It’s been an exciting year for the marketing sector, with the continued rise in AI technology offering new opportunities for process automation, improved reporting, enhanced researching and more. But with this comes new challenges.

Marketers and savvy business owners have spent years monitoring search engine algorithms and optimizing their websites for SEO, but the search landscape has now changed dramatically. Enter: generative engine optimization (GEO).

At Wyoming Interactive, we’ve put in the hours understanding how the rise in AI usage by consumers and corporates alike has shifted the way we need to optimize our clients’ websites. Ensuring that the hard-earned search visibility is not lost, but that their reach is expanded upon as their customers search in new ways.

Read on to understand what GEO is, how it is impacting businesses, and the optimization factors you need to consider to stay in front of your customers - and ahead of your competitors.

GEO stands for generative engine optimization, a marketing activity adapted from traditional search engine optimization (SEO). GEO focusses on making website content discoverable and feature prominently in AI search engines, not just traditional search engines such as Google, Bing and Baidu.

Most commonly, GEO now refers to optimizing website content for LLMs such as Chat GPT, but can also include optimizing for Google’s AI overviews that appear in traditional SERPs and even voice search through tools such as Siri.

Effective GEO should cover strategy, implementation and reporting on how a website or content piece is crafted and how it performs in AI search.

There’s no doubt that AI search and AI overviews are impacting the way websites generate traffic, but interestingly, organic traffic remains important.

Websites that rank at position 1 organically still earn an average click-through rate (CTR) of 28.5%. This is in comparison to the top results in Chat GPT only achieving an average CTR of 0.69%.

So how important is GEO really, if organic searches still generate more traffic?

Initial trends suggest that searchers rely on AI for answers to questions, typically ‘top of funnel’ or informational searches. Ranking in AI search engines for these queries boosts brand presence and recognition, and builds subconscious trust and authority within your target audiences. When this audience is ready to buy a product or hire a service, they typically divert back to organic searches and click on website links to make a final decision.

As such, to adapt to the new search landscape, optimization strategies should be adapted to include GEO – not replace SEO.

An effective search optimization strategy combines GEO and SEO. The differences don’t just stop at the search engines themselves, but in the optimization best practices as well. Encompassing SEO and GEO together allows for wider audience reach at all stages of the buying funnel.