Generative engine optimisation (GEO): misinformation and mythbusting
GEO… have you heard of it?
The answer to that is probably yes. Because those three little letters have been on the lips of every marketing, PR and SEO person for the last 12 months and more.
They’ve been the subject of countless LinkedIn posts, blogs, articles, features and commentary. Everyone has something to say about Generative Engine Optimisation – we’ve even written a few ourselves.
But the big thing about GEO and all of these insights and opinions being offered up is that most of them are either misinformed or outright incorrect… and it’s creating something of a rift.
A rift in understanding, which, if you’re on the wrong side of, could end up pretty harmful. As it might lead you off-piste when it comes to your digital marketing strategies.
Which is why we’ve written this piece. To cut through the noise of all the online GEO chatter and give you a concise and concise signals and answers surrounding some of the most prevalent GEO misinformation you’ll come across.
This is the big one. But despite what the headlines and hot takes would have you believe, GEO is not replacing SEO.
This is one of the more potentially damaging pieces of misinformation out there. Becasue when you have reputable media outlets running articles with headlines like ‘Forget SEO, Welcome to the world of GEO, ‘ it creates an ecosystem which makes us feel we have to choose between one or the other.
That’s not how it works and it’s this narrative that’s the most harmful, because it creates a false choice dilemma. In this particular case, it’s the logical fallacy that you have to choose between either SEO or GEO.
The fallacy is then negatively reinforced by layering the argument completely in favour of GEO – but without a full understanding of what it is and how it works.
In short, people on the internet are telling you to ditch SEO for GEO – they don’t understand how the two are linked.
When the terribly clever folk were building Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity… what do you think they trained it on?
They trained it on web-scale data, which means a lot of Google-indexed content. These tools are still using web-scale data to provide responses. So all that SEO content that it’s pulling from is kind of important.
More and more people are using AI tools as search alternatives; this is true.
Where the truth gets somewhat lost is in playing up the scale of this growth. Some paint the picture of Google being a quickly sinking ship, its search dominance dropping like a stone to the bottom of the ocean.
Now Google has lost some of its dominance. Its market share dropped to below 90% for the first time in 15 years. But 89% market share is still billions and billions of searches. ChatGPT is on the rise, but 17% market share is paltry in comparison.
These patterns may continue; they may not. The most dangerous this we can do is to assume one way or another. The best thing to do is to react to the here-and-now, while keeping one eye on the future.
Don’t lose sight of the current reality, that Google still has a lot of power and search volume isn’t tanking quite as hard as sensationalist LinkedIn posts would have you believe.
Now this one is 100% true. AI and LLMs are indeed having a huge negative impact on web traffic.
In Google, thanks to the introduction of Google’s AI Overviews, zero click searches are on the rise.
A zero click search, if you don’t already know, is a search query which doesn’t result in a click to any sourced website. There are two reasons why this would happen.
One is that the search itself did yield the appropriate outcomes and was abandoned. The other is that the searcher did get the answers they needed, but from other sources.
Pre-GEO, those ‘other sources’ could have been featured snippets, knowledge panels, people also ask. All these various features, bells and whistles that Google implemented to enrich search, whether that actually happened or not is a debate for another time.
But in a GEO age, the AI overview is pulling focus. Here’s what the data shows:
These numbers are a bit of a problem for all parties.
Zero-click journeys mean people aren’t getting into the traditional search engine results, meaning they aren’t converting into visitors and leads.
So, your traditional search visibility and SEO strategies are compromised – this is where the GEO visibility conversation rightly takes root.
The second issue is one of Google’s own making. Because this also applies to paid search. By keeping attention within the overview itself, Google is compromising its own PPC income stream – an issue they’re rapidly trying to fix by deploying ads in the overview itself, though it’s very early days for this
The argument being made, over and over again, is that you should abandon keywords in favour of contextual meaning.
Logically, linguistically, literally, this is a completely flawed argument.
It’s incorrect to say GEO doesn’t use keywords at all. It would be more accurate to say that GEO is not so rigid in specific keyword matching. But they are still present, viable and useful only in a different way.
Case and point, research is showing that when using AI tools, searches and questions get longer, and when they get longer they get more complex. In response to this, a term you might hear being used is the ‘query fan out technique’
In technical terms, this means that multiple, contextualised searches across several subtopics specific to that search are being run. In Leyman’s terms, it’s answering multiple questions, across various search intents, all at once. Something like this:
Seven word search (Google Search)
What’s the best seafood restaurant in London.
20+ word search (AI)
Can you recommend five highly rated seafood restaurants in London. Lobster and mussels must feature on the menu, outdoor seating would be preferred, they must take walk-ins and have a broad wine selection.
The ani-keyword argument is grounded in the theory that keywords as a sole tactic of search visibility won’t work in GEO. That is correct.
But in trying to create nuance, it actually misses more than it answers.
A more apt description would be to say that you need MORE than just keywords.
It isn’t enough to just say ‘we are the best seafood restaurant in London’ over and over and over again, trying to game the search system.
It’s about showing, not telling.
So, this is the million-dollar question… when people are talking about GEO strategies, what do they actually mean?
There’s a lot of jargon out there, but not a whole lot of clear answers. So here they are.
The three things that you should be doing to ensure you’re featuring in AI results.
Earned Media: quality, consistent media coverage in relevant and trusted outlets earns you critical brand brownie points. Offering signals to LLMs that you are to be trusted and therefore surfaced.
EEAT-driven owned content: creating and publishing all manner of content that leverages your expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness,
Technical structures: clean site structures, good UX, readability, load times, mobile friendliness and accessibility as well as coherent AI-friendly data structures and schema markups.
Now those versed in contemporary SEO might look at these things and think, wait, that looks familiar. If you aren’t, let me give you the insight.
Earned media, EEAT and clean technical structured data – they’re fundamentals of SEO
So, in truth, SEO and GEO have a lot more in common than those on the internet would have you believe.
What works for SEO also works for GEO.
There is no SEO vs GEO debate. You don’t and shouldn’t have to decide between one or the other. As we said at the top, this is entirely a false choice dilemma.
This isn’t a divergent moment. It isn’t a question of SEO or GEO.
The two are converging. It should be SEO AND GEO, and those who would tell you anything otherwise – like how SEO doesn’t factor in things like entity association, trust signals and semantic depth – have an outmoded view of SEO and how it fits into digital PR.
This entire debate around generative AI search results fails to understand how integrated digital communications already answers many of the apparent problems that GEO causes.
So the false choice dilemmas, the LinkedIn hot takes, the countless blogs and features attempting to explain away concepts that are already very well established.
It all comes from a completely one-sided point of view. People who’ve experienced SEO as a keyword stuffing, word matching exercise, designed to game search engines and push SERP position and only that.
This one-sidedness fails to take into account that this is one aspect of a broader digital PR strategy.
We can see the numbers and the data. Reputable sources like Ahrefs are showing us, as clear as day, that earned media and EEAT content are the two biggest drivers of visibility in AI search. Which we know, because they also drive SEO performance.
SEO hasn’t been about who has the most keywords for a very long time. It’s been about quality, relevance and consistency across earned media and owned channels.
That’s the face of digital PR now. GEO is just another aspect of it.
AMBITIOUS by name and by nature, we are a PR led communications agency that delivers integrated strategic communications - online, offline and everywhere in-between. Proud to be crowned winners of The Drum Magazine's RAR Best PR Agency of the Year.
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