• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

The hot new term is GEO, or generative engine optimization.  The concept is that you need to optimize your content so AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews will cite you when someone asks a relevant question or surface your brand whenever it makes sense based on detailed engagement.

GEO practices are spinning out of SEO agencies.  Those SEO teams are rebranding overnight.  There’s a steady flood of spam for services landing in everyone’s inbox, and I am personally getting deluged by people who profess to be experts. At first, I was concerned about how anyone could claim to be an expert in GEO, but then I dove deeper into the practice and realized that GEO is not a new discipline. It is content marketing on steroids, with old-school product marketing and a little bit of comms sprinkled in. And most companies are handing it to the wrong team.

The core mechanics of GEO are simple. AI platforms synthesize answers from multiple sources and cite the most authoritative, relevant content. If you want your brand in those answers, you need to produce content that AI systems can easily trust. That means structured writing with clear, direct answers; data-rich arguments; technical precision; and lots of volume.

This is not a search problem. This is a writing problem, which is why handing it to your SEO team and calling it done is an error.

Content marketers have known for 20 years that high-quality, authoritative writing earns attention. What GEO adds is a layer of technical specificity that content marketers alone don’t always bring. Think about the kinds of content that AI systems consistently favor, such as pricing tables, feature comparisons, step-by-step instructions, FAQ formats, and original research with cited statistics.. That is what product marketing teams have been producing for sales enablement and analyst relations for years, typically considered one of the least exciting yet most potent content formats a marketing team produces.

The difference now is that instead of packaging it for a Gartner briefing, you need to publish it openly and at scale, so the models can find it, train on it, and cite it.

Ironically, AI is demanding more human-written content than any channel before it, and AI can help you produce that content (sit on that for a minute). The brands doing this well are using AI to write first drafts and humans to punch them up with the authority, point of view, and specificity that make AI systems trust them.

The volume required to win at GEO is not achievable any other way.  It’s simply too much. You need to write about every relevant question your audience might ask, in every format they might ask it, across every platform where the AI systems are looking. That can take a minute.

AI platforms trust third-party sources more than brand-owned content. Sound familiar? That’s the fundamental logic of earned media and analyst relations. You need communications teams working hand in hand with product marketing to ensure brands show up consistently in AI-generated answers, driven by strong external citations rather than just optimized websites. Third-party credibility beats a beautiful website.

Most enterprise teams have some kind of GEO initiative. Many mid-market and smaller brands have not started yet. Citation authority, like domain authority before it, compounds over time. The brands that build it now will be the ones the AI systems default to in two years.

Who owns GEO at your company right now? If the answer is your SEO team, that’s a start, but it’s not enough. If the answer is nobody, you are already behind. The right answer is probably a collaboration between content, product marketing, and communications, because those are the teams that understand authoritative writing, third-party credibility, and the kind of structured, specific output that AI systems actually want to cite.

Write more. Write better. Write for a machine that is increasingly deciding what your audience thinks about you before they ever visit your site. That’s GEO. You’ve been doing parts of it for years. Now it’s time to do all of it on purpose.