AI chatbots and large language models (LLMs) have brought fundamental changes in online user behaviours over the past 12 months. Consumers are now searching for product and brand recommendations in ChatGPT or Gemini, in addition to traditional web search. This is driving a new marketing discipline that many brands are watching closely: Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).

GEO is an increasingly relevant topic for marketers and communications professionals across every sector, from consumer goods to professional services, and healthcare to finance. Increasingly now, when we search for information, AI’s ability to summarise all we need means we don’t need to click through at the end of the search. In fact, a recent study from SparkToro suggested that roughly 60% of searches now end with no click.  

So how can brands evolve their social media strategies in a zero-click era, and what will define success in these early stages?

What is GEO?

In simple terms, GEO is an evolution from keyword-heavy SEO to richer content that provides contextual meaning and direct answers for LLMs. If SEO was all about getting to the top of the rankings, GEO is about getting into the answer. 

While SEO focuses on improving page rank with keywords, GEO prioritises and values content that is more natural and conversational in tone, relying on a number of sources to provide comprehensive overviews in LLM outputs.

This means it’s important that brands show up across a wide range of sources consistently, whether it’s owned (brand website, blog), shared (Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn) or earned (media publications, industry reports).

Preparing for GEO

Evolving your social media, comms and brand strategy for the AI era can seem like an enormous task, but there are clear steps to understand this evolving online world. 

In the discovery phase, GEO projects start with a comprehensive audit of a brand’s online presence, including an analysis of how LLM responses prioritise it. This involves conducting a full AI Landscape Review (ALR) to determine a brand AI visibility score and identify areas for improvement, including extensive competitor research to understand the brand’s presence on the market.

While that initial snapshot is useful to gain an understanding of AI’s impact on a business, the fickle and volatile nature of LLMs means this snapshot is destined to change over time, prompting continuous monitoring and performance tracking to ensure GEO efforts don’t slip through the cracks.

A typical GEO analysis will begin by identifying key topics, prompts and domains that are most likely to reference a brand in AI responses across the whole influence ecosystem. In the context of social media and PR, this includes analysing the platforms and media outlets that AI models value the most, to understand the specific authority signals that appear to have the most influence on your AI visibility score. These elements will then be tracked over time to understand impact and extract actionable insights.

What can typically be observed when analysing your brand’s GEO ecosystem is that, in addition to the impact of the full stack of digital communications channels and activities on LLMs, a range of emerging or niche social media platforms will have a large influence, such as Reddit, Wikipedia and YouTube. These can often be overwhelmingly the most cited platforms across all AI models, with a specific emphasis on Google AI Summaries. Individually, the citation share of these platforms surpass even the most authoritative publications.

This isn’t too surprising. Research from four independent firms has found that 16% of all AI-generated answers cite YouTube, while 10% use Reddit. However, our experience also highlighted something far more urgent: these results vary greatly depending on the brand.

What is best GEO practice?

GEO is an evolving field, and new findings emerge all the time. However, some best practices are already surfacing through numerous LLM model updates. We’ve pinpointed some that can guide GEO activations:

• Optimise content semantically for answer engines, giving contextual information and in-depth description of a subject, product or benefit
• Create bespoke content strategies that take into account the strengths of each platform according to LLMs
• Conduct continuous monitoring to establish performance metrics and understand how to affect trends over time
• Bespoke audits that speak to a brand’s specific needs are a must, as every brand will be parsed differently by LLMs

Above all, brands that demonstrate a solid, consistent and comprehensive presence across owned (website, blog), earned (PR, media coverage) and shared (social) channels will perform best. 

AI answers are still built on crawlable, structured web content that is seen as authoritative and trustworthy. If your foundations are weak, it’s unlikely that GEO activities will compensate.

Why should brands care?

GEO is a key, emerging topic in communications, social and PR marketing right now. As more brands observe the impact of their activities on LLM results, it’s clear that adopting GEO best practices will be crucial to build a competitive advantage in the years to come.

Additionally, as AI models grow in popularity, users online are ever more reliant on them for their purchases and decision-making. Given the tendency of LLMs to offer comprehensive answers at all times, this often means a brand is competing with many others in one single AI response.

Regardless of brand or sector, a comprehensive, integrated content strategy that spans social, PR and web is crucial to establishing the foundations upon which GEO can help you thrive.

The top performers in GEO will be able to navigate this new landscape and mindset shift. With LLMs prioritising direct answers and fact-dense content, knowing how to catch live gaps and adopt semantic depth will be the key differentiating factor to showing up in AI results, and winning in the zero-click era.

If you’re looking to futureproof your brand, we’re already supporting clients across industries to turn GEO from buzzword to actionable insights. Email us at hello@battenhall.com to see how we can help.