Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is becoming essential as audiences shift from Google searches to AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. Around 10% of web traffic now comes directly from Generative AI, meaning visibility depends on how AI systems represent your brand.
Unlike SEO, GEO focuses on being findable, machine-readable, and repeatable across platforms so your narrative is accurately included in AI answers. For comms teams, this means optimizing content for clarity, authority, and consistency all while ensuring your brand voice is surfaced in the AI-driven information landscape.
This article explores what GEO means for communications teams and how they can adapt strategies to stay visible, credible, and influential in the AI-driven search era.
Imagine this: your website’s organic traffic drops by 10%, not because of competitor outranking you on Google, but because audiences are skipping search altogether and asking Generative AI (Gen AI) tools for answers. Now stop imagining... this is today’s reality.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is quickly becoming a strategic necessity for communications teams seeking to guide how their brand and products are surfaced, framed, and understood within an information landscape increasingly shaped by Generative AI (Gen AI). In February 2025, traffic from Gen AI sources to U.S. websites increased by 1,200% compared to July 2024 [stat link]. Today, the average website has seen a significant decrease in organic traffic and ~10% of traffic now comes from Generative AI sources like ChatGPT or Gemini. A surge that underscores just how rapidly discovery is shifting away from traditional search.
Until recently, most online visibility strategies revolved around Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the practice of improving your ranking on search engines, like Google, so users could find your website through a list of links. Now, instead of scrolling through a results page, users are asking large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity to answer their questions directly.
A recent survey found that 71.5% of users now turn to AI tools for search queries. This shift means the first (and often only) version of your message someone sees may come in the form of an AI-generated summary, rather than a click to your website or a direct interaction with your content.
If your organization’s voice is absent from the sources AI draws on, your narrative risks being omitted, distorted, or overshadowed by others. For comms professionals, here are a few things to consider in navigating the evolving world of GEO so you can sleep better at night.
In the traditional search model, communications leaders focused on tactics that ensured their organizations were visible and accurately represented when stakeholders, whether journalists, investors, policymakers, or customers, went looking for information. Even when discovery happened through earned media, the priority was maintaining a consistent, balanced narrative and ensuring the organization’s voice came through clearly.
With generative search, AI tools now act as intermediaries, pulling together responses from a mixture of sources, including news outlets, social media posts, corporate websites, and public databases, summarizing and synthesizing information. One search query from a user, may result in 10s of different sources being collected to inform a response. Often, those results sit outside the top 10 blue links you may find on a Google search results page.
The implications are significant:
This new environment creates three key challenges for communications teams:
This is where GEO enters the chat.
The good news for comms teams is that Gen AI search engines naturally gravitate toward the kind of content comms teams already excel at creating. Between 60–70% of traffic from Gen AI tools goes to news articles, blogs, and other authoritative narrative, which is the bread and butter of communications teams. Unlike traditional SEO, which often rewarded keyword stuffing or chasing rankings, generative search favors clear, well-structured, and fact-rich storytelling. As such, the press releases, executive statements, and thought leadership pieces comms teams create are already aligned with the content formats AI models are most likely to surface, summarize, and amplify.
The challenge now is making sure those assets are not only well-crafted but also machine-readable (i.e. formatted so AI tools can easily scan, interpret and use them) and consistently discoverable to the platforms shaping the generative search ecosystem, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of ensuring your organization’s public-facing information can be easily discovered, interpreted, and accurately represented by Generative AI tools. GEO blends content strategy (clear, consistent, authoritative messaging) with technical optimization (machine-readable formats, structured data, metadata, and schema) so AI systems can reliably surface and synthesize your organization’s perspective in response to natural-language queries.
GEO for communications teams means ensuring your content is:
For example, if a journalist asks ChatGPT, “Who are the top leaders in sustainable packaging?” and your CEO has been speaking on the topic for years, GEO ensures that AI tools represent your organization prominence on the topic.
We’re moving from a world of search engines to a world of answer engines. Yes, GEO still builds on some SEO principles, such as creating authoritative content, maintaining consistent messaging, and publishing on trusted domains. However, the fundamental difference is that visibility is now about being included in the answers AI tools generate directly for users. Here are key nuances to keep in mind:
The rise of generative search affects every area of communications:
If you want proof that SEO and GEO can work together, look no further than our own Key Generative AI Statistics page.
This single piece of content is currently ranked in Google’s AI Overviews for “Key Generative AI Statistics 2025”, giving us prime visibility in the traditional search landscape. But here’s where it gets even more interesting: when we asked ChatGPT to recommend the best sources for Generative AI statistics, our page was listed as the #2 source in its AI-generated overview, right alongside global research firms and market analysts.
That means we’re not just winning in SEO, where visibility is earned through ranking algorithms, backlinks, and keyword optimization. We’re also winning in GEO, where presence is determined by whether AI tools see your content as credible, authoritative, and worth including in their summaries.
This dual placement is exactly what communications teams should be aiming for:
When you achieve both, you’re not only discoverable by human audiences but also positioned as a trusted source in the “first draft” of information AI presents to them.
To position your brand effectively in the generative search era, consider integrating these GEO tactics into your comms tasks:
Generative search represents a structural change in how information flows. Several shifts are already underway:
The AI systems mediate your stakeholders’ understanding of you. Like any audience, they need to be briefed, given consistent information, and provided with sources they trust.
At Sequencr AI, we work with marketing and communications teams to ensure their brands are accurately represented in the generative search era. Our approach combines strategy, technology, and ongoing monitoring to secure your place in AI-generated narratives.
Our services include:
If you want to see how your brand is currently represented in the Gen AI world and how to stand out, reach out to us for a quick 30-minute discovery call.
