GEO-First, SEO-Strong: Building a Unified 2026 Strategy

One of the biggest questions you’re facing right now is just three letters long: SEO? GEO? AEO? Where should I focus my efforts?

It’s a good question. It feels more and more urgent to make sure your brand is found in AI search, and things are moving so rapidly, it’s hard to know where to start. But analysis paralysis isn’t an option if you want to stay competitive and meet consumers where they search.

There’s good news: you don’t have to choose. It’s not an either-or situation — in fact, SEO and GEO converge, diverge, and complement each other in different ways, and often what’s good for one is good for the other.

We’ll dig into these initialisms and what they mean, where you should focus your efforts, and how to build a strong GEO-first strategy that will benefit SEO while also making sure your brand is found in AI search.

SEO vs GEO: What’s the difference?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is just what it sounds like: optimizing your website to be found in organic rankings on search engines, like traditional Google or Bing. As a practice, SEO comprises a number of different tactics, things like content optimization, technical site health, on-page elements like metadata, internal link optimization, off-site tactics like link building and PR, and more.

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is also aptly named, aimed at optimizing your site to appear in answers across “generative engines.” These could be interactive AI platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity; AI-powered voice assistants, like Siri with Apple Intelligence; or traditional search engines, like Google, that also show generative results (such as AI Overviews.) GEO uses an understanding of how LLMs source, use, and serve content to guide tactics and strategy, many of which align with classic SEO practices.

A critical component of both SEO and GEO is that all of your visibility relies on whether or not crawler bots can find and see your website content. Bots need to find and understand your content to index and rank it for search engines; AI bots and agents need to find and understand your content to summarize and cite it in conversations. If you aren’t found, your products aren’t ranked, cited, or mentioned.

The value of SEO

Today, Google still drives the majority of site traffic, and it retains 90% of search engine market share. Optimizing your site for traditional search still matters. Consumer behavior is shifting to embrace AI search, but it’s important that your brand appears everywhere your customers seek answers, especially during this time of change. Think of the old marketing “rule of 7”: your customer will see a marketing message at least seven times before converting. Everywhere your brand shows up contributes to your customer journey one way or another, and SEO is a piece of that puzzle.

Additionally, AI platforms rely on traditional search rankings for a critical content retrieval process called retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Because LLMs on their own can’t refer to data beyond when their model training ended, they supplement answers with a process that taps into organic rankings for a query related to a consumer’s prompt:

We know that Bing has been a critical source for this data, and there’s evidence that ChatGPT also uses Google results. If you’re ranking in traditional search for queries that satisfy your customer’s needs, you’re already well on your way to visibility in AI search.

The value of GEO

Half of consumers are now using AI search to find answers, and it’s predicted to influence $750 billion in revenue in the next three years. You can’t wait to take action — AI technology moves fast, and you can be sure that your competitors are building GEO strategies as we speak.

Because AI search has compressed the customer journey from multiple, mostly trackable touchpoints into a single interaction held entirely within a generative engine, consumers can now discover, learn about, compare, and even purchase products directly in AI platforms. We’ve entered a world where your website doesn’t need to be visited (by a human) to influence a conversion. It’s highly efficient, and it allows customers to move further down the funnel more quickly: even if you see less site traffic, the visits you get from AI search will be more qualified and valuable.

Optimizing now gives you an early mover advantage — one that matters more than ever. Because AI search relies on trained LLMs, and that training happens years before the model is released, what you do for GEO today prepares your brand for success in the future.

Generative engines are a knowledge destination, an experience instead of just a tool. That means there’s vast opportunity for you to win the heart and loyalty of your customer in brand-new ways. Let’s get into how.

Build strong technical and content foundations

Your technical site health and content optimizations have already done good work for your GEO efforts, with things like:

• Indexability: You’ve made sure your valuable content is indexed with Google and Bing, and available to be found by bots in accordance with your SEO strategy.
• Crawlability: You’ve worked to improve your information architecture, internal linking, page depth, and more, efforts that make it easy for crawler bots to parse your site code and follow clear paths to find pages and content.
• Structured data: This helps inform rich results on traditional Google and Bing SERPs, and it provides an organized, clear way for AI bots to understand your site content even faster.
• User experience: Better site speed, clear hierarchies and navigation, and other UX elements help both human visitors and bots find answers they need.
• Content optimization: You have unique, descriptive metadata, your content supports the full customer journey, and it can be found and rendered by bots.

While this list isn’t exhaustive, it’s a good start to understanding how your SEO efforts will contribute to your GEO success.

Perform an AI visibility audit

Your strong SEO foundations ought to translate into some measure of visibility in AI search, so begin by auditing your visibility. Ask:

• What platforms does my brand appear in? (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Mistral le Chat, etc.)
• How often do answers to relevant prompts reference my brand or URLs?
• What percentage of answers link to my website or top citation sources?
• What percentage of answers have positive sentiment? Negative? Neutral? Flag any answer quality issues.
• How visible is my brand in answers spanning the customer journey and various intents?

You can do a similar exercise for your competitors. This will paint a clearer picture of the landscape you’re working in, and give you a base understanding of where you show up and how. This can be done manually, or our own AI Visibility feature can help answer these questions at scale and monitor your progress over time.

Focus on intent optimization

Technology comes and goes, but customer intent stays the same. The way consumers ask questions is evolving from keywords to long, nuanced conversations with AI, but they still want the same outcome: for example, to get healthy and fit as they age (by adopting a new jogging routine, and they need a supportive running shoe that will last.)

Get to know your ideal customer’s intent better than ever before. Reliable first-party data is your best friend here: use keyword data from Google Search Console to understand what needs your consumers have been asking in traditional search, align them with the customer journey, and map your site content to that intent. If you anticipate the answers customers seek at every point along the path to conversion, you’re set up to be referenced throughout a conversation in AI search.

While most keyword data from GSC is limited, Botify Analytics provides all your site’s keywords in combination with other first-party data. Especially for large sites with many traffic-driving keywords, this allows you to get as granular as you like and extract critical intent insights to guide your strategy.

Knowing your customer’s intent, desired outcome, and the journey they take to get there is the key to answering their needs in conversational AI search.

Optimize bot experience

All AI search depends heavily on the crawler bots and AI agents that discover, process, and serve information. GEO begins with being found by these bots; if your content isn’t found, it will never be shared in generative engines. Unnerving, right?

Generative engines combine trained knowledge with live retrieval (as we mentioned above) to be able to provide accurate, comprehensive, conversational answers to your customers. It’s both a long game and a short game: model training, which houses deep knowledge about your brand like its history, values, areas of expertise, and more, occurs a year or more before live models are released for use. To be sure AI knows about your brand in the future, you need to build a plan for models being trained today. On the other hand, live retrieval can be influenced almost in real time, and you can take steps to ensure even your newest products and content are found by AI search. 

We’ve written all about how AI platforms source content and how to influence them, so be sure to read our helpful primer. In short, you need to:

• Understand how AI bots are currently behaving on your site via log file analysis.
• Build an AI governance plan to control what content certain bots find (and what they’re blocked from.)
• Make sure bots can actually see and use critical page content like prices, inventory status, reviews, and more. Most AI bots can’t render JavaScript, meaning it’s basically invisible to them, and many e-commerce sites (in fact, 98.9% of all sites on the internet) rely on client-side JavaScript for user experience. SpeedWorkers solves this instantly by pre-rendering all content and delivering it straight to bots, making sure they get everything they need immediately.
• Deploy content updates quickly and at scale to ensure generative engines can access time-sensitive content (like seasonal sales or trends). You can do this via PageWorkers, which skips reliance on engineering queues and puts content control in your team’s hands.
• Use an indexing solution to make sure updated content is shared with AI engines as quickly as possible.

It’s important to remember that while you want your website to be a source of truth for generative engines, bots learn from many sources — forums, review sites, competitors, the news, and so on. Your off-site brand presence can be almost as important as your on-site presence.

Emphasize brand authority

That’s why it’s also critical to work on your brand authority when building your GEO strategy. AI platforms seek to provide trustworthy, accurate information to people, and the more authoritative your brand signals, the better you’ll fare. One study by Kevin Indig recently found that brand popularity was the greatest predictor for mentions in ChatGPT.

Part of providing accurate information is citing sources, so your brand authority work will help you earn citations or links within AI conversations. A trusted, well-known entity with special expertise is the ideal source to cite; your goal is to become that entity.

Improving your brand authority can look like:

• Implementing a digital PR strategy
• Auditing third-party mentions of your brand (and taking any needed steps to correct or improve them)
• Publishing high-quality content by known experts and displaying special expertise in your niche
• Stopping publishing content just for volume’s sake
• Developing an influencer strategy
• Focusing on thought leadership and contributed content
• Developing a review strategy
• Maintaining consistent messaging across all materials you can control

This aligns with SEO best practices as well — Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines have emphasized E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) for years. Again, you’ll find that much of what you do for GEO benefits SEO, and vice versa.

Your GEO strategy is within reach

It can feel overwhelming to be faced with so much change, but everything GEO demands of your brand is something you’ve tackled before. You’ve already built strong foundations via years of SEO focus; as you shift to optimizing for generative engines and AI chatbots, you’ll find that while the strategy has shifted, much of the tactics are familiar.

If you need more support building your GEO-SEO strategy, don’t hesitate to book a consultation with our own experts via Botify Advantage. We’ve got decades of experience on the team and solve tough problems with brands every day — we’d love to help.