Goodbye Keywords, Hello Context: Navigating the Shift from SEO to GEO

For the last few decades, whenever someone needed an answer to something they didn’t know, the response was simple: “Google it.” That phrase was shorthand for the way we discovered, learned, and made decisions online. But digital discovery is entering a new chapter. Instead of sifting through pages of blue links, people are now turning to AI engines to get their answers. And not just a random answer, but a well-researched, straightforward, and fast answer. As this shift continues to catch on with users (aka. potential customers), the way brands show up in AI answers is becoming as important as how they once ranked on search engines. The old playbook for getting visibility is changing, and marketers are taking note.

At CōLab, WestCap's in-house marketing and design studio, we’ve worked with several of our portfolio companies and growth-stage startups that told us they’re drowning in advice about digital discovery with the “takeover” of AI. That ultimately became my inspiration in putting together this simplified guide. My intention is to help cut through the noise, explain today’s must-know Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) basics, and highlight how we can all start adapting our marketing for an AI-first search era. Think of this as a working doc, because let’s be honest, we’re all testing, learning, and adapting in real time as things will continue to change in this space. Let’s dive in.

The Evolution of Search

For decades, companies invested significant resources to their website links on the first page of Google search results – a practice we know as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The more successful you were at achieving this goal, the more clicks you drove to your site, the more customers you would convert, and the more you’d improve your rankings. It was a virtuous circle.

But now, users aren’t perusing and clicking through search results one by one. Instead, they’re opting to get a single, synthesized answer on AI engines like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity or You.com without ever leaving the page or app they’re on. Which means that instead of optimizing to capture user clicks, marketers now have to also think about a new audience: AI.

AI has quickly proven to users that it can be fast, conversational, helpful, and most importantly, change customer behaviors and expectations.

So, it’s safe to say, search is shifting fast. According to Gartner, by 2026, 25% of traditional search traffic will vanish as users move away from search engines and towards AI chatbots to get the information they’re looking for.

Defining GEO

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is about making sure your brand is the trusted, cited source behind the answers that AI engines give to your potential customers. When someone asks, “What’s the best language tutoring platform for kids?” you want the AI’s summary to mention your company (and not your competitor).

The silver lining in this shift is that GEO builds on everything we’ve learned about site structure, content, and authority, but happens to cater more specifically to AI and the way it surfaces answers.

If your brand’s information online is outdated, incomplete, or contradicted by sources that search engines or AI rank more highly, there’s a real risk that these systems will surface old or incorrect details about your business as fact—or leave your brand out of the conversation entirely. Similarly, if negative feedback or outdated reviews appear more frequently than positive ones, those impressions can also be echoed in AI responses, regardless of your efforts in traditional SEO. To be recognized and referenced by AI, marketers need to ensure their messaging is current, factual, and reinforced wherever their brand appears online. This requires ongoing attention to both the substance and technical presentation of your brand across the entire digital landscape.

Note: As you delve deeper into researching GEO, you may also find a lot of content around AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization). These are often used interchangeably, but it’s important to note that there are subtle differences. Whereas GEO focuses on being cited in AI-generated answers, AEO is about showing up as the direct answer in search engines, and LLMO is about making sure large language models understand and represent your brand accurately. In practice, all three types of optimizations are geared towards delivering the same outcome: Make your brand the trusted source in AI-driven results.

SEO vs. GEO: It’s Not a Replacement, It’s An Evolution

Don’t worry, GEO is not making SEO (or your current marketing strategy) obsolete. A technically sound, expedient, crawlable, authoritative website is still table stakes. Which means that the work that you’ve put into improving SEO for your brand is not going to waste. But there are some key high-level differences to call out.

And it’s worth noting that there is still upside if you’re an early adopter of GEO. Though it’s probably true that big incumbents have backlink advantages compared to younger brands, chances are high that they will be slower to adapt to the age of AI search. If you’re nimble and can execute quickly, you have a unique opportunity to optimize for these new strategies and become a go-to source for AI citations.

Getting started with GEO: How to Get Cited by AI

Before we get into the nitty gritty, it’s important to remind ourselves that we are only at the beginning stages of understanding GEO. As AI engines and their behavior keep evolving, so too will this guide.

That said, here are the core strategies I recommend to marketing leaders looking to improve GEO today:

Pillar 1: Make Content That’s Citable

Stop writing only for Google’s bots. Start writing for the AI that’s going to take what you say and summarize it to answer a specific question or request. That means:

• Directly Answer Questions: Structure content logically, especially in Q&A formats. Use clear, descriptive headings (H1, H2, H3) that state high volume and high value questions. Provide a concise, direct answer immediately following the heading, and then use the subsequent paragraphs to elaborate. This inverted pyramid structure makes it easy for AI to identify and extract the core answer.
• Embrace E-E-A-T: Show real Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. This means publishing original research, detailed case studies, and in-depth articles written by genuine subject matter experts whose credentials are listed in clear author biographies. It also means citing credible external sources to support your claims. Google's own guidelines have long emphasized helpful, reliable, people-first content, and this is now more critical than ever.
• Structure Matters: AI models are highly effective at parsing structured information. Incorporating bulleted lists, numbered lists, and data tables into your content makes it significantly easier for an AI to extract key points and repurpose them accurately.

Pillar 2: Build Up (and Clean Up) Your Digital Presence

Your brand is a collection of "entities". Entities are specific things (e.g. a person, company, product, place, event, or concept) that an AI stores and then uses to connect together to help build up its knowledge graph for real life things, such as your company or brand. This means that you need to keep track of all the entities related to your brand wherever they may appear, even if it’s not on your own website. Some of the most important examples would be on:

• Third-Party Platforms: Make sure your information on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase, Google Knowledge Graph, Pitchbook etc., are accurate and robust.
• News Publications: A recent Muck Rack report showed that AI systems prioritize well-known and generally trusted media sources. 27% of links cited by AI are journalistic, with Reuters, Associated Press, Financial Times being some of the top-cited sources.
• Review Sites: AI scrapes review sites like Trustpilot, App store reviews and BBB for both quantitative scores and qualitative sentiment. For B2B companies, sites like G2, Capterra, Clutch are also important considerations.
• Social Platforms and Communities: AIs are now reading content on Reddit, Quora, Youtube, gaming platforms (Discord, Twitch, etc.), social media platforms (LinkedIn, Meta, TikTok, etc.) and industry forums to judge user sentiment. Participate authentically, because helpful, expert commentary gets reflected back by AI.
• Co-Citations: A powerful GEO signal is being mentioned in the same context as your key competitors. Proactively seek inclusion in industry roundups, e.g. "Best X Software" listicles, and comparison articles on reputable tech blogs and news sites. This helps the AI correctly categorize your brand and understand its position in the market.

Pillar 3: Get Technically Ready for AI Crawlers

You can have the best content in the world, but if AI can’t see it, you’re invisible.

• Implement Schema Markup: Schema is structured data you add to your website's code to explicitly tell AI models what your content is about. It's like translating your webpage into a language machines can easily understand. Implementing key schema types such as Organization, Product, Article, FAQPage, and Person is a critical first step.
• Ensure Crawlability and Accessibility: Your most authoritative content must be easily accessible to AI crawlers. This means avoiding practices that hide content, such as burying it in PDFs, placing it behind mandatory lead-capture forms, or embedding it within complex JavaScript. If key text isn't present in the initial HTML of the page's source code, it may be invisible to an AI.
• Prioritize Core Web Vitals: Foundational SEO principles like fast page load speeds and mobile-friendliness remain critical. A website that provides a poor user experience for humans is also considered low-quality by the crawlers that power AI engines.

Recognizing and Managing Risk in the Age of AI

Although AI can “read,” process, and synthesize an immense amount of information across the internet, large language models aren’t perfect (Surprise!). They can be prone to factual inaccuracies, inherent biases, and hallucinations, resulting in instances where they generate plausible-sounding but entirely false information.

This poses a notable threat to brand visibility and reputation. What if an AI incorrectly states your brand message, misrepresents your product features, or associates your business with negative events? To stay on top of this, I strongly recommend proactive monitoring (and creative prompting) to regularly audit how major AIs portray your brand. This can be as easy as you going directly to these AI engines and asking “What is [Brand]?”, “How does [Brand] compare to [Competitor]?”, and “What are the reviews for [Brand/Products]?”. Then, be sure to score the accuracy and sentiment of the answers and trace citations back to their sources.

Alternatively, you can engage with a third-party GEO partner to help you continuously monitor, track, and identify opportunities for how your brand shows up on these AI engines. There are also existing SEO companies rolling out AI specific products. See which solution makes the most sense based on the results of your auditing.

A Sample GEO Roadmap

Depending on your company’s size, scale, and appetite for change, the timeline you end up with can vary considerably. To keep things easy, below is a conservative and simplified roadmap to help kickstart your planning.

1st Sprint: Assess and Address (Short-term: 30-60 days)

• Audit:
  • Your site for E-E-A-T
  • Your brand’s visibility, sentiment, accuracy, and preferred citations on AI engines
  • Your competitors visibility, sentiment, and citation sources on AI engines
  • Your site’s technical SEO foundation
• Implement quick wins to improve E-E-A-T
• Identify and build out content against the top 2-3 high value queries where competitors are weak
• Update schema markup for Organization, Person, Product
• Fix and improve existing technical SEO foundation

Goal: Improve foundation for AI and mitigate immediate brand risks.

2nd Sprint: Implement and Establish (Mid-term: 2-6 Months)

• Expand schema markup to include GEO recommendations (e.g. FAQ Page, How- To, Industry-specific articles, etc.)
• Expand AI monitoring to include product categories and capture trends
• Identify and build out content against the highest-value queries for your industry
• Create content clusters on your site about relevant topics to show your company’s depth of expertise. Go deep into topics versus covering a wide range of topics
• Seed your authority signals: Coordinate with your communications/PR team around media placements. Reach out for inclusion in industry roundups and listicles. Start actively contributing to community forums.

Goal: Win early, high-impact citations and start building authority.

3rd Sprint: Monitor and Refine (Long-term: 6+ Months)

• Integrate GEO into all new content workflows
• Systematically generate reviews on key third-party sites
• Expand your authority signals by building out and actively monitoring brand presence across relevant platforms
• Formalize your company as being a Subject Matter Expert (SME) across a range of content relevant to your business. Continue growing out original research, industry reports, cross-promotion with credentialed authors, etc.
• Invest in tools to track GEO metrics over time, ideally integrated into your internal dashboard and marketing goals.
  • Key metrics to focus on: share of answer, citation frequency, sentiment of mentions, accuracy of brand info, AI referral traffic, and entity association

Goal: Establish broad authority and make GEO part of your core marketing DNA.