18 things worth knowing about GEO
What has changed in Search Marketing. And what hasn't.
For twenty years the job was to rank high and get clicks. But the click is no longer the holy grail. Here’s 18 things worth knowing about GEO:
In fairness, this was changing before the robots settled in:
SparkToro and Datos put US zero-click Google searches at 58% back in 2024.
Pew found that people clicked a link 8% of the time when an AI summary showed, against 15% when it didn’t.
Ahrefs has the number-one result losing 58% of its clicks when an AI Overview sits above it.
BCG and Moloco’s research suggests 33% of US adults now discover brands through personal AI agents, and 47% already use AI tools to research purchases.
Sources: SparkToro & Datos, 2024 · Pew Research, 2025 · Ahrefs, 2026 · BCG × Moloco, 2026
So the category got a name. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and a queue of people who updated their LinkedIn bio to match. Some of it is genuinely new. A good deal of it is the SEO we should have been doing anyway. So here the list of 18 things worth knowing about GEO:
1. Ranking still feeds the answer
Google’s own guidance says SEO best practices “remain relevant for AI features in Google Search,” and that “there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” AI Overviews are assembled from the normal search index. If you do not rank, you are not in the raw material. This part has not changed.
Source: Google Search Central, AI features guidance
2. The AI can only quote pages Google already knows about
Before a page can turn up in an AI answer, Google has to have it filed in its index, the catalogue of pages it has crawled. If your page isn’t in there, the AI can’t see it, so it can’t quote it. Google’s free Search Console tells you which of your pages are filed and which are missing. Fix that first before we invest in other AI tactics. It’s plain old SEO.
3. Check you are not blocking the robots
Cyrus Shepard went through 54 separate AI-citation studies, patents and experiments and ranked the factors. The one at the top was dull: can the page be crawled at all. Sites often block the AI crawlers without realising.
Source: Cyrus Shepard, Zyppy Signal
4. A lot of the “special GEO files” do nothing
Google, in writing: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup,” and “there’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add.” So the llms.txt file someone is trying to sell you does nothing for Google. Keep schema for your rich results if you want it, but not as a magic word for the machines.
Source: Google Search Central, AI features guidance
5. Human writing still wins the ranking that feeds the answer
Semrush looked at 20,000 keywords and found human-written content in the top spot 80% of the time, against 9% for content it flagged as purely AI. Their own caveat is: AI detectors are unreliable, and Semrush sells SEO tools. Take it as a lean, not a law.
Source: Semrush, AI content ranking study, 2026
6. Move from the page to the sentence
Here is a proper change from SEO. A search engine ranked pages. A model lifts a sentence. It does not cite your site, it quotes one clean line and moves on. So the question is not “is this page authoritative” but more like “can one sentence survive being pulled out and dropped into someone else’s answer.”
7. Be worth quoting
The original academic work on this, a Princeton paper from 2024, tested what nudges you into AI answers. Adding statistics, quotations and cited sources all moved the needle, by up to 40% in their words. Keyword stuffing made things worse, not better. So say specific, sourced, quotable things.
Source: Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”, KDD 2024
8. Answer early, and stop padding
Dan Petrovic’s work on how Gemini grounds its answers found about a third of a page gets considered at all, and a tight 800-word page got over half its content used against roughly 13% for a 4,000-word one. Put the answer near the top and let the page be short.
Source: Dan Petrovic, DEJAN
9. Write headings that match the question
AirOps looked at 16,851 queries and found pages whose headings closely matched the question were cited 41% of the time, against 29% for weak matches. Phrase the heading the way a person would ask it out loud, not the way a content calendar would file it.
Source: AirOps, The Fan-Out Effect
10. The bulk of what AI says about you is not on your site
AirOps again: across the brand mentions they studied, 85% came from third-party sources, not the brand’s own pages. Reddit, reviews, comparison posts, YouTube. You can write the best page in the world and the model will still reach for what other people said about you. The public record is the battleground, and barely any of it is yours. None of that is SEO as we remember it.
Source: AirOps, off-site signals in AI search
11. Off-site is the actual work, especially in considered categories
Which means the job spills well past your own site. For a bank or a B2B tool, the answer a model gives is being assembled from comparison sites, a forum thread from 2023, a handful of reviews. If that record is light, stale or confused, that is your exposure, and no amount of on-page polish fixes it.
12. The engines do not agree with each other
Back in early 2025, Seer found 87% of ChatGPT’s search citations matched Bing’s top results, and only 56% matched Google’s (a small sample, and the products have moved on, so treat it as directional).
Source: Seer Interactive
13. Citation is a probability, not a position
A rank holds still. An AI citation does not. Ask the same question twice and the sources can change. So the measure is not “are we number one?,” it is “how often do we show up across a basket of the questions our buyers ask, tracked over time?” Anyone promising a fixed spot is selling certainty that does not exist. [Note: More of an opinion than an empirical study].
14. Getting cited is worth real traffic, but keep it in proportion
Seer’s 2026 data: when you are cited in an AI Overview you get 120% more organic clicks per impression than when you are not. The footnote, which Seer make themselves, is that a result with no AI Overview at all still beats both. So a citation is the good outcome in a world with fewer clicks going, not a windfall that hands the clicks back.
Source: Seer Interactive, 2026 AI Overview update
15. Do not build a page per question
The tempting move is to spin up a page for every variation a model might ask. Google names that as scaled content abuse, and it is an own-goal regardless. Put the answers into the pages you already have.
Source: Google Search, spam policies
16. Make the boring pages do the work
The help centre, the pricing edge cases, the compatibility notes, the FAQ you buried three clicks deep. This is now very good raw material. A plain sentence in a support doc gets quoted where a glossy homepage gets skipped. Your About and credibility pages are the cheapest win, because they are how a model works out who you even are.
17. Pages that finish a job beat pages that only explain
Cyrus Shepard went through hundreds of winning and losing sites and found the survivors do more than inform, they get something done. His strongest performers are the pages where the reader actually does the thing: a transaction, a tool or calculator that turns your input into an answer, a forum where real people settle real questions. A model cannot hold the community, or take the booking, so if you have these, you’re in a better position. Specific, first-hand, useful content gets cited. The commodity stuff anyone could generate does not.
Source: Cyrus Shepard, Zyppy Signal
18. Where this is heading: loyalty, then agents
Two things on the horizon, both early. Google has started feeding the preferred sources a reader picks into AI Overviews, which turns earned loyalty into an input for AI visibility rather than a nice-to-have. And agentic search, where an assistant does the buying for you, is on Google’s own roadmap. It is coming but could be a while. Build for today’s reader and you are building for both.
Source: Google, Preferred Sources in AI Overviews
None of this is a dark art. It is being findable, being worth quoting, and being talked about in the places the machine already trusts.
