The Story Behind the Search

The rules of digital visibility are being rewritten in real time. We discussed the impact of these rule
changes last year in what was our first ever white paper, and things continue to shift.

Traditional SEO, or earning a position on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), remains important to most organizations. But alongside these rankings, an entirely different competition is now underway: earning a citation inside an AI-generated answer in Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude. This new discipline called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO – or AIO or AEO – whatever you prefer) does not replace the discipline of SEO. GEO works in tandem with SEO but follows a different set of rules that optimize content for AI systems that synthesize
answers rather than ranking webpages.