AI didn’t just change how we search, it’s changing who content is written for.
For years, Google was the internet’s biggest gatekeeper. If you wanted anyone to find your business, content, or product, you needed to show up on search. That meant playing by Google’s rules: optimizing titles, stuffing keywords, building backlinks, and structuring your content just right. This wasn’t just advice, it was an industry worth $75 billion. And it shaped how nearly every website on the internet looked, sounded, and performed.
But everything changed when AI models like ChatGPT entered the chat.
Instead of searching the old way, users are now asking full questions in chatboxes and getting full answers. No more ten blue links, no more clicking through five tabs to find a recipe or product comparison. In this new world, Google isn’t the final destination, it’s often not part of the journey at all.
And if you make content for a living, this can be a new challenge… or maybe a new opportunity.
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Meet GEO
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization, and yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. While SEO was about getting your website to the top of Google results, GEO is about getting your content cited for large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity. Instead of aiming for top rankings on Google, you’re trying to get quoted by AI.
These bots don’t just summarize random pages; they scan the entire internet for content, extract chunks of information, and then rephrase or cite pieces of it in their answers. If your content doesn’t get picked up, it doesn’t get seen.
That means the rules of visibility have changed. No one’s visiting your homepage anymore. They’re seeing one paragraph, pulled out of context, buried inside an AI answer and maybe your name gets linked or maybe not.
How search became a conversation
If you’ve ever asked Siri for a restaurant recommendation or told Alexa to play a song, you’ve already seen it: search is now a conversation. Gen Z users, in particular, are skipping Google altogether. They’re asking ChatGPT for study guides, fitness plans, and advice.
This is why tools like Google’s AI Overview and Perplexity’s Pro Search are quite popular. They answer your question directly with citations tucked into collapsible panels. As a result, even perfectly SEO’d websites are seeing massive drops in traffic.
In other words, your blog or website might still exist, but it’s no longer the place people go, it’s the place AI scrapes.
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What does GEO content actually look like?
Here’s the tricky part—AI doesn’t “read” like a human. It slices content into pieces, compares different passages, then forms an answer based on patterns. According to HubSpot, “citation-friendly content” usually looks like this:
- Clear, specific answers to common questions (FAQs)
- Expert quotes and real-world data
- Lists, bullet points, and comparison tables
- Schema markup for structured readability (a hidden code that helps AI and search engines understand your content better)
- Authored by real people (with credentials), not anonymous blogs
- Hosted on platforms AI crawls frequently like Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, Medium, LinkedIn, etc.
This idea is echoed in discussions on Reddit’s r/TechSEO forum, where one user commented: “It’s less about keywords now and more about structured content (FAQs, comparisons, bullet lists, etc.)”
And yes, even personal blog posts, Medium explainers, and Reddit threads are getting cited more than traditional websites. AI engines are looking for clarity, not fluff.
According to a November 2023 study conducted by researchers from Princeton University, Indian Institute of Technology, and independent scholars showed that GEO strategies such as adding citations, quotations, and statistics can significantly increase a website’s visibility.
The team tested different content strategies on 10,000 chatbot prompts and found that after applying these strategies, it boosted visibility in AI answers by up to 40%. Meanwhile, old SEO tricks like keyword stuffing had little to no effect. In short, clear writing, useful data, and credited sources could boost your content and get picked up by AI.
Here’s another twist. Some chatbots, including ChatGPT, may still use Google’s own search index when looking for updated info. A recent finding by ex-Google engineer Abhishek Iyer suggests that even OpenAI might be quietly querying Google in the background.
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So yes, your Google rank might still matter. But you’re not being rewarded with traffic, you’re being skimmed, cited, and maybe footnoted in a chatbot’s answer. You’re not optimizing to be clicked anymore, you’re optimizing to be quoted.
How content is changing
The shift from SEO to GEO is changing how some content is written. More content are now made with AI in mind. In a way, the web is becoming less of a reading experience and more of a database, an endless pile of snippets hoping to be cited by a bot.
