The use of AI chats and AI agents for information seeking is rising rapidly. Increasingly, people are turning to conversational AI interfaces instead of traditional search engines. Yet many organisations are still being overlooked in these results.
The urgency is real—and research proves it. According to our own findings based on the Digital Assistants Experience study (Shirute & Elisa, 2024), which assessed how well organisations serve AI-powered digital assistants acting as machine customers, most companies failed to meet even basic expectations. Digital channels frequently couldn’t provide relevant answers or support task completion.
This paints a troubling picture, and it’s not just our research revealing this gap. The reality today is even worse. These AI agents and AI searches can’t even find the relevant service providers to start shopping, because their content isn’t designed for machines to interpret and understand.
It gets even clearer when paired with external evidence, as other studies confirm that the problem is widespread.
According to the AI Search Index (Superlines, March 2025), which tested 3,500 prompts across leading LLMs, 80% of Finland’s 100 largest companies were mentioned in less than 35% of AI-generated responses. Only three companies appeared in more than half of the results. The takeaway? Even major businesses are largely invisible to today’s AI search engines—and often entirely missing from the conversation.
If traditional SEO were enough, results like these would look very different. But clearly, they don’t. The shift is happening fast. Are you ready for it?
When we talk about visibility in digital channels, we’ve long meant one thing: getting to the top of Google’s search results. But in 2025, the game is changing.
As Kieran Gilmurray highlighted in their discussion with Sirte Pihlaja in the recent episode of The AI Experience Podcast, we’re witnessing a major transformation in how people (and increasingly, machines) discover content.
This isn’t just a change in tactics. It’s a full-scale shift in who you’re optimising for, how your content is understood, and what visibility even means.
- For more on how AI is reshaping customer experience strategy and what CX leaders need to do to stay ahead, read Sirte’s related piece on bridging the AI skills gap in CX.
Welcome to the world of GEO—Generative Engine Optimisation.
AIO First, GEO Within: Understanding the New Visibility Stack
As AI becomes the primary gateway to information, the concept of visibility is evolving—and with it, the strategies that businesses must adopt. That’s where AIO (AI Optimisation) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) come in.
AIO is the broader strategy. It focuses on making your entire digital presence compatible with AI-driven discovery, recommendation, and interaction. This includes ensuring your business and content are represented in knowledge graphs, structured data formats, API-accessible platforms, and systems that AI agents can interact with.
GEO, by contrast, is a specialised subset of AIO. It’s the content side of AI optimisation, ensuring that your information is structured, clear, and trustworthy enough to be cited or summarised in AI-generated responses from models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude.
Think of AIO as the architecture, and GEO as the storytelling. AIO ensures you’re present. GEO ensures you’re heard.
From SERPs to Summaries: The Difference Between SEO and GEO
Let’s be clear: GEO builds on many of the same best practices as SEO. Structured data, semantic clarity, internal linking, authority signals—these still matter.
But here’s what makes GEO a whole new game: SEO is designed to help humans scrolling through search result pages find and click on your content. GEO, on the other hand, is focused on helping large language models (LLMs) and AI systems understand, extract, and reuse your content in the answers they generate, instead of showing a list of links.
The business model of people googling things and clicking through to your website is fading. As users shift to AI chats and agents to get things done—including shopping—your content must now be ready for a different kind of decision-maker.
GEO isn’t about ranking first on a SERP. It’s about being selected, quoted, or synthesised into an AI-generated response. This means your content must be:
- Machine-readable (structured, clear, and contextualised)
- Credible and verifiable (LLMs favour trustworthy, source-rich information)
- Entity-aware (so machines can connect ideas, not just match keywords)
And here’s the kicker: even modern SEO won’t guarantee you’re included. If your content isn’t optimised for how LLMs interpret and reuse information, it won’t make it into the AI-generated answers—even if it ranks well in Google.
Why GEO Is a Paradigm Shift
Traditional SEO helps humans find your content. GEO ensures machines can speak for you.
That’s a huge shift at the top of the funnel. In an AI-first world, customer journeys will increasingly start (and end) in a conversation with an AI or they are fully performed by an AI agent. If you’re not being cited, you’re not being seen.
AI search tools often deliver complete answers without requiring users to click through to websites, meaning your content might be used—and never credited—resulting in a sharp decline in direct website traffic.
Click-through rates from search engines are plummeting. Almost 60% of all Google searches (over 3 out of 5 trillion) last year ended without a click, and nearly 40% of search results now include AI-generated overviews (NP Digital, May 2025 data from Ubersuggest & Zero-Click Search Study 2024, Search Engine Land/SparkToro).
According to a recent Bain survey (Bain–Dynata Generative AI Consumer Survey, December 2024), nearly 80% of consumers now use ‘zero-click’ results in at least 40% of their searches—leading to an estimated 15% to 25% drop in organic web traffic.
If your website and content are not created with AIO and GEO in mind, you’ll simply disappear from the top of the funnel.
This shift affects more than marketing. It challenges content strategy, brand visibility, and the very idea of “search.” For businesses, it’s not just about traffic anymore—it’s about presence in the AI-powered moment of truth.
If you don’t optimise for AI, you won’t just lose human visibility: you won’t be able to serve AI agents either. Do you want to run a business that isn’t future-proof?
So What Should I Do First?
Use GEO practices in tandem with traditional SEO to enhance overall discoverability across both human and AI-driven platforms.
If you’re asking: “How do I ensure our business is visible in AI search, as people move from Google to AI tools?”, here’s your GEO starter kit:
- Audit Your Content for AI Readiness
- Optimise page load speeds and mobile usability. Ensure your content can be crawled efficiently by AI agents in real time to ensure AI accessibility.
- Is your content structured clearly with headings, lists, and concise answers?
- Is it backed by sources, quotes, and facts that build trust?
- Use Schema and Semantic Markup
- Apply structured data (Schema.org) so AI systems can easily interpret the purpose and context of your content.
- Clearly label products, authors, FAQs, and articles.
- Create Answer-Friendly Content
- Focus on explaining concepts and answering questions.
- Write in a way that makes your content easy for AI to reuse, summarise, or quote.
- Publish Thought Leadership That’s Worth Quoting
- Become the source LLMs want to cite by offering unique, well-supported insights in your niche.
- Track Your Brand in AI Interfaces
- Regularly test how your brand appears in responses from AI search engines.
- Tools like Perplexity, Bing Chat, or ChatGPT with browsing can help you spot where (or if) your content is appearing.
How to Make Your Content LLM-Friendly
Want to go deeper? Here are specific writing strategies that help your content show up in AI-generated answers:
- Be clear, structured, and extractable
Use short, declarative sentences. Include headings, bullet points, and tables. - Focus on factual precision
Include verifiable information—names, dates, stats, and examples. - Add context with entities
Mention people, brands, and tools explicitly. Avoid vague references. - Write with summarisation in mind
Structure content so it can be quoted or summarised without losing meaning. - Include trust signals
Cite sources, add author bios, and provide references. This increases credibility in the eyes of AI.
Bonus Tip: Have your website roasted by AI to see how well it’s GEO- or AIO-ready right now. Ask the AI for instructions on what changes to make. Google AI Studio’s Realtime Streaming is a great place to start a conversation and try this out!
When AI Agents Are Your Next Customers
This isn’t about abandoning SEO. It’s about adding a new layer: one that ensures your content shows up not just in search results, but in the answers those results are being replaced with.
The future isn’t just about human searchers. It’s about AI agents acting on behalf of customers making decisions, giving recommendations, and shaping purchasing paths without ever visiting your homepage. In this world, visibility isn’t about impressions or clicks. It’s about being part of the AI’s working knowledge.
Imagine AI agents comparing solutions, pulling citations, synthesising options, and deciding what to buy on your customer’s behalf. Or two AI agents negotiating a contract based on information they’ve gathered from authoritative sources. If you’re not one of those sources, you’re out of the conversation.
GEO is the new frontier of visibility. The businesses that adapt early will have the edge—not just in traffic, but in trust, relevance, and influence.
Are you ready to be part of the answer?
For more insights from Sirte Pihlaja, follow her on LinkedIn or subscribe to her podcast series AI Experience Podcast.
Sirte Pihlaja, a globally recognised AI Whisperer and CX Thought Leader, pioneers Agentic AI in customer and employee experiences. As CEO of Shirute and Head of Team at CXPA Finland, she helps organisations navigate AI-driven transformation with human-centric business models and CX and AI governance frameworks.
The author of three global bestsellers, including Customer Experience 2, 3, and 5, Sirte explores how multi-agent AI networks and machine customers reshape business and CX/EX strategies.
