Team Madcraft
If you’ve spent the last decade investing in SEO and you’re now hearing about GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and AI search, you’re probably wondering whether the rules just changed on you. Short answer: yes, partly. Long answer is what the rest of this article is for.
SEO is what most marketing teams already know. You optimize a website so that Google’s traditional results rank you on page one for the terms your buyers type in.
GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the practice of getting your business mentioned, cited, or recommended inside AI-generated answers. Think of the response a CMO gets when she asks ChatGPT, “What’s the best CRM for a 200-person manufacturing company?” Whoever shows up in that answer wins the consideration set. That’s GEO.
AEO, answer engine optimization, sits in between. It targets featured snippets, “People Also Ask” boxes, and Google’s AI Overviews. Some agencies use AEO and GEO interchangeably. Others draw a hard line between them. Honestly, the line is fuzzy, and most clients don’t need to care which label is on what.
What matters is this. There are now two different surfaces where your buyers find vendors. The classic ten blue links. And the AI answer that summarizes everything before they ever scroll.
For most of 2023 and 2024, AI search was a curiosity. Marketers experimented with it. CFOs ignored it. Buyers used it for personal stuff but kept using Google for work decisions.
That stopped being true sometime last year. Procurement teams started running shortlists through Perplexity. Founders started asking ChatGPT for vendor recommendations before they ever opened a search tab. Healthcare and tech buyers, in particular, have moved fast.
The numbers tell the story. Click-through rates on traditional search have been falling for two years. Branded search volume from people who first encountered a brand inside an AI answer has gone the other way. The shift isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s already in your analytics, if you know where to look.
If your competitors are showing up inside AI answers and you aren’t, you’re invisible to a chunk of your market. And that chunk is growing every quarter.
Here’s where most articles get vague and just list a few buzzwords. Let’s be more specific.
The ranking surface is different. SEO targets a list of blue links. GEO targets a single, synthesized answer that may cite three to seven sources, often with no clear visual hierarchy.
The signals overlap, but not completely. AI engines lean heavily on content that’s well-structured, factually dense, and easy to extract. A page that ranks number one for a competitive keyword might still get ignored by ChatGPT if it’s full of fluff and missing direct answers. Conversely, a less-ranked page with sharper, fact-rich content can get cited often.
Authority signals look different too. Traditional SEO weighs backlinks heavily. GEO leans more on brand mentions across the open web, including forums, industry publications, and structured sources like Wikipedia and Crunchbase. If your brand isn’t being talked about in places AI models train on, you’re harder to surface.
Measurement is messier. SEO has GSC, GA4, rank trackers, and a decade of established benchmarks. GEO has citation tracking tools that are still maturing, plus brand mention monitoring across AI platforms. You can measure it, but expect more uncertainty than you’re used to.
Content style is different. Long, meandering blog posts can still rank in traditional search. AI engines prefer content that gets to the point fast and answers the question in the first paragraph. That’s a real shift in how good content is structured.
A few things people are panicking about that they shouldn’t.
Your website still matters. AI engines need to read your site to know what you do, and they prefer fast, well-structured pages. Bad technical SEO hurts you in both worlds.
Backlinks still count. Maybe slightly less than they did, but a strong link profile is still one of the cleanest signals of authority an AI model can pick up on.
Keyword research is still useful. The exact terms people type into ChatGPT are different from what they type into Google, but the underlying buyer intent is the same. If you’ve done your homework on what your audience actually wants to know, that work travels.
Anyone telling you SEO is dead is selling something. It isn’t dead. It’s getting a sibling.
A few things that are working right now, based on what we’re actually seeing in client accounts.
The buyer asks ChatGPT a question. The model pulls together an answer from sources. If your page is the cleanest answer to that exact question, you have a shot at being cited.
That means your content needs to mirror how people actually ask things. “Best CRM for manufacturing under 500 employees” beats “Top CRM Solutions in 2026: A Comprehensive Guide.” The second one looks better in a content calendar. The first one gets cited.
Schema markup is having a second life because of GEO. FAQ Page, How To Article, Organization, Product. These tell AI engines what your page is about in a format they can parse without guessing. Most B2B sites still don’t have basic schema implemented properly. That’s an easy edge.
If your company isn’t mentioned in industry publications, niche forums, podcast transcripts, or reputable directories, AI models are working with thin information about you. Digital PR, podcast appearances, guest articles, and industry reports all feed the model. This isn’t link building dressed up. It’s about being a real entity in your sector that the open web actually talks about.
You need to know whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude are mentioning your brand and on which queries. There are tools for this now. They’re imperfect, but they’re better than guessing. Track citation share alongside your rankings and treat both as proxies for visibility.
Both. Almost always both.
Here’s why. Most B2B buyers in the US still start a meaningful chunk of their research on Google. SEO captures that. But the same buyers are increasingly using AI to summarize, compare, and shortlist. GEO captures that.
Investing in only one of them leaves you exposed on the other. And the good news is that the foundational work, technical health, content quality, brand authority, mostly serves both disciplines. You’re not running two completely separate programs. You’re running one program with two distribution surfaces.
The real choice is in where you weight the effort. A B2B SaaS company selling to CTOs probably needs to lean harder into GEO because their buyers are early AI adopters. A local service business in a less digital-native sector can afford to keep most of the budget in SEO for another year or two. Sector and buyer behavior should drive the split, not whatever the latest LinkedIn thread is shouting about.
Three traps we keep watching businesses fall into.
Hiring an “AI search” specialist who can’t audit a website. GEO without solid technical SEO underneath is a house on sand. The person running your GEO strategy needs to understand crawling, indexing, and structured data, not just prompt engineering.
Spinning up AI-generated content at scale to “feed the machine.” AI engines are getting noticeably better at downranking content that smells synthetic. Volume alone doesn’t work. Distinct, expert-led content does.
Treating GEO as a one-time project. This is a discipline that compounds over time. The models change. The citation patterns change. The query landscape changes. If you’re not measuring monthly and adjusting quarterly, you’ll fall behind quickly.
Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the practice of optimizing your brand and content so you’re cited or recommended inside answers produced by AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. Madcraft builds GEO strategies alongside traditional SEO so your business shows up across both.
No. SEO still drives a large share of B2B research. GEO sits on top as an additional discipline focused on AI search visibility. Madcraft helps clients invest in both without doubling their budget.
Test it manually by asking the major AI engines questions your buyers would ask. There are also citation tracking tools that monitor your brand’s presence across AI platforms over time. Madcraft sets this up as part of every GEO engagement.
Faster than SEO in some cases. Brand mentions and citations can shift inside a couple of months once content and digital PR start landing. Sustained visibility takes longer. Expect three to six months for a clear pattern.
Track pipeline contribution, not closed revenue. Connect your CRM to your website analytics so leads are attributed correctly from first click to contract. Madcraft sets this up as part of every engagement.
