The Scribewise crew has been experimenting with AI search for a couple of years now. We have been testing chatbots and exploring how AI is changing marketing (is it as scary as some say?).

So when AI search really kicked into gear earlier this year, we evolved our business to offer generative engine optimization (GEO) for professional services firms to help ourselves and our clients show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity and other answer engines. The keys to success in this new era largely align with what we have been harping on for a decade: 

• SEO keyword-driven content creates a bad user experience
• Most B2B businesses should not be concerned with SEO and instead focus on brand building and demand generation
• Sharing expertise via thought leadership and public relations can help you win

Here’s what we have learned so far from monitoring AI search and using GEO best practices to improve our own online discoverability. 

Getting started with GEO? Ask AI

AI search and GEO can feel pretty daunting. In fact, our “GEO Readiness Report” revealed that 45% of respondents say one of their biggest concerns about the future of content marketing in an AI-first search world is that optimizing for AI search platforms is “more obtuse” than it is for traditional search engines. In other words, where do you even begin to make progress with GEO? What’s the roadmap to follow? 

To understand our baseline, we turned to AI visibility tracking platform Scrunch to get a read on our visibility compared to other firms. Setting up Scrunch can reveal what AI search platforms know about your brand and help you figure out where to start.

Scrunch generates a summary of your firm, determines your competitors, creates personas and generates topics and prompts based on all that information. Scrolling through those AI-generated prompts is a great way to understand what large language models know about you.  

• If the brand description, topics or prompts don’t quite match how you want LLMs to see you, you need to adjust the content on your site to reflect your current brand. 
• If third-party information being pulled in is no longer accurate, you may have to adjust your media relations goals to place more up-to-date information about your brand, or change company descriptions that live on third-party sites (think review sites like G2 or Clutch).
• If you monitor prompts for a few days and notice you don’t appear where you should, you should write content on those topics to improve your visibility.

Use GEO sprints to improve your share of AI search

LLMs love the same kind of content that has always worked to elevate your brand—authoritative service pages, blogs and resources that clearly describe a topic. (This is why we think GEO is exciting!) The same marketing and public relations tactics that have helped put brands in front of more humans will also help put brands in front of LLMs. 

Once you determine a topic to start with, we recommend doing a GEO sprint—a roughly two-month stretch of creating content focused on a specific topic and distributing it across channels. Here’s what a GEO sprint should include:

• Enhancing service pages on your website
• Updating  other related content on your site 
• Writing multiple related blog posts. The more, the better—get as granular as possible (i.e., no surface-level SEO slop)
• Activating media relations to place stories and pitching SMEs for media interviews
• Amping up your publishing cadence on your preferred social networks

Do GEO sprints actually work?

When we started updating our own content and monitoring it in Scrunch, we saw a 25% increase in visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini within about two weeks. This is a massive opportunity to make big moves quickly in what is surely the future of online visibility.

More granular: One prompt we’re tracking in Scrunch AI is “GEO marketing agency for professional services firms.” That’s an answer we want to own, and so far, so good. We have 29.7% visibility for this prompt, almost 10x our closest competitor. 

These standings will change over time as AI search changes. But understanding the basics of AI search and GEO, and having a tool to monitor how it’s changing will help us (and our clients) stay ahead of the game.

We know that this is a rapidly evolving landscape, and the specifics of what works today may be less effective in the future. But we also know that the nature of AI means that it will continue to reward what human beings want. You can quibble with what media outlet is best for GEO today, and whether Wikipedia or Reddit is more important, but creating high-quality, in-depth content and distributing it in the places that matter most to your audience is always going to work.