GEO or SEO? How to rule search in 2025

For more than two decades, digital marketers lived and died by one acronym: SEO. If you could rank on Google, you could win the internet. Play by the rules—keywords, backlinks, technical hygiene, and a dash of clever copy—and your business had a real shot at organic growth.

But now it’s 2025, and the search landscape is up for grabs again. Classic SEO is still powerful, but there’s a new player on the field: GEO—Generative Engine Optimization. The rise of AI-powered search assistants, LLM-driven chatbots, and generative search platforms is reshaping how buyers ask questions, discover brands, and make decisions. And the rules are changing fast.

So what actually matters for discoverability in this new era? Do you stick to your SEO roots? Or do you start optimizing for generative engines—prepping your brand and content to show up in AI-driven summaries and answers? What’s the right mix for B2B, SaaS, and ambitious brands trying to future-proof their organic visibility?

Here’s the honest, unvarnished truth: To win in 2025, you need to master both—and understand how GEO and SEO overlap, clash, and amplify each other.

From search results to AI answers: Why GEO is here to stay

First, let’s clear up what’s changed. When someone googled “best CRM for small businesses” five years ago, Google returned a tidy list of blue links, sprinkled with the occasional featured snippet or map. Ranking first meant you owned the conversation.

Today, someone types—or asks—“Which CRM should I use for my growing SaaS team?” into Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or even an in-product AI sidebar. Instead of a simple list of links, they’re met with:

• Summarized answers, often directly quoting web content—but without an immediate need to click.
  
• Product recommendations and pro/con comparisons, pulled from a patchwork of sources.
  
• Direct citations (sometimes), but more often, synthesized “advice” based on LLM-trained content.
  
• Follow-up questions (“What about HubSpot vs Pipedrive?”), further steering the discovery process.

The underlying engine is generative: large language models trained on the open web, internal wikis, documentation, and millions of blog posts—including yours.

The implications are seismic. If you’re not shaping what these generative engines “know” about your brand, you risk being written out of the narrative—no matter how strong your traditional SEO is.

What is GEO, really? (And why should you care?)

GEO—Generative Engine Optimization—isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a new discipline: making your brand, products, and thought leadership “findable” by AI-powered engines that don’t just index and rank, but interpret, summarize, and synthesize. A growing number of marketers now use AI tools for eCommerce content optimization, ensuring their messaging gets picked up by LLMs and voice assistants.

It’s about:

• Getting your perspective and data into the answers LLMs serve to users.
  
• Earning mentions, summaries, and source citations in AI-generated search results and chatbots.
  
• Ensuring your messaging and positioning remain accurate (and positive!) in a world where content is remixed at scale.
  

Why does it matter? Because in 2025, more than half of information-seeking sessions for B2B, SaaS, and tech are happening via generative interfaces. Buyers don’t always click through—they ask, get a summary, and move on. If your brand doesn’t make the cut for these AI-powered digests, your share of voice shrinks, regardless of your search rankings.

How GEO and SEO intersect—and why both still matter

Don’t throw your old SEO playbook out the window just yet. Search engines still matter. Most generative engines still use search as one of their foundational tools. They crawl, parse, and synthesize web results, meaning strong SEO can get your pages into the LLM training set, the “top 10 sources,” or the recommended links.

But there are key differences:

• SEO is about ranking. You’re optimizing to show up, earn clicks, and capture traffic.
  
• GEO is about being referenced. You want your perspective, data, and expertise to be selected and repeated by AI engines—even if the user never clicks your link.
  

Sometimes, these goals align. Often, though, classic SEO “tricks” (keyword stuffing, vague copy, listicles-for-the-sake-of-listicles) will get filtered out by generative engines that look for clarity, authority, and context.

The best brands will optimize for both, recognizing that visibility in one feeds the other.

What generative engines want: Content that earns citations

So what makes content “geo-optimized”? The tactics are evolving, but some early patterns are clear.

1. Precision, not padding:
AI engines are less forgiving of fluff than human readers. If you want to be cited, get to the point—offer direct answers, definitions, and frameworks, not endless preamble.

2. Structured information:
Well-formatted content—tables, bullet points (yes, when justified!), numbered lists, step-by-step processes—makes it easier for LLMs to pull and remix your insights. Use H2s and H3s that sound like questions, and answer them directly beneath.

3. Authoritativeness and evidence:
LLMs reward content with clear sourcing, data, and a unique angle. Citing research, using original stats like content marketing statistics, or offering hard-to-find expertise increases the odds that your content gets surfaced as a “source of truth.”

4. Consistency and clarity of message:
If your product does X, say it. Repeatedly. Generative engines are building associations—make yours easy to spot. For B2B and SaaS, ensure product names, value props, and differentiators are spelled out and reinforced across your site, blog, and docs.

5. Context, not just keywords:
The old “stuff your target keyword everywhere” approach falls flat in a generative world. LLMs want to know why your product or solution matters, what pain points it solves, and for whom.

Common GEO pitfalls (and how to avoid them)

Here’s where AI marketing trip up when they first “pivot to generative”:

Assuming SEO alone is enough:
You can rank #1 and still be omitted from AI summaries if your content isn’t structured for quick citation. If you bury the answer six paragraphs down, LLMs will pull from a competitor who says it plainly in the intro.

Ignoring the source of LLMs’ training data:
Many engines use Wikipedia, government sites, major publishers, product documentation, and help centers—not just blogs. If your key information isn’t in public, easily-parseable formats, you’re invisible to the engines that matter.

Being inconsistent across touchpoints:
If your product’s capabilities are described five different ways on your site, LLMs will get confused. Keep your value prop, positioning, and language unified across your homepage, landing pages, docs, and press mentions.

Letting user-generated content define your brand:
If your product’s only mention is on Reddit or a competitor’s comparison chart, you lose control of your own narrative. Prioritize publishing definitive content on your owned channels.

The GEO playbook for 2025: How to get cited, referenced, and recommended

1. Build “answer-ready” content everywhere

Create pages that are literally formatted as Q&A, FAQs, or explainers. For every core product feature, industry pain point, or comparison query (“Airtable vs Smartsheet for enterprise use”), have a standalone, well-structured page. To further assist users, consider adding an AI chatbot that can provide instant answers and help direct them to the information they need.
Repeat this in your documentation, knowledge base, and blog. LLMs scrape these sources for direct, structured answers.

2. Publish original research and data

Be a primary source, not just a repeater. Run surveys, share customer benchmarks, release market studies. When generative engines look for up-to-date, unique stats or trends, they pull from primary data—if you’re the origin, you get cited.

3. Standardize product naming, features, and claims

Across your site, docs, PR, and partner content, lock down the language you use. The more repetition and consistency, the stronger the association in the LLM’s “knowledge graph.” Avoid jargon that only makes sense internally.

4. Push your content into public, LLM-friendly spaces

Get your documentation indexed by Google and other search engines. Where possible, share condensed versions on Wikipedia, open forums, and large aggregators (Stack Overflow, Quora, GitHub). LLMs are more likely to “learn” from high-trust public repositories.

5. Monitor your brand in generative outputs

Use tools to check how AI chatbots, search assistants, and LLM-based aggregators are referencing your brand. If they’re omitting, misrepresenting, or misunderstanding you, adjust your content structure and clarity, then test again.

SEO isn’t dead. It’s just… evolving

Don’t panic: you’re not starting from zero. Classic SEO still gets your pages indexed, surfaced, and cited—both for humans and machines. But as the balance shifts from “who ranks highest” to “who gets referenced by the AI,” your strategy should evolve.

• Continue producing in-depth, original content.
  
• Keep your site technically pristine.
  
• Build high-quality backlinks—but also focus on getting mentioned in places LLMs train from (industry wikis, reputable directories, open forums).
  
• Write for both the person and the machine: clear, direct, jargon-free, and rich with context.
  

Where SEO once ended with “get the click,” GEO extends it: “get the quote, get the mention, get into the answer.”

What to expect next: The future of GEO and SEO

We’re only at the start of this shift. In the coming years, expect:

• Greater focus on structured data: Schema markup, open documentation, and explicit Q&A content will be critical.
  
• Content refresh cycles: LLMs will increasingly prioritize the “freshness” and accuracy of your content, not just age or backlinks.
  
• Authority as a filter: Engines will use E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) more aggressively to determine which sources are trustworthy enough to cite.
  
• Real-time monitoring: Tools that alert you to brand mentions and misrepresentations in generative answers will be as important as rank trackers are today.
  
• Integration with in-product and in-app AI: The next frontier isn’t just web search—it’s your content being served as the “assistant” inside partner apps, enterprise portals, and even physical devices.
  

Final thoughts: GEO + SEO = lasting visibility

If you’re a SaaS, B2B, or ambitious brand, the message is clear: Don’t bet everything on old-school SEO, but don’t abandon it either. The future belongs to those who optimize for both the classic and the generative—the “engine” and the “answer.”

Shape your content for clarity, consistency, and citation. Anticipate the questions AI (and your buyers) will ask. Publish data and perspectives that no one else can offer. Track how and where you’re mentioned—not just ranked. And always remember: in 2025, showing up isn’t enough. You need to be the source the world’s smartest engines trust to answer the question.

If you can pull that off, you won’t just rule search. You’ll be everywhere your customers are looking—even when they don’t realize they’re searching at all.