Is Generative Engine Optimization the future of Search Engine Optimization?

The gradual adoption of AI, and more specifically Large Language Models, in our daily lives, is set to massively reshape the Search landscape. We are witnessing a reshuffling of the cards between platforms, with the emergence of new players.

But is Search Engine Optimization, with its 35 years of history, doomed to disappear, dethroned by a new discipline, Generative Engine Optimization? GEO is the process of optimizing an entity (a brand, products, concepts, people or ideas) so that it appears in the responses generated by artificial intelligence.

Or are SEO and GEO two connected and complementary disciplines?

SEO responds to the functionality of ‘discoverability’ of sites. GEO goes far beyond the website, working on brand recognition and shaping the training data extracted by AI.

Integrating Generative Engine Optimization into your SEO strategy does not mean turning the page on SEO. All the best practices for building content that is relevant and useful to your audience are still relevant and shouldn't disappear any time soon.

But let's just consider that your content now has another audience: the AI that powers Generative Search.

So, let's look at what's changing, and what's not about to.

Traditional search is based on three pillars:

Crawlability: the ability of sites to encourage and optimize the circulation of search bots.

Indexability: the ability of content to be identified as relevant in terms of search intentions and therefore to be indexed.

Rankability: the site's performance in being positioned on the results pages alongside other sites.

But AI-based search is now introducing a new pillar: Retrievability.

Retrievability is the effectiveness with which AI can access information about your brand, interpret it and prioritize it when developing responses.

As Crystal Carter, SEO Communications Manager at Wix Studio explains:

“As SEOs, we do not need to abandon the tactics we’ve always relied on, but we do need to evolve them. Where in the past we looked at crawlability, indexability, and stopped at rankability, we now need to add in retrievability. That is, taking extra steps to make sure that core information about our brands is available, accessible, and prioritized for LLMs.”

You might think that appearing at the top of traditional search results automatically means visibility in generative AI models.

But it's not that simple.

In fact, it's crucial for LLMs that rely on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which combines the best of two AI worlds:

- information retrieval (in real time, based on up-to-date and contextualized web content, hence the term Retrieval)

- and content generation from data in its learning corpus.

RAG enables the model to ‘consult’ a database, a corpus of external documents or news items in real time, to enrich its text generation. This search capability significantly improves the accuracy, relevance and richness of the content generated.

But LLMs build responses dynamically by recognizing contextualized patterns and establishing links between words, ideas and entities. This is forcing us to rethink what the term ‘authority’ really means in a landscape where AI is taking center stage.

For years, SEO has focused heavily on backlinks as the reference method for building authority (PageRank algorithm). High-quality links act as signals of trust, credibility, and relevance, directly influencing search engine rankings.

They still have value in the right contexts. But the way authority is calculated has changed fundamentally.

AI now recognizes authority through contextual relevance, entity associations and brand mentions in authoritative sources. And when these mentions multiply in influential thematic discussions and well-referenced datasets, they help shape the way AI understands a brand's expertise.

Technical SEO/GEO

There's no need to reinvent the wheel.

The fundamental technical principles that have prevailed until now simply need to be optimized to adapt to the way AI retrieves and processes information.

So, SEO remains the starting point for a good GEO strategy.

Here are a few rules that apply to both SEO and GEO:

Help AI to explore content easily.

Clearly authorize crawlers (Bytespider, Amazonbot, GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, etc.) via the robots.txt file. Depending on your strategy and depending on whether you prefer LLMs that cite sources and offer clickable links, or whether you don't want to appear when the LLM simply scrapes your content to train their model without any compensation, it is possible to block certain bots individually with a Disallow status in the robots.txt file.

example: User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: /

However, as these are only guidelines, it is more effective to use the .htaccess file to block malicious or non-compliant bots. Or rely on the emerging LLMs.txt file.

Regularly correct crawl problems such as dead links (404), minimize blocked resources (423) and inaccessible resources (403), and remove redirect chains and loops.

Make the most of strategically structured sitemaps.xml files to guide the AI towards the most relevant content.

Activate content indexability by declaring it in Google Search Console or via Bing's IndexNow (for Copilot, Perplexity and ChatGPT).

Keep data simple and clear.

Use simple HTML, limit the use of complex JavaScript.

Organize content clearly from a semantic point of view, so that AI can easily understand the pages.

Write clear and descriptive metadata to highlight the key subjects of the content.

Use structured data to improve recognition and retrieval.

Implement structured data vocabulary, Schema markup (schema.org) (Organization, Person, Product, Article, Recipe, Review, etc.) to strengthen relationships between entities and facilitate retrieval of key brand information.

Ensure that the brand and concepts are clearly defined in the markup to establish their relevance.

Give priority to site speed and performance.

Optimize images and scripts.

Achieve a satisfactory level of Core Web Vitals by ensuring that the site loads quickly and reliably: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift).

Activate browser caching.

Optimize multimedia resources for multimodal visibility.

Give images and videos descriptive file names and clear alternative text.

Exploit OpenGraph tags and Schema markup to improve visibility in AI previews.

Include accurate transcripts and subtitles for video content to facilitate processing.

In addition to SEO's EEAT quadriptych (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), there is GEO's PRA triptych (Presence + Recognition + Accessibility).

Presence: ensuring that the brand is constantly mentioned in the right places from which the data used to train the AIs is extracted.

Recognition: reinforcing the brand's credibility through consistent and relevant mentions, clear associations with authoritative entities so that the AI perceives the brand as a recognized voice that is itself an authority in its field.

Accessibility: structuring information about the brand on the website and on the web as a whole so that the AI can easily retrieve and prioritize the essential information about it.

As you can see, GEO covers a much wider area than SEO and involves a multitude of digital marketing channels: owned and paid media, blogs, forums, press relations, social networks, etc.

As part of a GEO strategy, each player will have to evolve his or her practices to meet the goals of visibility to AIs.

Who, in the organizations, will have to become the conductors of this change and define the best GEO practices for these media?

Here is an embryo of some twenty best practices that we have identified:

1.     Create content optimized for long-tail queries and question-based natural language. With the development of voice assistants, this should have been the case long ago.

2.     Refine and develop existing content to respond clearly, concisely, and completely to user queries and intentions.

3.     Regularly review AI-generated responses around your main topics to identify changes in user intent and context.

4.     Identify and fill content gaps based on AI's current understanding of those topics.

5.     Map the core entities in your field: sites, blogs, experts, comparisons, influential communities, etc.

6.     Integrate Social Listening for GEO purposes.

7.     Identify semantic competitors that are not competitors (keyword gap).

8.     Obtain links from them to reinforce the way AI associates related entities (backlink gap).

9.     Create links to authoritative sources recognized by the AI. Cite them to establish contextual associations.

10.  Publish original research and data-supported reports to gain citations and mentions.

11.  Highlight quotes and expert opinions to reinforce the authority of your ideas.

12.  Create informative content that is clearly structured: comparative studies, bulleted lists, FAQs, instructions, tables, etc.

13.  Avoid bombastic turns of phrase, buzzwords, empty words, and AI-generated content.

14.  Monitor and invest in platforms such as Reddit, Quora, Github... and niche forums.

15.  Monitor the content that is already appearing in the LLM results, keep it up to date and rework its internal meshing to highlight other content.

16.  Optimize Wikipedia presence to ensure accuracy of content and reference credible external sources.

17.  Contribute to Wikidata.

18.  Actively manage the Google MyBusiness profile to strengthen the brand's presence in Google's Knowledge Graph.

19.  Measure traffic from LLMs using regular expressions (regex) in GA4 (.*gpt.*|.*chatgpt.*|.*openai.*|.*neeva. |.writesonic.*|.*nimble.*|.*outrider.*|.*perplexity.*|.*google.*bard.*|.*bard.*|.*edgeservices.*|.*gemini.*google.*|.*copilot.*...)

GA4 graph showing the growth of AI-generated traffic

20.  If your site is interfaced with a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) platform, set up fields to collect UTM parameters. Ask customers whose source utm_ corresponds to an LLM to find out which prompt they used.

Finally, SEO and GEO are not such distinct disciplines. They are two components of your brand's visibility in a landscape where AI's share will grow over time.

On a sound SEO foundation, GEO will emerge to amplify your brand's reach through generative search experiences.

Don't expect to be able to ‘hack’ AIs - their algorithms aren't transparent, and it wouldn't be sustainable anyway. Instead, show up authentically, consistently, and strategically in places where your audience already trusts you.

Let AI discover you through meaningful conversations, relevant context, and valuable content. It's not just about optimization anymore, it's about reputation building on a grand scale.