The era of Artificial Intelligence is transforming everything around us, including how we search for information online.
With the emergence of generative engines, such as Google’s Gemini (formerly Bard) and Microsoft’s Bing Chat, searches have become more dynamic and comprehensive, generating multimodal responses that go beyond text. But hold on: ever heard of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
If you’re feeling lost amidst so many acronyms and technical terms, don’t worry: you’re not alone. Let’s simplify all of this and understand how AI is revolutionizing searches in search engines.
Curious to learn how to adapt your Content Marketing strategy to this new reality? Keep reading!
What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
It’s an innovative approach to search engine optimization that adapts to the era of artificial intelligence-based search engines, also known as generative engines (GE).
Never heard of the term GEO? Don’t worry: it’s quite recent, having been formalized in a collaborative study conducted in November 2023 by Princeton University, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi.
But what is a Generative Engine?
Before discussing optimization for generative engines, we need to understand what they are, right?
According to the researchers in the study, “Generative Engines typically satisfy queries by synthesizing information from multiple sources and summarizing them with the help of large language models (LLMs).”
So, GE not only searches for information but also generates a response to the user’s query from multiple sources, which can include text, video, infographics, e-commerce offerings, and whatever else seems relevant to answer the question.
Well-known examples include Gemini (formerly Bard), Bing Chat, and Google SGE.
What is the impact of GEO on SEO?
The perspective is that this change will have a significant impact on businesses and individuals, especially when considering traffic and search engine optimization (SEO). Giuseppe Caltabiano, VP of Marketing at Rock Content, made the following observation:
“Generative Engines represent a transformative shift in the search engine paradigm, offering direct, comprehensive answers to user queries and thereby potentially reducing the need for users to visit websites directly. Which can lead to a drop in organic traffic to websites and severely impact their visibility.”
The decrease in traffic is not new in the world of digital marketing. According to the 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Explorer research by Contentsquare, in various industries, 55% of websites recorded less traffic in 2023 than the previous year.
With AI search, many believe there will be an even greater decline in traffic with the intensification of ‘zero-click’ results, especially those with less specific intentions, meaning more at the top of the funnel.
The logic is simple: the response given by AI to these more general inquiries will likely already satisfy the user, reducing the chances of them clicking and going to your site.
Considering that many businesses rely on traffic and online visibility to generate conversion and sales, there is a discussion of how GEs have a very high potential to affect the economy of those working with Content Marketing in general.
That’s precisely why GEO emerged: to help this group better deal with this change we are going through and without much certainty about what the next steps will be. Quoting the same study:
“To address this, we introduce GENERATIVE ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (GEO), a novel paradigm to aid content creators in improving the visibility of their content in GE responses through a black-box optimization framework for optimizing and defining visibility metrics.”
The idea is that by understanding and implementing GEO methods, content creators can significantly increase visibility in AI-driven search environments.
GEO and SEO, what’s the difference?
After understanding the definition of each term, you might be wondering: but what about SEO? Does it no longer exist? Isn’t it the same thing? What’s the difference? Let’s delve deeper below.
Focus on AI Algorithms
GEO focuses on optimizing content for the AI algorithms of generative engines. Meanwhile, traditional SEO aims to improve rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs) based on various criteria like keywords, backlinks, content quality, user experience, and page loading speed.
Multimodal Responses
As we’ve seen, generative engines produce multimodal responses, combining information from various sources and formats, contrasting with traditional SEO’s focus on link-based results most relevant to answering the query.
Complex Queries
When conducting searches with long and detailed queries, search engine results pages (SERPs) often couldn’t address the entire specific demand. Thus, they opted to provide content they deemed more generally relevant to the query.