SEO for AI? What you need to know about GEO
To compete in generative search and AI-generated answers, you need to understand how GEO works and adjust accordingly. Understand and focus on these eight core areas to strengthen visibility, earn inclusion in AI responses, and improve conversions.
1. Same game, new rules
SEO used to be about optimising for algorithms. You researched, optimised, ranked, and watched traffic rise. But in the past year, that familiar game board has changed drastically.
After 12 years helping businesses to grow online, with a big focus on SEO, I’m refreshed by AI. That’s because of all of the changes I’ve faced with algorithm changes, AI actually focuses results on answering questions and solving problems. So while showing business how to succeed with GEO (generative engine optimisation) I also get to improve branding, and convert potential customers into paying customers.
That’s because the cornerstone of good branding is knowing what questions your customers are searching for. What problems do they need solving. And how clearly and quickly you can make them see that you have the answers and solutions the seek.
2. Understand how GEO differs from SEO
Generative AI – Google’s Search Generative Experience, Microsoft’s Copilot, ChatGPT’s browsing tools, and Perplexity – these no longer simply show search results. They synthesize them. They read, reason, and summarise. Instead of “ten blue links,” users now get a confident paragraph that blends multiple sources into a single, conversational answer.
For marketers, this shift is enormous. It means the fight is no longer just for position one. It’s for presence – being cited, referenced, or paraphrased within AI-generated results. The new SEO battlefield is contextual visibility.
And yet, the fundamentals haven’t vanished. They’ve been promoted.
3. From search to synthesis
Search is becoming synthesis – a shift from finding information to understanding it.
When users type a query into Google now, the response isn’t just a list of pages. It’s a summary drawn from what Google’s large language models (LLMs) trust. Similarly, Perplexity and ChatGPT’s “Search with Bing” tools don’t index in the old sense; they interpret the web.
Now this varies by age, but about 35% of people in the UK used AI for online shopping in 2025 (Ayden Retail Report) About two thirds of young people (ages 16-24) across the EU used AI tools in 2025. In Europe 63.8% of Gen Z used AI at some point, as did 33% of all people between ages 16-74.
These systems read your content, decide if it’s credible, and then decide if it’s useful enough to include in their answer layer.
Your visibility, therefore, depends less on keyword rankings – and more on your perceived authority and clarity across the open web.
4. How AI reads the web
AI models don’t think like search crawlers. They look for meaning, not metadata. When reading your site, they assess:
Entity clarity – Can they easily tell who you are, what you do, and how you connect to recognised entities? A clear About page, structured data, and consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) across the web all help establish this.
Topical authority – Do you have depth around a theme, or just a scatter of keywords? A marketing agency writing about “content strategy” should also publish related guides on audience intent, creative testing, and performance measurement – interlinked, coherent, and semantically rich.
Human trust signals – AI models actively weigh author bios, credentials, case studies, and reviews. They reward visible expertise.
Consistency – Schema, metadata, and written copy should all say the same thing. Confusion equals invisibility.
Depth and freshness – ranking these days is more about original thought and recency (not meta data). LLMs detect whether you’re rehashing information or contributing something new.
5. Be clear. Solve problems.
The biggest writing shift in SEO over the past year? The importance of clarity and getting to the point.
This is one of the biggest takeaways at Somuna. And it presents a massive opportunity for business owners to look at the basics of their brand. It’s so often overlooked or misunderstood. It’s all about knowing who your customers are and communicating how you can improve their lives, clearly and directly.
It’s actually very refreshing that AI aligns with branding in that way.
So, AI summaries extract sentences that are declarative, factual, and structurally simple. That means content needs to be written with answerability in mind.
For example:
- Weak: “It may be the case that AI could influence search rankings in some ways.”
- Strong: “AI determines which brands appear in search results.”
This directness not only improves AI visibility – it improves human trust. In our experience, most audiences appreciate confident, unambiguous writing. The best-performing content in this new landscape reads like it was written by someone who understands people, their pain points and how to fix them.
6. E-E-A-T is more important than ever
Google’s E-E-A-T principle – Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness – used to be a quality guideline. It’s been an SEO foundation for over a decade and continues to be for AI-driven visibility.
Every trace of your credibility matters. Who wrote the article? Are they a genuine expert or a ghost with no footprint? Are your claims supported by data, or simply assertions?
The 2024 Google Helpful Content Update doubled down on this, and analysis by Ahrefs found that sites implementing detailed author schema saw 22% higher citation rates in AI-generated snippets within six months.
In short, AI doesn’t just want content; it wants to be sure that the person and entity behind it are credible and authentic.
7. Structure: topics and schema
For marketing teams, the technical toolkit of modern SEO is starting to look like a cross between an engineer’s toolbox and a newsroom CMS. The essentials:
- Structured data: Schema for people, organisations, products, FAQs, and reviews.
- Topical clustering: Build depth through interlinked articles, not keyword silos.
- First-party insights: Share proprietary data and unique perspectives. AI loves quoting what no one else has said.
- Multimodal optimisation: Text, video, and images now have equal weight. Alt text and captions feed the same model.
- Citation-worthy content: Think “what, why, and how.” If your paragraph reads like it belongs in an answer summary, you’re on the right track.
These aren’t just SEO hygiene factors anymore. They’re visibility infrastructure.
8. SEO is not dying
Within the next few years, SEO will continue transitioning to Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). Instead of asking, “How do we rank?” marketers will ask, “How do we appear inside AI-generated answers?”
It could be that SEO sticks around, or adapts. It may continue to have it’s place but will certainly lose more of it’s share to GEO.
To ensure you get shown in AI results it’s important to build your brand’s entity graph – how your people, products, and insights connect to broader concepts in the digital ecosystem.
Visibility won’t come just from your own site, but from everywhere your brand shows up:
LinkedIn thought pieces, YouTube explainers, credible podcasts, or cited data studies.
AI models pull from these diverse sources to paint a full picture of who to trust.
A BrightEdge 2024 study reported that 68% of enterprise marketers are already testing GEO tactics, from citation-led content to entity optimisation.
We’re moving from manipulating algorithms to earning inclusion in collective intelligence.
Amid all this evolution, some principles remain stubbornly timeless.
Key takeaways
Good SEO – like good marketing – still rewards expertise, and originality.
Search engines, whether algorithmic or generative, still chase the same goal: delivering the most trustworthy, useful answer to the user’s question.
So while the mechanics evolve, the mission endures. Create something worth finding. Write something worth quoting. Build a brand worth trusting.
AI hasn’t made SEO obsolete; it’s made it smarter. It rewards marketers who help brands to find the right messages that resonate with the right people – communicating their solutions clearly.
At Somuna, we treat AI as an opportunity. It forces brands to grasp the essence of good marketing – particularly the notion that by being clear and helpful, you earn trust. Remember that it’s not the best services and products that succeed, but those that communicate best how they will benefit their customers.
That’s what the future of SEO and GEO looks like for us.
John Anderson has 15+ years experience in online growth and SEO. He helps organisations get found and make sense to customers through clear messaging, sustainable acquisition strategies, and a grounded, practical approach to AI.
