Website traffic has never been less important. This fact is driven by AI-induced human behavior—if we can get the information we want where we already are, why would we visit a website?
“Zero click” is now the expectation. Prospective clients (and everyone, really) want to consume information right in ChatGPT or Claude or Google’s AI overview, which means your firm needs to show up in AI search. To succeed in this new world of discoverability, you need to have authoritative content distributed across the internet. Easy to say, hard to do—you need to create great, original content on your website, in your social channels, on media websites, and on other digital watering holes where your future clients gather. (For more on how prepared professional services firms are for this AI search revolution, check out our Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Readiness Report.)
With such a lengthy to-do list, it’s hard to figure out where to start. One way to ensure you show up in AI search is through “GEO sprints”—aggressive, thought leadership-driven content campaigns that don’t focus on specific content types or channels, but revolve around a specific topic with the content distributed as far and as wide as possible.
Before diving into the mechanics of GEO sprints, let’s back up and define authoritative content.
What is “authoritative” content in the age of AI search?
SEO professionals will tell you that “authoritative content” is a post that is keyword-rich, at least 1,500 words long, and that has a bunch of backlinks.
Well, that’s not the way humans think, and it’s not how large language models (LLMs) work.
“Authoritative content” is both complete and concise. This has always been the hallmark of good writing—remember the famous (apocryphal?) quote from Mark Twain: “I would’ve written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
In other words, tell me everything I need to know without wasting my time. Axios’ Smart Brevity approach is a good guide on how to do this. With Smart Brevity, you chunk your content in a way that works for all audiences—the people who just need a bit of information can read the first paragraph, and those who want to dive deeper can do so. The way this works on a web page is to put the vital information and messaging above the fold, and then publish deeper, more nuanced copy and messaging further down the page.
Building authority in the AI search age is different from the SEO days; AI search engines detect credibility, rather than assign it. Back in the day, Google created PageRank to assign credibility to websites based on the criteria Google engineers decided was important. However, LLMs seek out established websites, including media websites, and favor them more heavily than your website, where you can say pretty much anything you want. Search engines tend to prioritize signals like backlinks and domain reputation, while LLMs focus more on interpreting context and synthesizing information into coherent responses.
Adopting the right mindset for GEO
GEO is the practice of making sure AI platforms consistently pull your firm’s thinking when people ask questions in your category.
It is not about website traffic, which is a hard pill to swallow for generations of digital marketers who grew up with traffic as the only metric that mattered. But don’t worry—you can measure your performance with the right tools.
SEO-driven content focuses on compiling a bunch of words on a page. This might sound a bit precious, but most SEO writing is bad writing—ask any English professor. SEO writing has, for the most part, always been an attempt to engineer art. Yes, that can work, but what typically happens is an SEO writer is given a list of requirements for a blog post or webpage, and they are graded by the number of boxes they check. Very little consideration (if any!) is given to the human being (future client) who is expected to read this content. In other words, marketers have created an ocean of SEO slop.
Ah, but you know what’s worse? AI slop. AI can produce SEO content at a massive scale, so the problem is not the individual AI-created blog post; it’s that there are trillions of them.
In a world filled with AI slop, the best way to stand out (and be rewarded with higher visibility in AI engines) is to create content that human beings want to consume.
Compelling content. Bold ideas. Great writing.
Not articles that check a bunch of algorithm-pleasing boxes.
How GEO sprints work
A GEO sprint is a focused effort around an idea, tying together specific tactics—blog posts, social posts, whitepapers or eGuides, website copy, infographics, videos and media relations—in a time-bound campaign.
The goal is to own the answer in AI search for specific, nuanced topics. You know, the type of topics and ideas that people like your clients are likely to have a “conversation” with ChatGPT about.
This is the anatomy of a GEO sprint:
- Identify your concept. What is the idea you want to focus your first GEO sprint on? It should be an idea that sits at the center of a Venn diagram of your firm’s expertise, what you want to sell more of, and what is a common challenge your clients are looking to solve. As an example, we work with a benefits consulting firm that excels at helping their clients with plan design—creating a health insurance program for an employer that fits both their employee population and their budget. One challenge that many employers grapple with is helping their employees to embrace preventive care, i.e., staying healthy so they don’t need to use their health insurance.
- Brainstorm prompts. Identify five to eight prompts that their prospects would be asking AI. These prompts should be based on your service offering. One good place to source them is by asking salespeople what questions they get asked. The client mentioned above might track prompts like these:
- What employee benefits incentive programs exist to encourage people to go to the gym?
- Should our insurance cover the cost of GLP-1s? What other pharmacy benefits should we cover?
- What do firms in our industry offer their employees?
Pinpointing the right prompts to target takes domain expertise and customer knowledge; this is not the same as targeting a bunch of keywords.
- Do research to see what content is being surfaced in AI search. In your initial research into the prompts you want to become known for, look at what AI is pulling from now. It will likely be a mix of your competitors’ websites and third-party sites, including media. Use these to inform the content you create (but don’t plagiarize!).
- Update and write new website copy. Update your website services pages to deliver a depth of information that helps humans understand your expertise. Include FAQs on the page as appropriate. We also recommend creating standalone FAQ pages that go deep on the specific topic you’re building this sprint around.
- Create thought leadership content. Don’t get hung up on what form the content takes. You should create blog post clusters, an eGuide or whitepaper, infographics, social posts and talking head videos for social.Don’t just think, “We need a lot of content.” Think, “We need a depth of content that demonstrates our expertise and anticipates the questions prospects are asking.” If you are truly an expert firm, you’ll be able to figure out these questions because clients will have asked them in the past, and you’ve gained an understanding of how they think.
- Jumpstart public relations and media relations to generate story placement. We know that media websites have an outsized influence on the information that gets surfaced in AI answer engines; as stated earlier, AI detects credibility. Generally speaking, media websites have more credibility than most business websites. Media placements, mentions and citations that explain and promote your point of view help you get in front of your prospect when they’re asking the questions that you just happen to have a great answer for—even if they’ve never heard of you before.
- Track your visibility performance. How do you show up at the start of your GEO sprint, and how do you show up at the end? If you follow the roadmap in this post, you will improve your visibility on specific prompts and topics compared to your competitors.
At Scribewise, we use Scrunch, an AI visibility platform that tells you how your brand is performing across AI engines—prompt by prompt. We’re very excited about what it promises because it is, very simply, a better way to measure your digital marketing efforts than we’ve seen before. AI search identifies the best answers to specific queries by scanning the internet (pretty much all of it) and determining the best answer.
Scrunch is the best scorecard we’ve ever had for digital marketing because it tells us what your firm is known for across the internet. It helps us understand your profile compared to your competition. It tells us whether marketing is doing its job—raising your firm’s profile and building trust at scale.
Winning in AI search
AI search is changing how people discover expertise. There are so many different directions you can go in. How do you decide? You make a decision on what you want to be known for, choose a topic and develop as unique a POV as possible, and launch.
Don’t freak out about going with the “perfect” topic; embrace courageous marketing and make a choice.
You’ll be learning, and you’ll also be racing past your competitors who are hemming and hawing about where to start their GEO journey.