Long live GEO: How to get AI to recommend your website

For more than two decades, organic search positioning has been one of the pillars of any digital growth strategy. Companies of all sizes have invested time, budget, and resources in understanding how Google works, identifying the keywords their audiences use, building authority through links, improving the technical performance of their websites, and producing content capable of reaching the top positions in search results. The logic was relatively straightforward: the better a page ranked, the greater its visibility; the greater its visibility, the more traffic it would receive; and the more relevant traffic reached the site, the greater the chances of generating business opportunities. For years, this relationship between rankings, traffic, and conversions was consistent enough to make SEO an essential discipline within marketing.

However, the way people discover, research, and evaluate information is undergoing one of the most significant changes since the emergence of search engines. Today, a growing part of the digital journey can begin within ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, AI Overviews, or other generative systems. Instead of entering multiple queries, visiting ten different pages, and manually comparing alternatives, a user can ask a complex question and receive a synthesized response that summarizes options, explains differences, recommends providers, and draws on multiple sources to reach a conclusion. For users, this means greater efficiency. For organizations, it represents a profound shift: a brand may have valuable content and rank well on Google, yet still be left out of the conversation if AI systems do not recognize it as a relevant, trustworthy, or sufficiently clear source.

That is why saying that “SEO is dead” should not be taken literally. SEO remains a fundamental infrastructure that enables search engines and generative systems to discover, crawl, understand, and interpret a website. What is becoming outdated is a view of SEO based exclusively on rankings, keywords, and clicks. The new ecosystem requires us to broaden the questions we ask. It is no longer enough to ask: “Where does our page rank on Google?” We also need to understand: “What does an AI say when someone asks about our category?”, “does it mention our brand?”, “does it use our content as a source?”, “does it compare us with our competitors?” and, above all, “does it recommend us when a potential customer is evaluating a solution?”

This is where Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) comes into play: a natural evolution of search practices focused on increasing the likelihood that an organization, its experts, and its content will be understood, cited, mentioned, or recommended within AI-generated responses. GEO does not replace SEO; it expands its reach. While traditional SEO aims to increase visibility within a list of search results, GEO seeks to increase a brand’s presence within the answer itself. And although this distinction may seem small, it fundamentally changes how companies should think about their content architecture, topical authority, distribution strategy, and ability to demonstrate real expertise.

This transition is especially relevant for B2B organizations, professional services firms, technology companies, and brands that sell complex solutions. In these types of buying processes, customers rarely make a decision after a single search. They research methodologies, compare providers, review case studies, look for references, evaluate technologies, and try to understand which alternative best fits their needs. Artificial intelligence can condense much of this process before the user ever reaches a company’s website. As a result, an organization may already be influencing—or losing influence over—a potential customer long before a session appears in Google Analytics or a new lead enters its CRM.

The strategic question, therefore, is no longer simply how to generate more traffic. It is how to build a digital presence strong enough to participate in the process of answering, recommending, and comparing that generative engines are beginning to mediate. Understanding this transformation is essential for any organization that depends on content, digital authority, and demand generation. The purpose of this article is precisely to examine what is changing, what the available data tells us, how SEO differs from GEO, and what concrete actions companies can take to increase the likelihood that AI systems will not only find their websites, but also consider them sources worth using and recommending.

Hybrid SEO: integrating the classic and the new

How to get AI to recommend your website

For more than two decades, much of digital marketing strategy has been built around a relatively simple idea: if a company could rank among the top Google results for the right searches, it would gain visibility, traffic, and, eventually, business opportunities.

That model has not disappeared. But it is changing profoundly.

Today, someone can ask ChatGPT which CRM is best for a B2B company, ask Gemini to compare ecommerce platforms, use Google AI Mode to find ways to improve the customer experience at a bank, or ask an AI assistant to recommend digital transformation consulting firms in Latin America.

In many of these cases, users no longer simply receive ten links.

They receive an answer.

And within that answer, some brands are mentioned, some sources are cited, and others, despite having strong SEO rankings, are simply absent.

Welcome to the era of Generative Engine Optimization — GEO.

SEO is not dead. The “ranking = visibility” equation is

The title of this article is intentionally provocative.

Google is quite clear on this point: SEO remains relevant to its generative search experiences because AI Overviews and AI Mode still rely on its search, indexing, and quality systems. Among other techniques, Google uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation —RAG— to retrieve information from its index before generating certain responses.

Therefore, a page that cannot be properly crawled, understood, or indexed still has a problem.

What is disappearing is the certainty that a strong organic ranking will necessarily generate a proportional amount of traffic.

An analysis published by Neil Patel/NP Digital clearly illustrates this disconnect. Between January 2023 and December 2025, the organic ranking index in its sample increased by 26%, while organic traffic declined by 19%. Until early 2024, both metrics moved relatively closely together; after that, they began to diverge.

Chart 1. The disconnect between rankings and traffic

Change from January 2023 to December 2025, based on data published by Neil Patel/NP Digital: organic rankings +26%; organic traffic -19%.

Ahrefs identified an even more revealing effect. In a study updated in February 2026, using 300,000 keywords and aggregated Google Search Console data, the presence of an AI Overview was correlated with a 58% lower CTR for the page ranking in the first position compared with the estimated scenario without an AI Overview.

In other words, an organization could maintain its rankings while simultaneously losing a significant share of the clicks those rankings historically generated.

Not because SEO has stopped working.

But because search results are answering more and more questions before the click happens.

The future of SEO when searches don’t happen on Google

AI-driven traffic may be smaller, but its intent can be much higher

This is where one of the most interesting opportunities for Growth Marketing emerges.

Traffic currently generated by AI assistants still does not match Google’s volume. Neil Patel points out that even among heavy ChatGPT users, Google remains the dominant search alternative.

But volume and intent are not the same thing.

Microsoft Clarity analyzed more than 1,200 publisher and media websites to assess the quality of traffic coming from AI tools. For subscription conversions, referrals from Copilot converted approximately 15 times more than Search, Perplexity around 7 times more, and Gemini approximately 3 times more.

Chart 2. Relative conversion rates of traffic from AI assistants

Relative index compared with Search = 1 for subscription conversions in the Microsoft Clarity study: Search 1x, Gemini 3x, Perplexity 7x, and Copilot 15x.

HubSpot reaches a similar conclusion from the marketers’ perspective. In its 2026 data, 49% of surveyed professionals said search traffic had declined as a result of AI-generated answers, while 58% believe AI referral traffic shows significantly higher intent than traditional search traffic.

This makes sense when viewed through the customer journey.

Someone arriving directly from Google after searching for “CRM” may only be beginning their research.

Someone who has spent fifteen minutes talking with an AI, explaining the size of their company, its processes, required integrations, and budget constraints, and then clicks on one of the three companies recommended by the AI, is likely to arrive much better informed.

AI is already handling part of the consideration process before the prospect ever visits the website.

What makes content “recommendable” to AI?

This is where GEO moves beyond a conceptual trend and becomes an operational discipline.

1. A flawless technical foundation

AI does not eliminate the need for technical SEO.

Google indicates that, to be eligible for its generative search experiences, a page must be discoverable, crawlable, and indexable. Architecture, indexability, canonicalization, performance, page experience, internal linking, and content availability still matter.

A technically weak website does not become competitive simply by adding the word “GEO” to its strategy.

2. Content that offers more than commodity information

This is probably one of the most important points.

Google explicitly recommends producing original, useful, experience-based content rather than simply summarizing what is already available online.

Before the rise of AI, hundreds of articles built around variations of keywords could still be effective.

In the GEO era, that strategy is losing strength.

An LLM can generate another article titled “10 benefits of improving customer experience” in seconds.

What it cannot legitimately invent are an organization’s internal data, lessons learned from 40 implementations, a proprietary benchmark, a methodology developed over years, or an expert conclusion based on real-world projects.

That proprietary knowledge becomes a competitive advantage.

3. Data, sources, and verifiable evidence

The academic research that formalized the term Generative Engine Optimization evaluated different strategies using GEO-bench and found visibility improvements of up to 40% within its experimental environment, although results varied by industry and query type.

This should not be interpreted as “adding statistics increases the probability of appearing in ChatGPT by 40%.” An academic review published in 2026 specifically warns that these results depend on the experimental environment and that there is still insufficient evidence to guarantee stable, long-term improvements in organic discoverability across different platforms.

The useful conclusion is different: content supported by evidence, attribution, specific data, and context gives generative systems stronger units of information to work with than generic content that is difficult to verify.

4. Clear answers before lengthy explanations

A strong editorial structure should allow both people and machines to quickly identify the main answer.

If a section is titled:

What is Generative Engine Optimization?

“Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing an organization’s digital presence to increase the likelihood that generative engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or AI Overviews will use, mention, or cite its content.”

The explanation can come afterward.

There is no need to write for robots. Google even advises against obsessively breaking content into artificial fragments or creating page variations for every possible query.

Clarity benefits the reader first and, as a result, also makes automated understanding easier.

5. Authority beyond your own domain

A brand cannot build authority by talking only about itself.

Generative systems can draw information from publications, forums, videos, specialized media, research, corporate websites, and other digital sources.

Ahrefs also found that YouTube accounted for 18.2% of the citations appearing in AI Overviews that did not rank within the top 100 for the same query, while YouTube represented approximately 5.6% of all URLs cited in its dataset.

That is why GEO is directly connected to digital PR, thought leadership, video, social media, expert personal branding, and content distribution.

Publishing the article is only the first step.

Authority is built when the idea begins to circulate.

Three use cases

Case 1: a B2B consulting firm

Imagine a firm specialized in Customer Experience.

A traditional SEO strategy might target “customer experience consulting.”

A GEO strategy would build a much deeper ecosystem: a proprietary study on CX maturity, industry benchmarks, a clearly documented methodology, implementation case studies, expert opinions signed by consultants, comparisons between NPS, CSAT, and Customer Effort Score, explanatory videos, and external mentions.

When an executive asks an AI how to develop a Voice of Customer program or which methodology to use to redesign a journey, the company would have multiple assets capable of becoming sources.

Case 2: ecommerce and retail

An online store should not limit itself to product descriptions.

Objective comparisons, complete specifications, availability, clearly explained policies, FAQs based on real customer conversations, authentic reviews, buying guides, images, and videos provide more useful information for recommendations.

Google also confirms that Merchant Center and Google Business Profile can feed product- and business-related experiences across its generative search surfaces.

Optimization therefore moves beyond focusing exclusively on a query such as “buy a 20 kg washing machine” and begins to consider questions like “which washing machine is best for a family of five living in an apartment that wants to reduce water consumption?”

Case 3: complex B2B services

For companies operating in technology, digital transformation, CRM, automation, pricing, or customer experience, GEO may be even more relevant.

These are buying processes in which prospects need to educate themselves before speaking with sales.

HubSpot reports that nearly 70% of marketers say leads are entering the buying process later because they have already conducted AI-assisted research beforehand.

The strategic question is no longer only:

“Are we generating traffic?”

It should also be:

“What is the prospect learning about us before visiting our website?”

GEO also changes analytics

For years, the typical SEO dashboard included rankings, impressions, CTR, organic sessions, conversions, and backlinks.

That is no longer enough.

Google Search Console launched specific performance reports for generative experiences in June 2026. These reports make it possible to analyze impressions across AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative Discover experiences, while also viewing URLs, countries, devices, and performance over time. Google initially began rolling out these reports to a subset of websites.

Google Analytics has also evolved.

GA4 now includes an AI Assistants channel that identifies users coming from sources such as ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot, or Grok. There is one important distinction: visits originating from Google AI Overviews and AI Mode are not classified within this channel, but rather under Organic Search.

This requires a more comprehensive measurement framework.

This final layer is critical.

The goal of GEO should not be to obtain a screenshot showing ChatGPT mentioning the company.

The goal is to understand whether that presence is influencing consideration, demand, business opportunities, and revenue.

How to start a GEO strategy

An effective transition can be approached in three stages.

During the first 30 days, the priority should be to establish a baseline. Identify the business’s strategic topics, define between 50 and 100 real prompts related to awareness, consideration, and decision-making, evaluate when the brand appears compared with competitors, and audit the SEO architecture, existing content, and external sources of authority.

Between days 31 and 60, the organization should strengthen its assets. This means updating priority content by incorporating first-hand experience, benchmarks, data, comparisons, identifiable authors, case studies, real customer questions, verifiable sources, and clear relationships between articles, services, solutions, and industries.

Between days 61 and 90, the focus shifts to distribution and measurement: turn key content into videos, executive posts, expert articles, and PR assets; pursue legitimate mentions in relevant sources; configure Search Console and GA4; and regularly measure prompts, mentions, citations, traffic, and conversions coming from the AI ecosystem.

It is not about publishing more.

It is about increasing the density of differentiated knowledge surrounding the brand.

The new game of digital visibility

HubSpot reports that more than 92% of marketers already use or plan to use optimization for both traditional search engines and AI-powered search engines.

The transition has already begun.

But it would be a mistake to interpret GEO as a replacement for SEO.

A GEO strategy without technical SEO will likely struggle to be discovered. An SEO strategy without GEO may continue to achieve rankings, but it risks losing influence in the layer where more and more users are receiving, comparing, and evaluating answers.

The evolution can be summarized this way:

We used to optimize so users could find our page.

Now we must also optimize so AI understands why it should recommend it.

In this environment, the competitive advantage will not necessarily belong to the company that publishes the most articles or repeats the most keywords.

It will belong to the organization that can become a recognizable source of knowledge: one supported by real experience, data, authority, structure, distribution, and a point of view that is difficult to replace.

SEO is not dead.

But the era in which winning the ranking was enough is coming to an end.

Long live GEO.

SEO without AI is no longer competitive

Conclusion

The evolution toward generative search does not mean we should abandon everything we have learned from years of SEO. It means we need to broaden our definition of visibility. Technical optimization, site architecture, keyword research, internal linking, external authority, editorial quality, and user experience remain fundamental. Without these foundations, a GEO strategy will struggle to succeed. However, organizations that continue to measure performance only through rankings and organic traffic will be seeing just one part of the new digital journey. More and more decisions can begin —and move significantly forward— before a click ever happens.

This requires a change in the way content is created. For a long time, many SEO strategies were built around the need to cover keywords: identify a query, create a page, optimize it, and try to outperform competitors. In the generative ecosystem, that approach must evolve toward building real topical authority. It is not simply about having an article on a topic, but about demonstrating that the organization has enough expertise to explain, compare, provide context, and support its claims. Proprietary studies, methodologies, original data, case studies, expert opinions, benchmarks, tools, frameworks, and knowledge gained from real projects become significantly more valuable because they are assets that AI cannot simply replace by summarizing other articles available online.

The way we understand competition is also changing. In SEO, a company typically compares its position with the pages ranking above or below it on Google. In GEO, the competitive landscape can be much broader: media outlets, specialized websites, videos, communities, research, independent consultants, technical documentation, and even third-party publications can become sources an AI uses to build a recommendation. As a result, digital authority is no longer solely an attribute of the corporate website. It becomes the sum of the signals surrounding an organization, its professionals, its knowledge, and its results. An effective strategy will need to combine SEO, content, digital PR, thought leadership, social media, video, analytics, and brand building.

Measurement will also need to evolve. Rankings, sessions, and conversions will remain relevant indicators, but they will need to coexist with new KPIs: mentions within generative engines, the percentage of relevant prompts in which a brand appears, cited sources, share of voice versus competitors, traffic coming from AI assistants, and, eventually, business opportunities influenced by these new channels. The challenge for marketing teams will be to connect this visibility with real business outcomes. GEO should not become a race to collect screenshots showing ChatGPT mentioning a company. Its value lies in determining whether that presence increases consideration, improves lead quality, strengthens authority, and contributes to business growth.

For companies like ICX and any organization that competes through knowledge, this transformation represents more of an opportunity than a threat. Companies with deep expertise, proprietary methodologies, and real case studies have a potential advantage over those whose content simply repeats generic information. The challenge is to transform that internal knowledge into clear, structured, accessible, and well-supported digital assets that both people and generative systems can interpret. The strategy is no longer simply about “publishing content”; it is about building a knowledge ecosystem around the brand.

In the coming years, we will likely see new platforms, algorithm changes, different attribution models, and new ways of measuring the influence of artificial intelligence on the customer journey. Even the terminology may change: GEO, AEO, AI Search Optimization, or whatever term the industry eventually adopts. But behind the terminology lies a much more lasting transformation: search is evolving from delivering links to delivering answers. And when the primary interface is an answer, ranking first is no longer the only objective. The ability to be understood, cited, and recommended becomes a new form of positioning.

That is why the real message is not that SEO is dead. SEO remains the foundation on which much of digital visibility is built. What is coming to an end is the era in which achieving a strong ranking was enough to consider the battle won. Organizations will need to compete simultaneously for rankings, authority, mentions, citations, and recommendations. They will need to optimize for search engines, but also for systems capable of interpreting meaning, context, experience, and reputation.

SEO is not dead. It has evolved. And in that evolution, GEO represents the next competitive field for attention, trust, and digital influence. The goal will no longer be only to help a customer find our page, but to achieve something far more powerful: when they ask which solution is best, the AI has enough reasons to include us in the answer.

Does your company appear when customers ask AI about solutions like yours? At ICX, we can help you assess your digital visibility and build an SEO + GEO strategy focused on positioning, authority, and demand generation.