How do you optimize content so it gets cited in generative AI and LLM-based search or answer engines?
Over 50% of Google searches are now zero-click, where AI engines generate answers to queries or prompts and users never actually click links to the outside web, resulting in a collapse in organic website traffic. Their analysis shows that the majority of searches now stay within Google’s ecosystem after making a query.
Strategic marketers are rewriting their SEO playbook and they’re calling this next era of optimization either AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), or GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).
Major brands are measuring a decline in organic website traffic. It’s mostly driven by AI-powered discovery engines and this trend will only increase customers become more reliant on AI-based search and summaries. As traffic patterns evolve you can use principles from either acronym to ensure AI understands your brand in order to surface your products and offerings in synthesized answers they curate.
- AEO practices are aimed at getting your content to surface when someone asks a question. The term was coined sometime back around 2018 when featured answer snippets in Google search and voice assistants like Alexa or Siri started becoming popular. AEO best practices ensure findability by structuring content so answer engines can use it as a direct answer. These tactics work well in today’s AI-powered search world to prime Google’s search generated experiences, Bing Copilot, or Perplexity. AEO experts leverage schema, structured data, and build clusters of content framed as answers that are legible to search engines.
- GEO, a category first introduced by Princeton researchers in a 2023 research paper, builds on the principles of AEO above. Generative engine optimization strategies are focused on AI-generated summaries produced by Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other emerging platforms. You’re essentially training AI models to recognize your brand content as a trusted source, so that your information gets synthesized and cited within AI-generated responses. AI looks for content that is machine-readable, easily justified, and consistently refreshed inside their training and retrieval pipelines. GEO extends beyond the logic of optimization from SEO-era page ranking to dataset influence, making sure brand narratives don’t just appear in search, but are reinforced in the sources LLMs rely on.
I see GEO as the more useful guiding frame because it stretches beyond the narrow lens of search. Generative AI is quickly becoming the default interface for how people discover information, receive recommendations, and form impressions of brands. By positioning GEO as a core digital strategy, brands can position themselves at the center of AI-mediated discovery and storytelling, ensuring authority, freshness, and relevance in environments where content curation gets outsourced to algorithms.
I recently had the privilege of hearing Webflow’s Guy Yalif speak in Atlanta at a TAG Marketing Society event, and he shared a sharp perspective on emerging best practices in this space. Yalif outlines 3 challenges for modern marketers in the era of AI in his AEO Maturity blog:
- Your carefully crafted brand narrative gets paraphrased by AI
- Less traffic (is more qualified)
- Brands drawing inspiration from AIs create similar content blurring to resemble competitive content
This space is moving fast. In 2025, OpenAI published a study of consumer ChatGPT usage reporting 700 million weekly active users of ChatGPT.
Let’s compare that to the world population.
8 percent of the world’s population is using ChatGPT weekly, and it’s changing the way humanity creates and consumes content. It’s clear that the well-understood SEO strategies everyone’s been using for the last decade aren’t going to work for the next decade.
SEO was built for crawlers, static maps, and page rankings. GEO, by contrast, ensures your brand is legible to LLMs through schema markup, dynamic structures, and real answers. Winning now means moving past listicles or bulk blog creation to deliver personalized, segment-aware content that actually differentiates your brand.
Digital experience leaders should rethink their success metrics and move beyond traffic counts or keyword rankings. In an AI-connected internet, the real goal becomes shaping and sustaining your brand story in a way that resonates with customers onsite, while measuring the share of AI voice.
Sitecore recently published an insightful report about the state of search in 2025. ‘Search, rewritten’ outlines how to optimize for AI visibility, craft content that earns attention, and stay ahead of the curve. Download the report to explore how agentic engines are reprogramming discovery.
