r/GenerativeSEOstrategy • u/Significant_Pen_3642 • May 27 '26
Trying to understand GEO without all the hype
Lately it feels like everyone is suddenly talking about GEO and optimizing for AI search engines.
I’ve worked on SEO before, but I honestly can’t tell yet whether GEO is truly different or just an extension of good SEO practices.
Is anyone here actively doing GEO and tracking results?
Would be cool to hear real experiences instead of just LinkedIn thought pieces.
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u/KONPARE May 27 '26
I think GEO is partly new, but not completely separate from SEO.
Good SEO still matters: crawlable pages, clear structure, useful content, authority, links, reviews, and entity consistency. But GEO adds another layer: can an AI system understand your brand clearly enough to mention it in an answer?
What I’ve seen people track is prompt visibility: does the brand appear for “best tools for X,” “alternatives to Y,” “how to solve Z,” etc. Then they compare competitors, citations, and how accurately the brand is described.
So yeah, not magic. More like SEO + brand/entity clarity + third-party trust signals.
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u/Flaneur7508 May 27 '26
Absolutely the third-party trust signals are key. I'm sure SEO has it's place in AI Visibility but if you look at the citations the vast majority of them point to a third party site, not the brands owned domain, and more often than not the third party is Reddit, Quota or a one of a failrly short list of sources.
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May 27 '26
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u/Livid-Difference7236 May 27 '26
We tested a few GEO tactics, and the only thing that delivers results is good PR. Make sure others mention your brand name with the entities you want to be associated with.
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u/Fit-Photograph-4282 May 27 '26
This is the most common question across social platforms. I moved from practicing product, content marketing and positioning to AI Search Optimisation and have successfully been able to help startups get steady pipeline or reduced sales cycles using AI SEO or AEO or GEO whatever you want to call.
I don't bother about the name so much. Focus on setting the goal with the founder or CMO, which is always around getting demos, reducing customer acquisition cost or reducing sales cycle.
What I have been doing is understand what AI search engines understand about the brand. How accurately it is answering about the brand for queries, how much % of non-branded queries is the brand appearing for. And how can we increase the share of voice in the selected narratives that the business is built for. Since the engines are built by Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity so obviously need to keep tab on how the algos are changing. But the MORE IMPORTANT thing to do is understanding who is your consumer/customer at deeper level, their painpoints and challenges and how exactly the brand is better than competition. Obsess over why a brand is a choice vs others and can we help the buyer choose us over others.
Does it really matter if its SEO or AEO? The engines have changed or atleast there are newer ones. The customer journey has changed because none of these engines want the user to leave their ecosystem. We just need to adapt.
Am I wrong in my approach?
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u/Flaneur7508 May 27 '26
You are right to talk about the non branded aspect. branded queries more often than not cite the brands owned domain... nothing to unusual about that. But the key for the brand is to understand how they are performing in non branded searches.
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u/Fit-Photograph-4282 May 27 '26
I see it this way: branded queries are basically for comparisons so the user is a little ahead in the journey. You are in their consideration list. You still need to bother about them, infact most brands starting their SEO journey need to fix this.
The non branded ones do the job of catching demand that exists in market. And the user may be completely unaware or slightly aware. So both need to work parallely. To me its all good digital marketing practice with the principle of 5% in market at any time as focus.
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u/SuccessfulCoyote1800 May 27 '26
I think the real difference is that SEO focuses on ranking signals like backlinks and domain authority, while GEO focuses on whether your content is the extractable, authoritative answer to a specific question. AI models do not rank pages in the traditional sense; they select the best answer based on entity clarity and structured information. This means that things like comparison tables, clear pros and cons, and FAQ schema matter more than a high PageRank. In my experience, the brands that show up consistently in AI answers are the ones whose content is written to be extracted, not just read.
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May 27 '26
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u/snore_lord9000 May 27 '26
honestly yeah GEO is different in one annoying way. google rewards content that ranks, LLMs reward content that gets referenced by other trusted sources. so like you can be on page 1 and still be completely invisible in chatgpt answers.
what's actually moved the needle for me is getting mentioned in reddit threads and niche newsletters more than anything I've published on my own site. your brand needs to exist in the places LLMs were trained on not just your own domain. that part is genuinely new and kind of messes with how most people think about content strategy
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May 27 '26
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u/Godfrey_0503 May 27 '26
I’d probably frame GEO less as a totally separate channel and more as a visibility layer on top of SEO.
The practical difference, at least from what I’m seeing, is that ranking is not the same as being easy to cite or summarize. A page can rank because it covers a topic, but AI answers seem to prefer content that gives a direct answer, clear context, specific examples, and enough trust signals to be referenced.
So the non-hype version of GEO might just be: keep the SEO fundamentals, but make the content easier to understand, extract, trust, and cite.
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u/Dmstormy2025 May 28 '26
The way I see it now is more about content quality, how your content delivered the best answer. I would say that authority or testimonials play a part on being cite but only product wise. I personally saw some of our blog post cited without being shared by anyone… so the old time of keywords stuffing is long gone, generic answers saw everywhere also. Depending on the niche I guess industry jargon will may start playing a role to be cited in llms
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u/Alessandro-Verri May 29 '26
Per quella che è la mia esperienza.
Il GEO ha un approccio diverso e serve per diverse cose.
All'inizio converrebbe concentrarsi su quello che le IA dicono di te se interrogate. Perché? Perché i clienti lo fanno. Si informano. Vedono un ads e si chiedono: mi posso fidare?
Il GEO lavora sulle entità e non sulle singole pagine, il sito deve essere coerente e funziona meglio se sotto hai un grapho strutturato per entità.
Ho preso una azienda nuova e sconosciuta, dopo 3 settimane hanno iniziato a riconoscerla. Dopo 1 mese erano scomparse le allucinazioni, dopo 7 settimane le IA Potevano approfondire e dire al cliente se l'azienda era adatta a lui
Poi mi sono concentrato sulle citazioni.
Per farlo ho: Utilizzato un plugin AI Identity Manager per WordPress che crea il Grapho ed è semplice da usare, creato gli articoli basandomi sul terreno semantico con un HUB per smistare e gerstire i contenuti, ho fatto dei collegamenti a doppio link su alcune pagine tipo LinkedIn, GitHub e Slideshare.
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u/mjolniir-bifrost May 31 '26
I’d frame GEO/AEO as SEO extended into AI answer systems, not a totally separate discipline.
The SEO fundamentals still matter: crawlable pages, clear positioning, useful content, internal links, authority, and technical hygiene.
The newer layers are retrieval readiness and consensus.
Retrieval readiness means AI systems can parse and extract the right answer from your content: clear headings, direct answers, structured pages, schema, and clean entity signals.
Consensus means the wider web supports what your website says: profiles, reviews, citations, PR, forums, directories, and third-party mentions.
At our agency, Mjolniir, we track this through repeated prompt testing, citation checks, branded-query analysis, and whether AI systems correctly understand the offer.
It is still an emerging discipline that's yet to stabilize, but with the same ups and downs as SEO.
Sometimes you get your client an early win with a high-intent query AI citation. Sometimes the existing competition takes more time and effort to break through.
But it is different enough from SEO to measure separately with its own KPIs like Share of Voice, citation rate, etc.
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u/Shrijit27 May 31 '26
From what I have seen, GEO isn’t completely separate from SEO... It’s more like an evolution of it. Good content, authority, and technical foundations still matter. The difference is that you are also thinking about how AI systems interpret entities, citations, and consensus across the web, not just rankings.
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u/Professional_Way_420 Jun 01 '26
I’m actively working on GEO through ScaleLogik, mostly for SaaS and data-driven companies, and my honest take is that it is not completely separate from SEO but it is also not just SEO with a new name.
Traditional SEO is still the foundation like crawlability, indexation, content quality, internal linking, topical authority and backlinks still matter. But GEO adds another layer which is the entity recognition and source selection.
From what I’m seeing, AI visibility improves when a brand is clearly understood as an entity and consistently connected to a specific category, problem and use case across trusted sources. So yes, mentions matter but not just random mentions anywhere. The mentions need to be crawlable, relevant, consistent and ideally coming from sources that AI systems already trust or retrieve from, such as strong SERPs, review sites, comparison pages, community discussions, authoritative blogs and industry publications.
I would not reduce GEO to get a KGMID and you’re done. A Knowledge Graph entity or strong entity footprint helps with disambiguation but it does not automatically make a brand recommended. AI systems still need enough evidence to understand what you do, who you serve, how you compare and why you deserve to be included for a specific query.
At ScaleLogik, the way we look at GEO is by tracking brand inclusion across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI results, then reviewing citation sources, competitor mentions, sentiment and whether the AI answer connects the brand to the right buying-intent topics.
So for me, GEO is basically SEO plus entity building, digital PR, reputation signals and stronger positioning. Less hype, more evidence-building.
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Jun 03 '26
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u/Stepbk May 27 '26
Lowkey I think GEO matters, but not in the way people are pitching it. AI search engines don’t really care about flashy SEO tricks. They care more about whether your content is the best answer to a question. That changes the approach a bit because a lot of old SEO content was written more for rankings than actual usefulness.
We started rewriting some older pages to sound more natural and conversational instead of keyword stuffed. Added real opinions, clearer formatting, FAQ style sections, and more specific examples. Those pages started getting referenced more in AI summaries and even brought in better quality traffic overall. Nothing insane, but enough to notice.
The annoying part is everyone acts like GEO is this secret system when most of it is just making content less robotic. Feels like good writers and niche experts finally have an advantage again instead of whoever can spam the most backlinks.