SEO vs "GEO" / AEO: Stop Choosing Sides!
Beyond the hype: Why GEO experts cannot do without SEO expertise
Generative engine optimization (GEO) services are becoming increasingly popular, and many professionals claim themselves “GEO experts”, announcing SEO as dead.
In reality, SEO expertise is the foundation of GEO for two main reasons:
Organic search visibility is fundamental to AI visibility because LLMs primarily use search to research a topic and discover brands or products. Without SEO, your URLs will likely be unfindable for LLMs.
Most traditional SEO tactics are key to LLM discoverability in one way or another.
Here are those SEO tactics that remain fundamental to AI visibility optimization:
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Keyword research
The conversational nature of generative AI search prompted many SEO/GEO professionals to announce keyword research as “useless” or “dead”.
I consider these claims fundamentally wrong.
First of all, there’s no replacement to the query data. We don’t have any access to the reliable prompt data. Essentially, we cannot know what users are typing as AI prompts to discover brands or products.
Keyword research is still the only source of insights as to how consumers arrive at certain buying decisions. Keywords can be organized by intent, giving you clues on how to structure your site to help your target customers at every step of their research.
Keyword (content) gaps help you identify what your site may be missing and where it is failing to be helpful to customers.
All of that is as useful for organic visibility as for LLM visibility because LLMs mimic people’s buying journeys and mostly take the same steps when helping their users to choose a product to buy.
There’s no way to optimize for prompts because they are likely to be all different and unpredictable. Keyword optimization is all we need to create content and pages that solve your customers’ problems and cater to their needs.
Content optimization
On-site content SEO hasn’t fundamentally changed due to LLMs. Like 5 years ago, we still need optimized content to:
Help customers when they are still researching their problems (and may not be ready to buy).
Put your products in a relevant, problem-solving context.
Optimized content may not generate the same amount of traffic these days that it did 3-5 years ago; yet it doesn’t mean you should stop publishing it and focus on “bottom-of-the-funnel” / high-intent queries that generate sales (this is a popular recommendation many “GEO experts” make).
LLMs can take your content, summarize it, and give it to your customers in the form of a comprehensive answer, so they never have to click to your website. But it will likely still influence your customers’ buying decisions because your brand will end up being part of that content, and LLMs will likely recommend them as a solution.
Nowadays, we optimize for buying journeys, but we still use keyword research to understand those buying journeys, and we keyword-optimize content for both search and LLM bots to be more likely to find it, and “understand” that it is relevant to the users’ needs.
Site architecture and navigation
In traditional SEO, flatter site architecture (which ensures no pages are dug too deep into the site) and better internal linking strategy ensure better crawlability and more long-tail keyword ranking opportunities.
In LLMs, clear site architecture ensures that LLMs understand your business better and place your products correctly in the training data.
In both cases, your site navigation should be:
Well-structured for customers (or LLM bots) to be able to quickly find what they need
Usable without JavaScript enabled (for it to be usable regardless of the browser (or absence of one) it is being accessed through)
Clear and focused to reflect your site’s purpose and value proposition.
Link building
Whether any of the LLMs use any authority signals like backlinks, we don’t know. The only hint of Gemini / AI Mode using PageRanks was almost a year ago. So whether backlinks directly influence LLM citability is unknown.
However, backlinks (specifically, linked or unlinked brand mentions) are important for other aspects of LLM visibility:
Higher organic rankings, which (again) drive LLM findability
Entity associations (being mentioned/linked to alongside your well-known competitors)
Authority: Regular and consistent brand mentions and links on authoritative publications make your business more trustworthy (which helps frequent answer inclusion)
All of these indirect LLM visibility signals are achieved by a high-quality link-building strategy (like data-driven digital PR).
Of course, there’s more to GEO than SEO best practices, at least for one crucial reason: GEO relies on different success metrics than SEO. But without knowing and implementing traditional SEO, your chances of being found by LLMs are almost 0.