There’s a lot of noise surrounding AI. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and others are now commonplace. If grandma knows about it then surely it’s time to take notice. I wrote about our own AI SEO shift around this time last year and it’s only increased its influence since then.
We’ve been working in the digital space for a while and AI is something we have tested heavily and embraced in our service offerings. For us it really seems an extension of what we specifically do (vs social media which for us did not really play to our skillset and to be honest the desire to incorporate it wasn’t there) but AI, while there may be some inherent long-term and social issues, is for the most part incredibly useful and powerful and well, pretty awesome.
Our services have always centered around supporting businesses and organizations who want or need to be visible to their audience online. We support this by creating strong digital foundations with a critical eye on SEO and building from there. A while ago we made the realization that a certain part of our clients audience was using Ai Agents as part of their research process so we really had to dig in and see how to make that work for them. The industry was calling it various names but the ones that stuck were GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization).
GEO seemed the closest to SEO essentially involving being included in a search or prompt response that includes some specific query a user is looking for. Think ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini.
AEO seemed a subset of that and focuses mostly on just answering a specific question. Think Siri, Alexa, Featured Snippets.
The question for us became, how do we get our clients to be the one or ones that they use to provide the answers. For us obviously experimentation and continued learning in our industry is and has always been second nature if you want to succeed. Some things work, other things don’t and quite often, you can’t even rely on experts to provide accurate answers.
Our Current Take
SEO itself has evolved considerably through the years and our techniques with it. GEO is just an extension of that. We moved from talking about “keywords”, to “keyword phrases” to “entities” and “query fans”. We’ve always talked about “trust” and “authority”. We’ve always talked about having a strong product and letting everyone know about it. We’ve always promoted a strong foundation that will support you. That’s all effective SEO. We learned that GEO doesn’t work without SEO activity as we know it. AEO is useless without SEO. We definitely saw greater impact on those client projects that already had great brand management, managed online sentiment, leveraging brand connections…things that were perhaps a little more optional with SEO (or occurred more organically) became a must-do.
Focusing on results is (and technically always has been) the non negotiable here.
So yes there are things we can do to increase your chances of appearing in a ChatGPT prompt, but don’t start thinking that it’s going to be your next big answer…at least not yet. Google search still dominates all of our client stats. It still produces results so be a little wary of doing anything too drastic.
The above reflects a client’s actual data which has typically been strong on SEO with a few little GEO tweaks along the way.
The above reflects a client who decided to move in a different direction.
It’s certainly a challenge not to jump all-in on AI, we leverage it for several tools we’ve built, we’ve implemented internal processes, we leverage it for design, development, data…it has a lot of uses. Mostly effective. But it can also be wrong, bloated, outdated.
So What Can You Do?
You need to ensure there is the sound digital foundation that we need for traditional SEO. Strong website, good content, off website activity (backlinks and citations). But increasingly it’s about being more precise about answering the questions:
Who are you?
What do you do?
Where are you?
Who You Are? – “Digital Marketing Company” is pretty broad. A while back back we changed to “Technical SEO Company” which served us well for a while but now we need to decrease ambiguity even more. “Technical SEO, GEO and AEO Agency” might be a little more impactful.
What You do? – the main thing I’d suggest here is being concise and less cute. “We help grow businesses” is cute but either you’re going to ignored or lumped somewhere among the billion of companies to help grow businesses. “Email Marketing for Non Profits” will yield much greater impact.
Where you Are? – this is less about location (though that may be important for you) and more about the audience or industries you serve. Non Profits, Startups, SaaS. Make it clear that these represent the people you serve.
You need to use this to guide your activity on and off your website. When AI checks your company, your messaging needs to align. From there, it’s time to get busy. I’ve always said to clients they should be interested and interesting. Doing something cool? Write about it. Post it online. Do it in LinkedIn. Go on a podcast and talk about it. Just make to keep your messaging laser focused.
It’s a super interesting time in our professional lives, perhaps it has breathed a little life into our industry. But realistically, even since we’ve been in business, SEO has evolved, this is just continued evolution.
