GEO is the new priority for digital marketers
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Move over Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the new must-have marketing strategy is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
Traditional SEO results have collapsed, taking $74 billion in marketing budgets with it. In its place, a new AI-driven search ecosystem is emerging and the brands that master it first will capture the lion’s share of traffic, while everyone else disappears from the conversation entirely.
Consumers search for things as much as ever, but they simply traded search bars for chat boxes. Platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity offer answers to users’ questions that feel concise, personalized, and, ironically, human. Whereas Google felt like a search engine, LLMs provide what feels like personalized recommendations from a trusted expert.
While some marketers remain stubbornly attached to the old ways of doing things (i.e., SEO), astute marketers have recognized glimmers of what may just be the most significant attention arbitrage since the invention of Google itself.
“Our clients are actually seeing traffic from LLMs convert seven times higher than what they were getting from Google,” says Rob Hoffman, CEO and Co-Founder of Mentions, a GEO optimization tool. “ChatGPT still has a lot of ground to cover if it wants to dethrone Google as the world’s default search engine. But at least for now, even the comparatively smaller amount of traffic these LLMs send is far more valuable.”
What’s more, marketers who have seemingly cracked this new world of LLM search are focusing on three main things: GEO strategy, digital PR, and LLM-optimized content on their own websites.
1. GEO strategy: Identify opportunities where LLM search results can be influenced.
Brands are often excited when they see their first few site visitors trickling in from sources like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. But this also beckons an important question: how do I get more of it?
As a result, dozens of software tools have materialized, seemingly overnight, eager to help brands identify opportunities where they can increase their visibility in LLMs and earn more high-converting Search traffic.
“The new GEO tools offer a roadmap to brands and marketers who feel like they’re flying blind,” says Hoffman of Mentions.
Another tool in the space, Profound, recently secured $20 Million in Series A funding, putting a more than $100 million valuation on the software company that is less than a year old. Clearly, GEO focused tools are striking a nerve.
Tools like Mentions and Profound help marketers identify where they can influence AI search results by tracking customer-style prompts in LLMs like ChatGPT and monitoring the responses over time. Since these answers are often built by scraping and summarizing content from the web, brands that appear on frequently cited pages are more likely to be recommended. The challenge then becomes creating content that LLMs want to cite or securing mentions on the high-authority pages they already trust.
2. Digital PR strategy: Find ways to get your brand mentioned by highly-cited publishers.
This is where, if you squint your eyes, the new GEO begins to look a lot like the old SEO. “Brand mentions are the new backlinks,” says Jake Ward, Co-Founder of the SEO Agency, Contact. “In the past, we used to reach out to publishers to see if we could get backlinks in exchange for providing unique information to journalists, or in some cases, by simply paying them.”
Not much has changed.
When consumers turn to LLMs like ChatGPT for real-time information about where to buy products, such as the “best organic shampoo for dandruff in 2025,” the LLMs often get their information by scraping listicles from authoritative publishers. As a result, brands that appear at the top of these listicles will often also enjoy increased visibility in ChatGPT.
This has reignited demand from brands to earn favor of authoritative publishers in their niche. With limited supply and virtually endless demand, brands and marketers alike have begun searching for ways to gain visibility in LLMs that don’t rely on third-party publishers.
Some marketers believe the answer lies in creating content for what SEO experts call “longtail queries.”
3. LLM-optimized content strategy: provide clear and concise answers to customers’ hyper-specific questions.
Consumers’ search habits on ChatGPT appear to be slightly different from their previous search habits on Google. Specifically, people tend to phrase their searches in LLMs as questions, and don’t restrict their searches to short, punchy queries like they would on Google. Instead, searches made on ChatGPT tend to be long and nuanced.
For example: Instead of searching “best organic shampoo,” as someone would on Google, if they’re using ChatGPT, they might search “what is the best organic sulfate-free shampoo to use if I have a dry scalp?”
In the SEO world, the unit economics for creating content to address these longtail queries have traditionally presented a challenge, since the number of people making this hyper-specific search each month is likely pretty small. Creating content can be expensive, especially content that might serve fewer than 10 searches per month, and therefore, present little opportunity for marketers to get an ROI.
But today, AI has flipped these unit economics on their head.
AI content writing tools like Airops and Byword allow marketers to mass-create content relatively cheaply. And while some raise concerns about the “quality” of this content, others believe it’s possible, with the right strategy and tech stack, to achieve both quality and quantity.
“Our platform allows brands to build out precise content workflows that are grounded in their unique data and context, meaning that while the output is AI-assisted, it’s still unique to them, their business, and their niche,” says Alex Halliday, CEO of AirOps. “At the end of the day, it’s all about answering people’s questions and adding to the conversation. And people have a lot of unanswered questions because the content simply doesn’t exist. We are changing that.”
Using AI tooling to answer consumers’ more nuanced questions provides a win-win scenario for both brands and customers. And from an SEO perspective, since, in many cases, the content to answer these nuanced questions doesn’t yet exist, marketers who create content for these niche longtail queries will have an easier time ranking on legacy search engines like Google and Bing. As a result, when LLMs like ChatGPT scrape Google or Bing’s pages in response to a user’s prompt, they’re likely to use this content as a citation, earning more visibility for the brand that created it.
The shift from searching on search engines to searching on LLMs is already underway, and the window to secure top spots is closing fast. In a world where an AI answer might only feature three recommendations, the brands that claim those positions early will dominate awareness, trust, and conversions.
Kevin Kruse is the Founder + CEO of LEADx, scaling and sustaining leadership behaviors with behavioral nudges, micro-learning, and live cohort-based workshops. Kevin is also a New York Times bestselling author of Great Leaders Have No Rules, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management, and Employee Engagement 2.0.