For years, we have worked to “do well on Google”: positioning our website, obtaining links of high quality, feed social networks and take care of our digital reputation on search engines and platforms.
That map has changed, and apparently there is no turning back. Generative AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have become the new mediators: they no longer just display links, they search, interpret and write a single response for each user based on what they find on the web.
This is the context in which GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) was born: optimisation for generative AI engines. It does not replace SEO, but rather expands on it and redefines what it means today to be visible and credible to your audiences.
In this article, we explain what GEO is, why it matters to communication teams, and what the first steps are. and what first steps you can take so that your brand begins to position itself in the brand start to position itself in the search engines of AI.
From search engine to assistant: what has really changed?
With traditional search engines, visibility was measured in positions: being on the first page, appearing ahead of the competition, gaining clicks on certain keywords. The user was the one who decided which link deserved their attention.
With AI assistants, the visibility unit is no longer a URL, but a paragraph within a response. The model decides which sources to consult, how to combine them, and which fragments to incorporate. For the brand, the dilemma boils down to something very binary: to be or not to be within that text.
This introduces three fundamental changes. First, the importance of open and authoritative sources. AI relies primarily on accessible, well-structured content from domains that already carry some weight. Second, the idea that there is no longer a ‘page 2’: if you don’t appear in that first response, you disappear from that user’s radar. And third, the loss of control over the specific snippet that will be displayed; AI cuts, summarises and reinterprets, and in that process shapes your story.
What is GEO and how does it relate to SEO?
SEO continues to follow a well-known logic: optimising websites and content so that search engines can find them, interpret them and display them in relevant positions. The GEO does not break with that logic, but it does displace it. The objective ceases to be solely “that they find me” to become “that they use me as a source”.
GEO focuses on increasing the presence of the brand in AI-generated responses: ensuring that the assistant cites us as an example, recommends us, describes us correctly, or includes links to our content. The indicator is no longer just visits from Google, but the frequency and quality with which we appear in the responses of different models.
To achieve this, the playing field is expanding. It is not enough to optimise the corporate website. Enter earned media (media coverage), open blogs, reports and studies cited by others, sector repositories and databases, institutional pages and even certain social media profiles. Everything that models can ‘read’ about the brand is part of the GEO.
In summary: SEO continues to be necessary, because many models rely on search engines to complete information. But GEO adds a strategic layer: taking care of the footprint global that we leave on the ecosystem of content that feeds AI.
Algorithmic reputation: the image that AI constructs of your brand.
In this context, it makes sense to talk about algorithmic reputation. If traditional reputation is the image that different audiences have of an organisation, algorithmic reputation is the image that algorithms construct based on available content.
It manifests itself in very specific ways: how AI explains who you are and what you do, what milestones it highlights when asked for a ‘summary’ or ‘career history’, what topics it associates with your name, whether it links you to innovation, sustainability or conflict, whether it mentions past crises without contextualising them, or whether it completely ignores your key messages.
That reputation is fuelled above all by unpaid content: articles from media outlets, institutional documents, corporate blogs, reports, pages of independent organisations. Press releases and campaigns continue to be important, but above all insofar as they generate coverageexternal references that will then be read and reused.
For communication professionals, this opens up two lines of work. On the one hand, diagnosing what today’s AI models are telling about the brand, the spokespersons and the sector. On the other hand, planning content and relationships with the media with an eye also on that algorithmic narrative: what we want the AI to find, from where we want it to draw its definitions, what sources we are interested in reinforcing.
GEO in practice: where to begin from communication
Although GEO may sound very technical, the first steps are quite natural for a communications team.
The starting point is to review the basic content of identity and activity: who we are, what we do, how we are different, what figures or data define us. This information should be available on clear, up-to-date and easily indexable pages, not just in PDFs of reports or old press releases. If there are long, unavoidable documents, it is a good idea to accompany them with summaries in web format.
In parallel, it is useful to make an inventory of presence in external sources: articles in media, opinion columns of opinion, interviews, participation in reports sector reports, mentions on websites of associations, rankings or institutions. All this helps so that, when the AI searches for context about the brand, it will find descriptions that are coherent and consistent.
It is also worth adapting the way certain content is written to make it more ‘quotable’: clear answers to frequently asked questions about the sector, definitions of key concepts, step-by-step explanations of processes that you master as an organisation. The easier it is to reuse a paragraph to explain something to third parties, the easier it will be for an AI model to integrate it into its responses.
Finally, there is one exercise that is very simple and makes a big difference: start doing AI listening starting to do basic AI listening exercises. It’s as simple as always asking the same three or four questions about the brand and the sector to several attendees, save the answers and observe the evolution over time. This observation will allow adjusting the strategy of content and prioritising actions by GEO where more is needed to be done.
