"Buyers didn't abandon search engines. They added new ones. Today, decisions are shaped across two environments at the same time - search engine optimization (SEO), where buyers research, compare and validate through traditional search results, and generative engine optimization (GEO), where buyers ask AI tools to summarize, recommend and explain. The mistake many teams are making is treating these as separate strategies. They're not. They're two moments in the same decision cycle."
"Under pressure, people don't want more information. They want certainty. A modern buying journey looks like this: a buyer Googles a question to understand the landscape, asks an AI tool like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google Gemini to summarize options, forms an opinion quickly and may never click a single website. That last point matters. You can rank first in search and still lose the deal if your perspective never shows up in the answers shaping buyer understanding."
"When teams hear GEO, the instinct is to spin up a new initiative - new tools, dashboards and owners. That's unnecessary and often counterproductive. What works in SEO is the same thing AI systems look for: clear expertise, structured information, credible sources and consistent messaging across the web. The difference is how content travels. Search engines send people to pages. AI engines extract and repeat explanations."
Search has expanded as buyers use both traditional search engines and AI tools. Decisions occur across SEO, where buyers research and validate, and GEO, where AI summarizes, recommends and explains. Buyers often Google to learn the landscape, then ask AI to summarize options and may form opinions without visiting websites. SEO improves discoverability; GEO amplifies distribution and can directly shape buyer understanding. Treating SEO and GEO as separate strategies misses their interdependence. Effective content demonstrates clear expertise, structured information, credible sources and consistent messaging so AI systems can extract and reuse explanations.
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