What is the best tool you can use to prepare for A.I. generative search? A search engine optimization expert, because SEO = GEO 1.0.
That’s right: SEO is the closest discipline to GEO! Good, experienced organic-search professionals are the nearest thing to A.I. search optimizers in this new age of artificial intelligence.
Yup, I’m writing this piece, I’m an SEO expert, and I might be a bit biased about the SEO-GEO connection. But please bear with me. I bet the logic will resonate with you.
In the first place, the foundation of generative engine optimization (GEO) is SEO. It’s what I mean by “GEO 1.0”: It’s the first strategy when you start “GEOing.” That’s because search engine optimization best practices have been refined and have grown in sophistication over decades with one simple purpose: To help search engines, especially Google, to better understand websites like yours in order to get its individual webpages to rank better in organic search results. As a result, SEO managers and directors around the world are stepping up to GEO. Their chief marketing officers and product executives are looking to them too.
That means that the actual, existing, well-known SEO best practices that help your site to rank high in Google can also help Google Gemini (which Google describes as “our largest and most capable A.I. model“) to better understand your product, content, brand, landing, and other webpages for its A.I. search results too.
It also means you probably need an SEO consultant for the new GEO best practices to boot.
It’s called “A.I. SEO” because it’s SEO for A.I.
Yup, many folks call GEO “A.I. SEO.” That’s because it is inherent. They want to “do SEO” for the artificial intelligence bots that are out there crawling websites just like Googlebot, Bingbot, and the other traditional search engine user agents that have been crawling the 1.13 billion websites around the world and then using the data they find to comprise their massive databases, to run those data through their incredibly complex algorithms, and then to index all of the most pertinent pages for 2+ trillion yearly web searches.
Getting crawled isn’t the only goal, however. According to Search Engine Land, integrating GEO with SEO plays out like this:
- Crawlability, indexability, and rankability are traditional SEO goals to which
- Retrievability is now added as a main GEO concern, plus
- Brand mentions and additional GEO factors.
I think it’s helpful to illustrate that first comes traditional SEO. Second, retrievability is being explained by some as new to generative engine optimization, but that’s not accurate because experienced SEO experts have known for many years that Google has had limited capacity (ability?) to render JavaScript on websites worldwide. If your JavaScript was not rendered, content and links within it were missed. Therefore, good SEO experts have advocated in-house for “retrievability” as part of doing their jobs well. Naturally, that skill set transfers nicely to GEO.
As alluded in the preceding paragraph, “A.I. SEO” can also be called generative search optimization (GSO). A generative search is one that is rooted in the large language models (LLMs) of A.I. It is a “generative engine” instead of a keyword-seeking search engine like the beloved Google search box you likely grew up using. With that in mind, you can see how the premises and recommendations of search engine optimization can very logically benefit this new age of search engines called “generative engines.”
Yes, your SEO contractor is an “A.I. SEO tool”
It’s O.K. You can call me a tool. : )
I am a proud worker bee in the organic search hive. I am a Swiss Army knife with many extendable content-SEO blades and technical-SEO gadgets in the survival kit required for the wilds of Google search. And I am an optimizing, fits-all socket wrench in your web-development toolbox. I am a search engine optimization professional with more than two decades of experience working with some of the country’s best brands to evolve their websites and to keep improving their rankings in search engines. As a contractor available to partner with you, I am a human tool that now knows generative engine optimization and layers it on top of those 20+ years of SEO success.
Here are some key ways in which this SEO contractor does the GEO work for you:
- Leverages SEO expertise for generative search (and organic) results.
- Builds on that foundation with GSO-specific tactics.
- Evolves and grows with your A.I. strategy as we continue to learn.
- Delivers actionable data insights and reporting about A.I. performance.
- Expands capabilities with artificial intelligence itself, as well as GSO applications.
This one tool can do all of that.
This tool also multiplies ROI across channels
The return on investment from making use of your friendly SEO consultant for generative engine optimization is more than doubled. You win in A.I. searches from optimizing for them. You win again in higher-ranking pages in organic search. But you also win these additional, very tangible returns too:
- Higher conversion rates: SEO helps to reduce bounce rate and to increase page load time, which has a direct correlation to better conversion rates.
- Improved PPC page authority: Your PPC landing pages benefit from the keyword research and content depth emphasized in SEO content development.
- Better content credibility: In the age of A.I., the expertise and quality of your site content is one of the most important ways in which your brand can excel.
- Growing brand awareness: A.I. bots learn about your brand’s reputation and authoritativeness based on how it is discussed on other sites.
- More friendly UX and tech stack: Traffic landing on your website from any channel benefits from the technical SEO enhancements like UX-centric Core Web Vitals.
SEO is organic and its returns are broad. The good thing is that strengthening your website’s SEO with the express purpose of benefitting in both generative search and organic search can be your focus, while all of the additional returns on your investment are knock-on wins in the background.
