The New SEO: Adapting Strategies for AI-Powered Search

Customers are searching differently, and we all need to keep pace

by Robert Langenback, president, Eight Oh Two Marketing

TL;DR—AI is reshaping how people search and find answers online. Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) now reach 2 billion monthly users, and more searches than ever are happening through AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. They are becoming everyday tools for discovery, and they don’t just list links, they summarize information and cite sources.

If your content isn’t showing up in these AI-generated responses, your brand risks losing organic search visibility. Conventional SEO still matters, but to improve your brand’s visibility in AIOs and other AI-assisted search results, you’ll need to incorporate Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to make your content easy for AI to understand, trust, and cite.

What GEO means for SEO

While GEO is essentially an evolution of SEO, built on the same foundation of people-first, evidence-based content, GEO places an added emphasis on being citable in AI summaries. That means structuring content into clear, short, and scannable paragraphs supported with data, schema, and distribution across credible sources that AI models pull from.

AIOs aren’t the enemy, but they are filters. Google positions them as creating more complex queries and linking opportunities, so your strategy needs to account for both realities: optimizing to be cited as well as building brand demand so more of those impressions become visits.

Here’s how to adapt your strategies to win with both SEO and GEO.

Optimize for AI summarization

To make your content more “quotable” by AI:

• Use TL;DR summaries, providing the short version up top.
• Build “answer blocks”: 40- to 80-word, machine-readable summaries front-loaded with information like definitions, steps, comparisons, and pros versus cons. 
• Avoid fluff—get to the point quickly (think opposite of recipe blogs).
• Write standalone answers. Each section should work without extra context (think Wikipedia).
• Include data and statistics in tables, charts, or bolded numbers. AI loves hard facts.
• Use schema markup (e.g., FAQs, Review, Product, HowTo) as well as headings and bulleted lists to organize info and help machines parse context. 
• Maintain Core Web Vitals, fix broken links, and optimize images with alt text.

AI can help you draft and structure, but human editorial judgment should always drive the final result; in fact, Google has explicitly warned against low-value, scaled automation. Before publishing new content, ask yourself: Does this showcase expertise and firsthand experience? Does it add real value and build trust with your audience? 

Earn citations across the web

AIOs often pull from multiple reputable sources, and so do your customers. A recent report by MuckRack shows that more than 95% of links cited by AI are from non-paid, earned media.

To increase your odds of being cited and trusted, show up across the channels people use to research and make decisions:

• Publish original stats such as benchmarks, pricing studies, and surveys.
• Get quoted in industry press and podcasts.
• Join community discussions (e.g., Reddit, forums) with real expertise, not promotion.
• Publish evaluative content; in-depth guides and comparison pages both attract AIO citations and support buyer decisions.

Manage AI crawlers intentionally

If your goal is to be cited by AI assistants and AIOs, confirm you aren’t accidentally blocking reputable AI crawlers in robots.txt.

If you need to limit LLM training, configure controls like Google-Extended and GPTBot; understand that this doesn’t block Google Search or AIO inclusion. Emerging proposals like /llms.txt exist, but adoption varies. Make an explicit policy choice per site. 

Measure success

Right now, AIO impressions and clicks are rolled into Search Console performance but not broken out separately. Google’s AI Mode is starting to show its own metrics, but visibility is limited. For other AI search tools, reporting is even more limited. While new tracking tools are emerging, for now the most reliable signals are referral traffic, brand demand, and manual checks. 

Until Google provides breakout reporting for AIO citations, measurement is a mix of platform data and proxy signals: 

• Maintain a list of key queries using panel checks and trackers, logging spikes when an AIO is present for a query. 
• Pay attention to brand demand signals such as organic queries, direct traffic, and “assisted” conversions from content exposed in AIO-friendly topics. 
• Where available, watch AI Mode metrics as they begin to surface in Search Console.

Keeping pace

The shift from rankings to citations, coverage, and brand demand is already happening. With AIOs summarizing answers, the question is no longer “What position am I in?” but “Where is our brand referenced, and how often are we earning clicks from it?”

More people are turning to AI assistants or AIOs for quick answers instead of scrolling through search results. Winning organic visibility means writing helpful, structured, evidence-rich content that showcases brand authority, then distributing it across the places buyers actually look.

Source: Eight Oh Two Marketing

  AI, Eight Oh Two Marketing, GEO, Opinion Piece, Robert Langenback, SEO