Generative engine optimization (GEO) is taking hold across B2B and B2C businesses, but most companies are flailing about. Consider:
- 84 percent of marketers we surveyed say they’re confident they can shape AI answers, but
- 51 percent don’t think their strategy is right.
It’s important that your firm gets this right—companies that don’t embrace GEO are doomed to become invisible. Semrush surveyed B2B buyers who use AI for work, and 92 percent said AI influenced their vendor shortlist. If you don’t show up in the AI answer, someone may never find you.
The Clickpocalypse is here. Google’s blue links are going away. AI Overviews now correlate with a 58 percent lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page. And in just two years, the percentage of searches that don’t result in a click increased from 60.45 percent to 68.01 percent, the fastest acceleration of this phenomenon in the last decade.
This Guide will help you distinguish the signal from the noise so that your firm can succeed.
Why your firm should dramatically rethink your approach to marketing
You’re familiar with the line, “What got you here won’t get you there.”
Well, you can’t market your firm like it’s 2015 anymore.
Regardless of whether your firm has been heavily engaged in digital marketing or has relied completely on word-of-mouth referrals, AI search is an exciting new channel. Think of it as a source of digital referrals—meaning it scales way beyond however many lunches you can have with prospects.
The firms that set out on this journey will have an opportunity to realize aggressive growth. While your boutique consulting firm can’t imagine competing with Deloitte or McKinsey, those big firms are not that far ahead of you right now, simply because the race has just started. B2B buyers were asked what made a firm stand out when asking AI: 53 percent said a close match to their specific problem and 50 percent said a clear, detailed description of a firm’s work. Only 7 percent cited brand recognition. Being a big name alone will not carry you. But proving you can solve the problem can. You have the opportunity to show up beside the big firms as a credible alternative.
Plenty of people—most of them SEO professionals—will argue GEO is just the latest flavor of SEO. Our survey found that 56 percent of marketers are unsure how AI search optimization differs from SEO.
But, as preeminent SEO pro Mike King said, “The argument that AI Mode and AI Overviews are ‘just SEO’ is short-sighted at best and dangerously misinformed at worst. What this position gets wrong isn’t just technical nuance; it’s the complete misunderstanding of how these generative surfaces fundamentally differ from the retrieval paradigm that SEO was built on.”
Your SEO foundation matters, but what you do offsite to support GEO can be the difference between being cited and not.
Why AI search platforms can’t lose to search engines
AI search platforms are, very simply, a better experience than a search engine. If we’re friends and I ask you a question, you’re going to give me an answer. This is what large language models (LLMs) do. If I ask the same question of a search engine, it’s going to give me 10 options to choose from, four of which it’s being paid to tell me about. Some friend!
Search engines invented metrics like PageRank to assign credibility to a website; LLMs infer credibility by corroborating sources across the internet. LLMs interpret context, nuance and intent and build an answer based on these factors, rather than keyword match. Further, LLMs synthesize their answers from multiple sources, as opposed to search engines trying to determine who the winner is.
These truths fundamentally change how people discover content and how it needs to be optimized.
Clinging to your current SEO strategy is a path to failure. There are some similarities, but as the chart below shows, GEO is fundamentally different in how you structure content, where you get that content published and what your goals are.
| ASPECT | SEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Goal | Rank higher in search engines | Be named and cited inside the answer |
| Audience | A ranking algorithm choosing 10 links | A model writing one answer (including on Google) |
| Primary Focus | Earn the click to your website | Be the answer, whether or not they click |
| Optimization Technique | Keywords, meta tags, backlinks, technical site health | Entity authority via earned media, clear factual descriptions, content a model can lift cleanly |
| Content Strategy | SEO-driven blogs, meta descriptions | Fact-rich, self-contained thought leadership |
| How You’re Chosen | Relevance, backlinks, domain authority | Match to the sub-questions the model generates, and how often credible third parties name you |
| Performance Metrics | Organic traffic, keyword rankings, CTR, bounce rate | Mentions, citations and recommendations |
| Traffic Profile | The bulk of your site traffic today | About .5 percent of traffic, but converts roughly 3x better in B2B |
| Longevity | Shifts with algorithm updates | Shifts with model updates |
| Tactics | Keyword optimization, link building | Media relations, entity consistency, earning a place in third-party roundups |
Where to focus first: Your website
No offense, but your website is likely built for yesterday.
LLMs parse, interpret and extract meaning. They are looking for clarity, authority and trustworthiness. If your website doesn’t provide these signals, you risk being invisible when a prospect asks ChatGPT, “Who should I trust to solve this problem?”
Your website must have a clear explanation of what you do. If your website says, for example, “Innovative solutions for today … and tomorrow,” you’ll lose. If your site says, “We’re a dependable and trusted technology solutions provider for the construction business,” you have a much better chance of being cited by LLMs.
Going deeper, you can’t just say how wonderful you are; you need to offer up proof—case studies, awards and thought leadership.
Completeness is critical. AI crawlers scan entire pages, but retrieval and citations happen to passages. So you need to write in self-contained chunks. Basically, each paragraph should work independently, and you should try to avoid overuse of pronouns or referencing other parts of the page. If an AI platform pulled one paragraph from one of your service pages, could it stand on its own without other context?
There is also a technical aspect to ensuring your website appeals to LLMs. It’s vitally important that your site loads quickly, is secure and is accessible to everyone. Behind the scenes, your team should use modern coding practices that signal authority and trust, like showing who wrote content, when it was last updated and linking to credible sources.
Marketing activities for AI visibility
As stated earlier, large language models pull from multiple sources in formulating their responses. They are searching for credibility (not the same as “domain authority” from the SEO era), which means your marketing is not only about your website—it’s about the entirety of your online presence. In other words, it’s finally time to deemphasize website traffic.
Moving on from strictly SEO activities toward GEO is a difficult change for anyone who has worked anywhere near marketing for the last 25 years. Many executives believe that “all you have to do is be on the first page of Google,” which is no longer true (if it ever was!). Semrush found that ChatGPT cites pages ranking beyond Google’s first two pages almost 90 percent of the time. But this doesn’t mean that rank has no value. Ahrefs found that 88 percent of ChatGPT citations are pulled from search.
How AI finds your firm
When someone asks AI a question about a problem your firm solves, the AI search platform searches in the moment, reads what it finds and writes an answer based on that information. Importantly, LLMs break a question into a bunch of narrower questions (query fan-out) and search for answers to those instead.
What gets your firm named are answers to those narrow questions and other sources across the web that corroborate the information. This is why distribution and public relations are so important. Your firm needs to create evidence of expertise in places where models (and people) are paying attention, specifically vertical trade press and social media.
It’s important to have your brand mentioned across the internet
Public relations has been the most cost-effective way to build a brand for decades. This is because media outlets, even in an age in which anyone can offer their opinion online, are seen as arbiters of truth. The best media outlets have editors seeking the truth and what is important to their readers; you have to pass by some type of gatekeeper to be featured in the press.
Readers know this and therefore seek out news that is important to their lives and, for our purposes, their jobs. In short, PR has always been a primary focus for smart organizations. Now, with the rise of AI search, PR activity to generate positive coverage online is doubly important. A published article in vertical trade press, a podcast appearance or a whitepaper that gets cited by the media all reinforce your brand’s authority. The more those signals are repeated and cross-verified, the more likely your brand is to show up in an LLM’s answer.
Large language models also pull from non-media, third-party sites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, social media, business listings and review sites. Frequently publishing on social media helps to elevate both your people and your firm’s brand in the “eyes” of the LLMs. LinkedIn in particular is a very useful channel for professional services firms because it has the power to connect and align you with entities outside your organization, such as professional associations, influencers, companies and products that are important to your ecosystem.
Smart firms will embrace GEO now
GEO is not a one-time project; like getting and staying in good physical condition, it must become a way of life. One press release won’t move the needle. But a steady cadence of insights, mentions, and contributions builds a digital footprint that AI can’t ignore. Visibility in the age of LLMs is earned by being not just present, but trusted and persistent.
Your firm’s goal is to “own the answer” for a number of key prompts that should lead to you. Your future clients are turning to ChatGPT and Gemini more and more to find the answer to the questions and challenges that they confront in their work lives. Identify the specific questions you answer or problems you solve, and this becomes the core of your GEO strategy.
APPENDIX: KEY STATISTICS
- 84 percent of marketers say they’re confident they can shape AI answers, but 51 percent don’t think their strategy is right. (Scribewise)
- AI Overviews now correlate with a 58 percent lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page (Ahrefs)
- The percentage of searches that don’t result in a click increased from 60.45 percent to 68.01 percent, the fastest acceleration of this phenomenon in the last decade. (SparkToro)
- 92 percent of B2B buyers who use AI for work said it influenced their vendor shortlist (Semrush)
- B2B buyers said a close match to their specific problem (53 percent) and a clear, detailed description of a firm’s work (50 percent) mattered most when researching with AI. Only 7 percent cited brand recognition. (Semrush)
- ChatGPT is the fifth most-visited website in the world (Similarweb)
- 90 percent of citations in ChatGPT come from sources not on the first two pages of Google (Semrush)
- 88 percent of ChatGPT citations are pulled from search. (Ahrefs)
- ChatGPT has 900 million active users each week. (OpenAI)
- Average monthly web visits across generative AI platforms hit 9.5 billion in May 2026, up 70 percent year over year. (Similarweb)
- 84 percent of AI citations are from earned media (Muck Rack)
APPENDIX: THE CEO’S GEO CHECKLIST
Here are some key questions you and your marketing team should be asking:
On your website
- Is our expertise explicit? Every core service or product should be explained in plain language.
- Do we demonstrate authority? Publish case studies, thought leadership and evidence of credibility.
- Is our content structured for machines? Clear headings, semantic HTML and straightforward navigation help LLMs parse your site.
- Are we consistent across platforms? LLMs cross-reference your website with external signals.
- Does our site build trust? Transparency, accessible contact details and human voices matter.
Off your website
- Do we have a strategy for thought leadership beyond our own site? Media relations to create earned media placements is vital.
- Are we being cited or mentioned in credible external sources? LLMs infer credibility by corroborating across the internet. One placement is not enough.
- Is our brand presence consistent across all digital channels? Using consistent language strengthens the signals you send LLMs.
- Are we tracking how our visibility grows in AI-driven search results? Continued monitoring is key for navigating a path towards success.