there used to be. It’s not enough that they exist, they need to be relevant and up-to-date. They’re also not even close to the most important off-page factor for LLMs.

LLMs want to see activity online. They want to see that you are active and serving new content. They want to see that you have lots of great reviews. They want to see your customers raving about you (and absolutely not ranting about you). They want to see that you are mentioned on sites like Wikipedia and Reddit and build bridges between the things you say on your site and what people say about you. They want to serve the most up-to-date and relevant information for any possible user query ever and if they can get that information from a real person with no motives, rather than a brand looking out for itself, they may do that.

The Knucklepuck Take

Does this all sound so overwhelming? GEO/AIEO/AIO – or whatever you want to call it – on the surface seems like it is asking you to do everything all the time with a small team and too much already on your plate.

But here’s the good news. Good SEOs have been considering all of these factors for a long time. We can tell you which aspects of your business and decisions you make will have the most tangible impact, so give us a seat at the table where decisions are made. For future marketing leaders, a foundation in digital marketing and experience in SEO will be a requirement, not a ‘nice to have’.

But if you’re not an expert in SEO and you’re wondering where to get started, the Knucklepuck team has been doing this work, in the weeds, since Google was only 10 blue links on a page. Let us know what you need help with. We got you.

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