Who would have thought that there would come a day when, instead of Googling something, people would much rather prefer to get the answers from an AI-powered chatbot?
Well, it’s happening.
We’re already seeing a shift in how people search online.
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About 5 months ago, Ahrefs reported that they’re getting thousands of new signups from ChatGPT.
What does this mean? Day after day, GEO is gaining more and more territory.
What is GEO?
Instead of Googling it, let’s ask our good “old” friend ChatGPT to define GEO. [In hindsight, this is exactly what GEO is all about - using an AI tool instead of Google for answers.]
Here’s what ChatGPT says:
“GEO is an emerging concept related to optimizing content for AI-generated search results rather than traditional search engines like Google. It focuses on how content appears in AI-driven responses from tools like ChatGPT, Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE), and Microsoft's Copilot.”
But what interests me is the WHY.
Why do people prefer to get their answers from AI-generated search results over Google?
Here are some of the reasons I’ve received:
What Does This Mean For SEO?
Traditional search rankings will continue declining as more people turn to AI-powered chatbots for help instead of Google. Even Reddit is becoming more trustworthy than Google results (although they are heavily intertwined now that Reddit threads are ranking very high on Google).
We’re seeing more and more of our partners asking us to double down on Reddit marketing.
Are we on the verge of seeing the death of Google? And most importantly, the death of SEO?
Short answer: No, SEO isn’t dead or dying any time soon.
As Ahrefs CMO said in a recent LinkedIn post:
SEO is and will continue to be relevant because GEO uses SEO as a foundation when giving you the answers you’re looking for.
I’ll let ChatGPT answer for itself:
“Yes, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) builds on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as its foundation, but it expands beyond traditional SEO to optimize content for AI-generated responses rather than just search engine rankings.”
How Relevant Is Your Company In Generative Search Engines?
Unlike SEO strategies, which have been around for decades (while also evolving), GEO strategies are pretty new. GEO is a different beast.
Why?
First, there isn’t one single AI-powered chatbot you can aim to rank high on. There are dozens available, and new ones are popping up each day.
So you will not know which ones your audience uses, leaving you in a situation where you’ll have to practically shoot in the dark.
Second, various AI chatbots have their own ranking criteria for coming up with responses and deciding which information to prioritize.
“Unlike traditional SEO, which is based on Google’s ranking factors (backlinks, keyword relevance, page authority, etc.), AI-generated rankings rely more on contextual understanding, credibility, and structured data,” ChatGPT responds.
Why should you care?
While you may do your best to follow the criteria of one particular AI-powered chatbot, you will most likely not come up high in rankings by other AI chatbots.
Our team at Empact Partners did an experiment recently where we tested a dozen AI chatbots and analyzed the answers each one gave to the same prompt.
Then we went deeper to understand the ranking criteria for each AI-powered chatbot to better understand the reasoning behind each answer we got from each tool.
Let’s Test Your SaaS Company’s GEO Performance
Curious about the current GEO performance of your company? You can follow the next steps to find out where you stand with GEO.
How Empact Partners Is Pioneering GEO For SaaS Companies
By now, you should know that if your business isn’t “optimized for AI” and you’re not putting any effort into GEO, your company will risk becoming invisible in this new search ecosystem that we see evolving every day. We keep on mentioning the following to our partners: High-quality content always wins.
But it happens at times when a partner would come back to us with: “I’m not buying it.”
And we get it.
AI content is everywhere nowadays. Just take a look at this AI generated content published on Forbes about “Artificial Intelligence And The Future Of Content Marketing.” But while we move away from conventional content marketing, at the same time, there is a need to create new, unique, and high-quality human-generated content to remain relevant in AI training datasets.
If you focus on creating high-quality content, you're going to influence the answers that are being produced by Generative AI (GenAI) engines, and, ultimately, that's going to drive traffic and exposure for your product.
So if you want to win in the search game or if you want to be recommended in the GenAI search engines, you need to create high-quality content. As simple as that.
The fundamental importance of quality content remains constant, especially now that it has the ability to influence AI models, and, by extension, product visibility and recommendations via AI-powered chatbots.
Our team at Empact Partners is currently digging deeper into the share of voice sources and creating an internal GEO optimization roadmap that will help SaaS companies get discovered via non-traditional search engines like AI Chatbots.
It’s not only about gaining more visibility. It’s about converting that visibility into revenue.
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That’s why it’s important to capture the GEO market share pretty early on, not to get left behind. Our GEO Framework is built on the core factors AI models use to generate content and come up with their answers.
We’ll help you:
The Future Of GenAI And Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
Last month, I attended the SINFO tech conference in Lisbon. One of the keynote talks that stood out to me was the one by Rohit Patel titled “What is GenAI and how to evaluate AI for your use case?”
Patel is the Director of Generative AI at Meta and founder of QuickAI. When asked if we should expect more GenAI players to go open source in the near future, Patel said:
He mentioned that current models are already becoming more commoditized.
AGI is the next theoretical leap in the field of AI. Instead of just performing simple tasks, AGI will eventually be able to adopt, innovate, and better understand human needs.
But we are yet to experience this level of AGI.
“I think what's going to happen is maybe the definition of AGI will transition a little bit to sort of the latter where you have some AIs that are good at a wide variety of tasks because we as humans do want to accomplish a wide variety of tasks in our day to day.
But a large number of applications are going to be certainly smaller purpose-built things that will just do whatever it is they need to do in their domain.” Patel added.
Curious to find out how you can succeed in the uncharted GEO territory? Book a call with me.
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