By Lelo Klaas
For years, search has been one of the most fascinating parts of the digital world for me. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what people search for, the words they use, why certain results appear before others and what ultimately makes someone click. Search engine optimisation taught us to think carefully about visibility, relevance, intent and the customer journey. Now, artificial intelligence is changing that journey again, and I find myself looking at search, and my own relationship with AI, with fresh eyes.
I will admit that my interest in AI did not begin with Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO. Like many people, I initially saw AI as a useful tool that could help me work faster. It could help with research, ideas, analysis, content and some of those repetitive tasks that take up more time than we realise. The more I started using it, however, the more I realised that the bigger story was not simply about productivity. AI is beginning to change how people find information, how they ask questions and how they make decisions online.
That is where GEO becomes interesting.
Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of improving content and a brand’s digital presence so that generative AI systems can discover, understand and potentially cite or reference that information when answering a user’s question. Traditional SEO has largely focused on earning visibility in search-engine results, while GEO is concerned with visibility within the answers generated by AI systems. Current industry definitions increasingly describe GEO as complementary to SEO rather than its replacement.
The concept itself is still relatively young. The academic paper that introduced GEO was first submitted in November 2023 and described it as a new approach to helping content creators improve their visibility within generative-engine responses. The researchers also found that the effectiveness of optimisation strategies varied across different subject areas, which is an important reminder that GEO is still developing and should not be treated as a simple formula.
Search is becoming a conversation
The easiest way to understand why GEO matters is to look at how our own search behaviour is changing.
Traditional search is familiar. We open a search engine, type something such as “best moisturiser for dry skin”, receive a list of results and start browsing. We might open several websites, compare products, return to the results page, refine the search and eventually make a decision.
AI introduces a different experience. Instead of typing a few keywords, I can explain my entire problem. I can say that my skin becomes extremely dry in winter, that I have sensitive skin and that I am looking for an affordable routine. I can then ask a follow-up question without starting another search. I can ask which ingredients to look for, which ones to avoid and what type of product would suit my needs.
Suddenly, search is no longer just a query followed by a list of links. It is a conversation.
That change has significant implications for anyone working in digital. We have spent years asking how we can get a website to rank for a particular keyword. Now we also need to ask whether an AI system can understand what our brand does, what expertise we have, what our products offer and whether our information is credible enough to contribute to an answer.
This does not mean that keywords are suddenly irrelevant. It means that context is becoming increasingly important.
GEO does not mean the death of SEO
Whenever a new technology enters the digital industry, we are very quick to announce the death of something else. Social media was going to replace websites. Apps were going to replace websites. Voice search was going to change everything. Now AI is supposedly going to kill traditional search.
I am not convinced.
I believe we are watching search expand rather than disappear.
SEO still matters because many of the principles that make content useful to traditional search engines also help make information understandable and retrievable for AI systems. Strong technical foundations, useful content, authority, clear website structures, accurate information and an understanding of user intent remain important. GEO builds on many of those principles but applies them to an environment where an AI system may synthesise information from several sources and present the user with an answer directly.
For me, the important shift is therefore not from SEO to GEO. It is from thinking only about rankings to thinking more broadly about discoverability.
The question used to be, “Where do we rank?”
Increasingly, another question needs to sit next to it: “When somebody asks AI about something we specialise in, are we part of the answer?”
AI has changed the way I think about my own work
This is where the conversation becomes personal for me.
The more I work with AI, the less interested I am in using it simply because AI is the latest thing everyone is talking about. I do not want AI to become another technology that businesses say they have without really understanding what they want to achieve with it.
Having an AI tool is not an AI strategy.
What excites me is figuring out where the technology genuinely makes us better.
Can AI help us understand what customers are searching for? Can it identify patterns in thousands of search queries that would take a person hours to analyse? Can it show us where our content is failing to answer customer questions? Can it help us organise information better? Can it help teams get through repetitive work faster so that they have more time for strategy and creative thinking?
Those are far more interesting questions to me than simply asking whether a business is “using AI”.
The opportunity is not in having access to the technology. Almost everyone will eventually have access to similar tools. The opportunity is in how intelligently we learn to use them.
Better technology should push us towards better content
There is another side of GEO that I find particularly interesting. AI may actually force us to become better content creators.
For years, parts of the digital industry have been guilty of producing content because an SEO tool told us that we needed 1,500 words about a particular keyword. The result has sometimes been pages filled with information that technically ticks SEO boxes but does not necessarily give the reader anything new.
Generative AI can produce average content at an extraordinary speed. That means simply producing more content is unlikely to be enough.
What becomes valuable is the information that is difficult to manufacture: genuine expertise, original research, customer insights, useful comparisons, experience, credible evidence and a clear point of view.
AI-search guidance is increasingly placing emphasis on clear, self-contained answers and information that systems can retrieve and understand. At the same time, emerging research suggests GEO is more complicated than following a handful of optimisation tricks. A 2026 review of GEO research found that results can vary across platforms and contexts, and that there is not yet one proven technique that guarantees long-term visibility everywhere.
That uncertainty is important because it reminds us not to turn GEO into another checklist.
The goal should not be to write for robots.
The goal should be to create information that is genuinely useful to people and structured clearly enough for machines to understand it too.
The information businesses already have could become incredibly valuable
I also believe many businesses are sitting on valuable information without recognising it as content.
Think about the questions customers repeatedly ask call-centre agents. Think about the phrases people type into a website’s internal search bar. Think about product reviews, customer-service conversations, frequently asked questions, product comparisons and the reasons people abandon a purchase.
That is real language from real customers.
When we combine that information with search data, website behaviour and AI-assisted analysis, we can start creating content around what customers actually need rather than what we assume they need.
This is where I believe SEO, GEO, customer experience, content and data will increasingly come together.
The departments and disciplines may still have different names, but the customer does not care about our organisational structures. They simply have a question, a need or a problem, and they expect the digital experience to help them solve it.
Where I believe the industry is heading
I believe the future of search will be much more fragmented than the one we have known.
Google will remain important, but it will not be the only place where discovery happens. People will continue searching on social media, marketplaces and individual websites, while also asking questions through AI assistants and AI-powered search experiences.
The result is that digital visibility will become bigger than occupying a good position on a search-engine results page.
Brands will need to think about whether their information can be found, understood and trusted across different discovery environments. GEO is one part of that changing landscape.
We are already seeing the industry develop new ways of thinking about visibility, including AI citations, brand mentions and whether information from a source is actually incorporated into an AI-generated response. Research published in 2026, for example, has proposed looking beyond simple citation counts and examining how much influence a cited source actually has on the answer that is generated.
That tells me that the measurement conversation is going to change too.
Traffic and rankings will continue to matter, but digital teams may increasingly find themselves discussing visibility in AI responses alongside traditional organic-search performance.
We should not allow AI to become something that is simply there
This is probably the strongest feeling I have about where we are right now.
AI is here. We can debate exactly how quickly adoption will happen, which platforms will win and what the technology will look like five years from now, but ignoring it will not stop the experimentation happening around us.
At the same time, blindly accepting everything AI produces would be equally irresponsible.
AI can be wrong. It can misunderstand context. It can reproduce weak information confidently. There are legitimate questions around privacy, copyright, bias, transparency and trust. The technology deserves curiosity, but it also deserves scrutiny.
That is why I think the best approach is active participation.
Use it. Test it. Question it. Learn what it does well. Learn where it struggles. Understand what it can automate and where human judgement still needs to lead.
My growing love for AI does not come from believing that it can replace people. It comes from seeing what becomes possible when a person brings their own knowledge, experience and judgement to the technology.
AI can give me twenty ideas in seconds. I still have to know which idea makes sense.
It can analyse information quickly. I still need to understand the business context.
It can produce an answer. I still need to ask whether that answer is actually right.
That human responsibility is not disappearing.
The next chapter of search has already started
For a long time, one of the biggest questions in digital marketing was simple: Can people find us?
Then we became more sophisticated and started asking: Can the right people find us at the right moment?
I believe AI is adding another question: When an AI system is helping someone understand something, compare options or make a decision, does it understand enough about our brand to consider us relevant?
That, for me, is what makes Generative Engine Optimisation worth paying attention to.
I do not see GEO as the latest acronym that should send everyone rushing to rewrite their entire digital strategy. I see it as a signal of something much bigger: the way people discover and consume information is changing again.
We are still early enough that there are more questions than answers, and I actually find that exciting.
This is the time to experiment, learn and understand where AI genuinely fits into the work we already do. We should not allow it to become another piece of technology that simply sits there because everyone else has it.
We should learn how to use it to the best of our ability.
Because I do not think the future of digital belongs to AI on its own.
I think it belongs to the people and businesses that learn how to combine technology with human experience, curiosity, judgement and creativity — and use that combination to create something genuinely useful.