What is Generative Engine Optimisation? and what’s the impact on SEO?

The age of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming everything around us, including the way we search for information online.

With the emergence of generative engines such as Google’s Gemini (formerly Bard) and ChatGPT, searches have become more dynamic and comprehensive, generating multimodal responses that go beyond text. But wait a minute: have you heard of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

If you’re feeling lost amid so many acronyms and technical terms, don’t worry: you’re not alone. Let’s break it all down and understand how AI is disrupting SEO.

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What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

It’s an innovative approach to search engine optimisation that adapts to the era of artificial intelligence-based search engines, also known as generative engines (GEs).

Never heard of the term GEO? Don’t worry, it’s quite new, having been formalised in a collaborative study carried out in November 2023 by Princeton University, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi.

But what is a Generative Engine?

Before talking about optimisation for generative engines, we need to understand what they are, right?

According to the study researchers, “Generative engines typically serve queries by synthesising information from multiple sources and summarising it with the help of Large-Scale Language Models (LLMs).” 

Thus, a GE not only seeks information, but also generates an answer to the user’s question from multiple sources, which may include text, video, infographic, e-commerce offers and whatever else seems relevant to satisfactorily answer the question. 

Best known examples are AI Overviews (Gemini), Bing Chat, and ChatGPT 

What is the impact of GEO on SEO?

The perspective is that the introduction of AI overview in search will have a high impact on businesses and people, especially in terms of traffic and processes for search engine optimisation (SEO).

Recent data has shown a decrease in the amount of traffic referred from search results pages when AI Overviews were introduced. This decrease in traffic is nothing new in the world of digital marketing. According to the “Zero-Click Search Study” from Sparktoro, for every 1,000 Google Searches in the EU, only 374 clicks go to the open web, and in the USA, this number is 360.

With the increased proliferation of AI search, many believe there will be an even greater drop in traffic, with an increase in ‘zero click‘ results, especially for keywords with less specific intentions, that is, for searches at the top of the funnel.

The logic is simple: the answer given by the AI to these more general questions will probably satisfy users, reducing the chances of them clicking and going to your website. Considering that many businesses rely on online traffic and visibility to generate conversions and sales, there is a discussion of how GEs have a very high potential to affect the economy of those who work with content in general.

GEO was created to help businesses deal better with the changes we are going through, especially when the landscape is shifting rapidly and there isn’t much certainty about what the next steps will be.

In the words of the Princeton study:
“To address this, we introduce Generative engine optimisation (GEO), a new paradigm to help content creators improve the visibility of their content in GE responses through an optimisation framework to optimise and define visibility metrics”

GEO vs SEO – what’s the difference?

After understanding the definition of each term, you may be wondering: but what about SEO? Doesn’t it exist anymore? Wouldn’t they be the same techniques? What’s the difference?

The graphic below might help you understand the differences better:

Relevance of positioning on the SERP

In the traditional search engine model, visibility is often measured by a website’s average ranking on search results pages. However, this metric is less relevant for generator engines, which prioritise rich structured responses over a simple list of links.

What are the main examples of Generative Engines?

Does it all seem very theoretical? It’s much simpler than it seems and is very close to our daily lives in recent times. As we mentioned in the introduction, we have examples of GEs that are very popular today.

Gemini (ex-Bard)

Gemini is an artificial intelligence tool developed by Google, initially called Bard. It works as a generative language assistant, capable of understanding and answering complex questions, as well as generating relevant and informative content.

Using advanced natural language processing and machine learning techniques, Gemini aims to offer more accurate and human responses. It can even be used in place of Google Assistant.

 ChatGPT (OpenAI)

ChatGPT is an advanced artificial intelligence model developed by OpenAI, designed to serve as a generative conversational assistant. It excels at understanding natural language, answering complex queries, and producing creative, coherent content across a wide range of subjects.

Built on state-of-the-art large language model technology — including versions like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 — ChatGPT leverages deep learning to deliver human-like, contextually relevant conversations.

Bing (Copilot)

It is a search engine developed by Microsoft designed to provide relevant and accurate search results to users.

Bing Chat uses a modified version of ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, to provide its conversational functionality, allowing the chatbot to answer questions and participate in conversations in a more natural and informative way.

Thus, Bing incorporates artificial intelligence resources to improve the search experience, offering direct and personalised answers to user queries.

Google AI Overviews

AI Overviews is an initiative by Google to integrate AI-based natural language generation capabilities into its search results.

It aims to improve the search engine’s ability to provide direct answers, summaries, and intelligently generated explanations to user queries.

Using advanced language models, AI Overviews seeks to understand user intent and generate responses that are informative, concise and contextually relevant.

As you can see, currently, the sources used to generate the response are indicated in the form of a link with a title and a small summary in a carousel. So, if the person wishes, they can click and read the full source.

What are the most effective strategies for optimising for GEO?

In this study, the three strategies that stood out in terms of effectiveness were Cite Sources, Quotation Addition and Statistics Addition, which, with minimal changes to the original content, improved the site’s visibility by 30-40% in GEs compared to the other strategies.

The study also showed that the effectiveness of optimisation strategies varied depending on the knowledge domain.

For example, Authoritative optimisation worked best for content related to the historical domain, while Source Citation was most effective for factual search queries, and Statistical Data Append proved beneficial for questions related to law and government.

They include the study strategies we mentioned above, but go further, with other suggestions such as:

• Have reviews from real users.
• Get an expert analysis.
• Have a list of pros and cons.
• Have a summary for any long-form content that is relevant but too long to quote.
• Add more content. Not just increase the number of words, but the number of related unique words.
• You have UGC (user generated content). Summarize it in a quotable way.
• Write about new topics and events that are not part of LLMs (large-scale language models) training data.
• Make sure you don’t have any crawling or indexing issues.
• Mention and explain technical terms relevant to your topic.
• Keep content up to date.
• Use lists, especially for key aspects of the topic you are covering.
• All the common EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust) advice applies too.

Conclusion

We know it’s a lot of new things and we seem to be sailing through a tortuous sea with a boat that doesn’t work very well.

However, don’t think about dropping everything and modifying your entire content strategy overnight, betting all your chips on Generative Engine Optimisation to maintain relevance and visibility in AI-powered search environments. Remember that everything is at an early stage. Observe movements, follow the news, carry out tests, measure results and try again.

Don’t know where to start? At AccuraCast, we offer a specialised Generative Engine Optimisation Service

We can help you to streamline your creation process and ensure your content stands out even in the era of Generative Engine Optimisation.