Whether you call it “AI SEO” or “SEO and GEO,” optimizing your website for large language models (LLMs) and search engines is one of the most important long-term investments you can make for your digital strategy. While Google still boasts about 89.54% of the world’s search traffic, LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s Gemini are quickly gaining market share. If you want your website to be cited as a source for an AI Overview (AIO), AI Mode, or a ChatGPT recommendation, consider this post your quick-start guide.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
GEO is the process of optimizing your website to be found and understood by popular LLM tools. Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini are all capable of crawling websites to find sources for answers to user questions. They are three of the bigger models, but there are many more, with new ones entering the market all the time.
Here are the steps to starting your GEO journey:
1. Ensure your SEO is buttoned up
Your website should be technically sound with high-quality, helpful content that showcases your organization’s experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
2. Optimize your content for LLMs
As of this writing, LLMs prefer exact or close match keywords, question and answer formats, and summaries of the most important points near the top of the page. As they say in the newspaper business, don’t bury the lede.
3. Use ALL the schema.org markup
Basic SEO includes organization, website, and product markup, but to ensure the LLMs can easily understand your pages, products, and services, you need to move beyond the basics.
4. Take E-E-A-T to the next level by building brand and topical authority
Topical authority can be a little easier to build than brand authority because it means you’re using your content to prove your expertise on the topics related to your business. If you sell landscaping materials, use your internal experts’ first-hand experience to write blog posts about topics like the best season to lay down mulch, which type of soil works best for certain plants, what grass grows easiest in specific climates, etc.
Brand authority often takes a little longer to establish. It’s measured by your customers’ respect and trust and the wider public’s perception of your brand. Are you a thought leader? Does everyone in your industry recognize your brand’s name and logo? Do people in your industry mention your company as a source of reliable information? It’s easy to think of examples of companies with highly recognized brand authority; Nike, Google, Samsung, Apple, Disney, and Rolex are just a few.
To learn how to build this kind of powerful narrative for your business, check out our blog article on core brand messaging and AI.
Measuring the Success of AI SEO Optimization
The old way of measuring successful SEO is increasingly unreliable. Impressions are often inflated by AI Overviews, and clicks are down thanks to those same zero-click searches. Google has confirmed that every source listed in an AIO enjoys a position-one ranking, which means that if there are a dozen sources, there are a dozen websites getting credit for the top spot in Google Search Console. Visibility improves for AIOs, but if your “blue” organic link is also on page one, it could be pushed so far below the fold that nobody truly sees it.
So, on what key performance indicators (KPIs) should a business focus now? It really depends on what your business goals are.
If your core goal is revenue growth, consider
- Conversions
- Revenue
- Average order value
If increasing traffic is key, you could go with
- Sessions
- New users
- Bounce rate
For companies in a highly competitive industry, share of voice or share of market can indicate how well you’re performing compared to your competitors.
Another option for brands focused on gaining LLM recommendations is to use sourceMedium referrals in Google Analytics to track metrics such as sessions, revenue, and new users directly from the chatbots.
Making AI SEO a Priority
Here at ROI Revolution, we are excited about the future of SEO and GEO! Our team is building proprietary tools that will help us track our clients’ progress with GEO, measure brand and topical authority, and provide insights to further improve marketing strategy. If you’re ready to improve your digital marketing strategy with AI SEO, contact us today to get started.
Sources
- Statcounter, Search Engine Market Share Worldwide
- Google Support, What Are Impressions, Positions, and Clicks?
