Boost your brand's visibility in AI chat interfaces with generative engine optimisation (GEO). Optimise for the AI chat-driven future of search.
From ChatGPT and Perplexity to Google AI Overviews and Bing Co-Pilot, generative AI-powered chats are quickly becoming key cornerstones in contemporary search journeys. As AI search pioneers, we’ve been researching and testing optimisation for AI surfaces since long before ChatGPT disrupted the SEO industry. Regain control of your SEO by enhancing and directing your brand’s visibility across the AI platforms your customers increasingly rely on daily.
GEO builds on strong SEO foundations to help brands stay visible and accurately represented in AI-generated search experiences.
Solid technical SEO, authoritative content, and strong E-E-A-T signals remain the bedrock for ranking in both traditional search and AI-generated overviews.
Comprehensive and structured resources, like FAQs, help docs, and detailed guides, can help AI systems confidently understand and recommend your brand.
Natural language, precise context, and clear sentence structures make it easier for AI to interpret meaning and accurately represent your brand in search results.
Clear, logical site structure ensures AI tools can easily crawl, connect, and interpret your content, increasing your chances of appearing in AI-generated answers.
Earning mentions in trusted publications, especially highlighting unique selling points, helps AI associate your brand with specific user needs and contexts.
Consistent, corroborated information across credible sources strengthens the likelihood that AI engines will include your brand in answer summaries and recommendations.
AI-driven platforms favour fast, frictionless UX. They also rely on structured data and clean feeds to deliver instant, accurate answers drawn from knowledge graphs.
Staying contemporary with GEO means continuously adapting to new AI tools, evolving result formats, and shifting citation patterns as the landscape changes.
Looking for more technical detail on GEO? These FAQs will help you to navigate the new frontier.
Yes, Google is still the leading search engine, holding more than 85% of the total global share of the search market, according to Statcounter. Users rely on it for finding brand platforms, navigating to specific websites, and making purchases. For now, Google dominates searches with high intent, including:
Meanwhile, generative AI platforms are rapidly growing in popularity for informational and research-focused queries. They excel at top-of-funnel experiences where users are exploring and learning rather than transacting immediately.
In Q2 2025, 49% of searches on Google were navigational, compared to 34% on ChatGPT. Meanwhile, 52% of searches on ChatGPT were informational, compared to 36% on Google. This shows AI tools are more focused on helping users learn or explore topics.
From 2015 through 2022, Google’s share of the global search market never fell below 90%—but that streak ended when ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in late 2022. As of Q2 2025, Statcounter and other trackers still peg Google at roughly 87–89% of all queries, and the rate of decline has since slowed. Even so, the emergence of generative AI platforms represents a genuine inflection point in how people find information.
Conversational AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Grok are carving out a niche for top-of-funnel research. Users value their instant, conversational answers and are increasingly kicking off informational searches there rather than in a traditional search bar. As generative AI continues to improve, that shift will likely accelerate; but for now, Google’s dominance remains largely intact.
Unlike traditional search engines that lean on signals such as domain authority, backlinks, and click‑through data, generative AI chatbots craft answers by synthesising information they have already learned. Their sense of what counts as “reliable” or “relevant” comes from consensus signals in their training datasets. These training backbones include public web crawls, licensed datasets, and proprietary training materials.
Depending on their design, generative AI platforms fall into two broad categories:
Because AI models evaluate passages of text on contextual relevance and content quality, and not merely on old-school authority and SEO metrics, well‑written specialist pages can rise to the top when they best address a user’s question. Nevertheless, there is still substantial overlap with high‑ranking Google results. Authoritative domains feature heavily in the datasets that language models learn from and in the indices that retrieval‑augmented systems search.
Estimates vary across studies and the landscape is constantly evolving. As of Q2 2025, ChatGPT accounts for about 80% of the generative AI search market. However, Google Search still handles roughly 350 times more queries than all generative AI tools combined, making it the primary search destination overall.
It’s important to remember that many people who search on Google have already conducted initial research using generative AI. These users often arrive more informed and are primed to engage with specific brands, unique selling points (USPs), or solutions they’ve discovered earlier in their journey.
AI Overviews are Google’s proprietary generative AI snapshots. They appear at (or near) the top of search resuls pages for most informational queries.
Powered by Google's large language models (LLMs), including Gemini, these overviews synthesise information drawn from multiple sources across the web to produce a cohesive, conversational summary that directly answers the user’s query. The feature was formerly referred to as the Search Generative Experience (SGE) during its experimental rollout phases.
Visually, AI Overviews appear as a highlighted box at or near the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The content may include:
This experience is designed to help users get quick, multi-faceted answers without needing to click through multiple pages. As a result, they often reduce clickthrough rates.
From a technical perspective, AI Overviews operate as a query rewriting and multi-step reasoning system. When a user searches Google, here's a simplified overview of what happens under the hood:
In short, AI Overviews are an embedded AI chat interface that uses “retrieval-augmented generation” (RAG) to deliver tailored, up-to-date, and verifiable answers designed to address the user’s precise intent, while remaining closely aligned with the traditional organic results for the same query. It can issue hundreds of searches behind-the-scenes, reason across disparate pieces of information, and create an expert-level, fully-cited report.
A 2025 study by Ahrefs reported an average 34.5% drop in clickthrough rates for the #1 organic result when AI Overviews were shown. This means fewer people click on individual organic website links. The actual links in AI Overviews, including the citations, also do not get clocked as frequently as traditional organic results. Despite this, appearing in AI Overviews still helps brands gain visibility while users are reseaching a topic.
No, brands should not ignore Google Search. Google is still crucial for brand visibility and high-intent searches. However, brands also need to optimise for generative AI platforms to stay visible where users are increasingly searching. Fortunately, there is a huge overlap between GEO and traditional SEO.
Brands should think about GEO the way they think about mobile SEO, voice search, or SERP feature optimisation... it's simply an additional consideration within an already multi-faceted seamless search strategy.
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