By Jaquie Hoyos, Chief Media Officer, Moroch
In the eleven years I’ve worked in digital marketing, I’ve never seen the landscape shift more rapidly than it has in the past year. Best practices that worked two months ago may already be obsolete. Strategic flexibility in today’s world isn’t a selling point; it’s a requirement.
Over the past year, my biggest focus has been understanding how AI is currently impacting the Search landscape and anticipating where it’s headed. Like nearly every industry, the world of Search is being massively impacted by the evolution of AI.
In May of 2024, Google introduced AI Overviews in the United States. These AI-generated summaries showcase a snippet of information at the top of the Search Engine Results Page, with the intention of answering more sophisticated user queries. This marks a fundamental shift: search engines are no longer just directing users to website – they’re increasingly attempting to answer questions directly.
The impact has been dramatic with many businesses reporting significant drops in organic traffic, directly resulting from Google’s AI Overviews and the increase of “zero-click searches”. We’ve seen cases where companies have lost over 70% of their organic web traffic since AI Overviews were introduced. And the scale is massive – AI Overviews appear in almost 20% of all Google queries, which equates to nearly one trillion searches per year.
But the disruption doesn’t stop with Google. Growth among other LLM’s like ChatGPT and Perplexity have increased at unprecedented rates. ChatGPT acquired 1 million users in just 5 days after its initial launch in November 2022, and OpenAI is currently projecting that they will surpass 1 billion users by the end of 2025. This surge in generative search creates new challenges for businesses – and a new solution: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
GEO is the practice of optimizing your website and online presence to improve organic visibility from AI-generated responses of LLM’s. The concept is new enough that it does not have an officially designated acronym; others use AIO (AI Optimization) or AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) to describe the practice. I believe Generative Engine Optimization best reflects the new search paradigm:
- AIO (AI Optimization) is too broad; it could refer to anything from model training to workflow automation, not specifically content visibility.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) limits the concept to Q&A-style responses and ignores the broader generative capabilities (summaries, narratives, comparisons, etc.). AEO is also an acronym that predates the AI-search era, previously referencing the process of optimizing towards voice search and Google Answers.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), on the other hand, clearly defines the target environment – generative engines – and mirrors the familiar lineage of SEO, making it both intuitive and precise for marketers and creators adapting to AI-driven discovery.
Beyond the acronym debate, the practice has become more mainstream recently, with many sharing hyperbolic perspectives. Some are claiming that “Traditional SEO is dead” and should be abandoned. Others claim that GEO is a short-term fad. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
Many SEO fundamentals still work, and work well for GEO: well-structured content, E-E-A-T principles (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), topic clustering, and schema markup remain critical. But GEO brings new dimensions to the table.
It emphasizes answer-friendly formats like FAQ pages and leans into multimodal content (text, video and images) that AI models can easily interpret and summarize. And it doesn’t stop at your website.
LLM frequently sources answers from platforms like Reddit, Quora, and YouTube. If you have significant share-of-voice on those platforms, your brand will appear more often in AI responses – positive or negative. Your brand presence outside of your website is increasingly becoming as important as the content you publish on it. A Reddit thread, review video, or social post can become the “answer” a user sees and makes an opinion about your business.
This makes brand management and reputation-building more distributed – and more vital – than ever before. It’s not enough to just keep your social media channels active; businesses should also encourage authentic customer reviews, engage in relevant community conversations, and monitor how they’re being represented across the internet.
One of the most common challenges I see across both brands and agencies is siloed media teams. That’s always been a detrimental practice, but that issue is exponentially larger in today’s increasingly evolving landscape. Creating unified strategies is imperative not just across not just SEM and SEO, but across all paid and organic initiatives. Your brand must have a common voice, strategy, and purpose – one that is consistently reflected across every digital touchpoint.
The brands that will succeed in this new era will prepare now. That means:
- Auditing and optimizing content for AI-readiness – clear, factual, and well-structured for LLM’s.
- Building a positive brand presence across communities and platforms that LLM’s commonly cite.
- Monitoring brand representation within generative results and responding strategically.
- Optimizing your website for conversion – ensuring the traffic you do get has the best chance of converting.
Whether you’ve felt the impact yet or not, the clock is ticking. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, has stated that his goal is for “AI Mode” to be the default search experience – essentially turning Google Search into a conversational AI platform. This would fundamentally change how users discover information and how businesses acquire traffic.
SEO has historically been often underfunded and overlooked. But today, both SEO and GEO are business critical. The companies that invest now and innovate as the landscape shifts will turn disruption into a competitive advantage – shaping the answers, not just reacting to them.
