Oct 4 2025
Maximize Your AI Visibility Before Your Competitors Do [Webinar] via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

AI-driven search is rewriting the rules of discovery. 

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are changing how customers find brands. Traditional rankings no longer guarantee visibility. 

Are you appearing where it matters most?

Discover proven strategies to boost your AI mentions and citations.

What You’ll Learn in This Session

Pat Reinhart, VP of Services & Thought Leadership at Conductor, and Luiza Shahbazyan, Sr. R&D Product Manager at Conductor, will show you exactly how to win in the age of AI search. You’ll learn:

  • How to maximize your brand’s visibility across AI answer engines.
  • Key signals that influence AI citations, including content authority and digital PR.
  • Practical strategies to earn mentions and strengthen trust signals.
  • How to adapt your SEO workflows for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

Reserve Your Spot Today

Register now to get actionable tactics and data-backed insights that help your brand show up in AI results.

🛑 Can’t attend live? Sign up anyway, and we’ll send the full recording straight to your inbox.

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Sep 24 2025
From SEO To GEO: How Can Marketers Adapt To The New Era Of Search Visibility? via @sejournal, @Semji_fr

This post was sponsored by Semji. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

For three decades, SEO has been the cornerstone of digital visibility.

Keywords, backlinks, and technical optimization determined whether your brand appeared at the top of search results.

However, the landscape is shifting, and it’s likely that if you’re reading this article, you already know it.

Download The Full Guide

With generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, or Perplexity, users no longer rely solely on lists of blue links.

Instead, searchers and researchers receive synthesized, conversational answers that draw content from high-authority sources.

The message is clear: ranking alone is no longer enough.

To be visible in the age of AI, marketers need a complementary discipline, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

To do so, you need concrete methods and best practices to add GEO efficiently into your strategy.

What Is Generative Search Optimization (GEO)?

Generative Search Optimization (GEO) is the practice of ensuring that your content is selected, understood, and cited by large language models (LLMs) and generative engines.

How Does GEO Differ From Traditional SEO?

Traditional search engines use bots to crawl webpages and rank them.

LLMs synthesize patterns from massive pre-ingested datasets. LLMs and answer engines don’t index; they use them as their conversational padding.

What Is A Pre-Ingested Data Set?

Pre-ingested datasets are content that is pulled from websites, reviews, directories, forums, and even brand-owned assets.

This means your visibility no longer depends only on keywords

What Do I Need To Do To Show Up In AI Overviews & SERPs?

To increase your visibility in LLMs, your content must be:

Put simply: GEO ensures your brand shows up in the answers themselves as well as in the links beneath them.

How To Optimize For LLMs In GEO

Optimizing for LLMs is about aligning with how these systems select and reuse content.

From our analysis, three core principles stand out in consistently GEO-friendly content:

1. Provide Structure & Clarity

Generative models prioritize content that is well-organized and easy to parse. Clear headings, bullet points, tables, summaries… help engines extract information and recompose it into human-like answers.

2. Include Trust & Reliability Signals

LLMs reward factual accuracy, consistency, and transparency. Contradictions between your site, profiles, and third-party sources weaken credibility. Conversely, quoting sources, citing data, and showcasing expertise increase your chances of being cited!

3. Contextual & Semantic Depth Are Key

Engines rely less on keywords and more on contextual signals (as it has been more and more the case with Google these last years–hello BERT, haven’t heard from you in a while!). Content enriched with synonyms, related terms, and variations is more flexible and better aligned with diverse queries, which is especially important as AI queries are conversational, not just transactional.

3 Tips For Creating GEO-Friendly Content

In the GEO guide we’re sharing with you in this article, 15 tips are delivered–here are 3 of the most important ones:

1. Be Comprehensive & Intent-Driven

LLMs favor complete answers.

Cover not just the main query but related terms, variations, and natural follow-ups.

For example, if writing about “content ROI,” anticipate adjacent questions like “How do you measure ROI in SEO?” or “What KPIs prove content ROI?”!

By aligning with user intent, not just keywords, you increase the likelihood of your content being surfaced as the “best available answer” for the LLMs.

Learn how to do this.

2. Showcase E-E-A-T Signals

GEO is inseparable from trust. Engines look for identifiable signals of credibility:

  • Author bylines with expertise.
  • Real-world examples, roles, or case insights.
  • Transparent sourcing of statistics and references.
  • And many more opportunities to prove your credibility and authority.

Think of it as content that doesn’t just “read well,” but feels safe to reuse by the LLMs.

3. Optimize format for machine & human readability

Beyond clarity, formats like FAQs, how-tos, comparisons, and lists make your content both user-friendly and machine-friendly. Many SEO techniques are just as powerful and efficient in GEO:

  • Add alt text for visuals.
  • Include summaries and key takeaways in long-form content.
  • Use structured data and schema where relevant.

This dual optimization increases both discoverability and reusability in AI-generated answers.

Why It’s Essential To Optimize For LLMs

Skeptical about GEO? Consider this: 74% of problem-solving searches now surface AI-generated responses, and AI Overviews already appear in more than 1 in 10 Google queries in the U.S. AI Overviews, Perplexity summaries, and Gemini snapshots are becoming default behaviors in information-seeking. The line between “search” and “chat” is blurring.

The risk of ignoring GEO is not just lower traffic—it’s invisibility in the answer layer where trust and decisions are increasingly formed.

By contrast, marketers who embrace GEO can:

  • Defend brand presence where AI engines consolidate attention.
  • Create future-forward SEO strategies as search continues to evolve.
  • Maximize ROI by aligning content with both human expectations and machine logic.

In other words, GEO is not a trend: it’s a structural shift in digital visibility, where SEO remains essential but is no longer sufficient. GEO adds the missing layer: being cited, trusted, and reused by the engines that increasingly mediate how users access information.

GEO As A New Competitive Advantage

The age of GEO is here. For marketing and SEO leaders, the opportunity is to adapt faster than competitors—aligning content with the standards of generative search while continuing to refine SEO.

To win visibility in this environment, prioritize:

  • Auditing your current content for GEO readiness.
  • Enhancing clarity, trust signals, and semantic richness.
  • Monitoring your presence in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and other generative engines.

Those who invest in GEO today will shape how tomorrow’s answers are written.

Want to explore the full framework of GEO?

Download the complete guide on Generative Engine Optimization

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Semji. Used with permission.

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Sep 23 2025
SERP Visibility Decline: How To Grow Brand Awareness When Organic Traffic Stalls

This post was sponsored by AdRoll. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Text‑heavy AI Overviews blocking your brand?

The “People Also Ask” that you could scroll through forever, effectively hiding position 1?

Knowledge panels and rich snippets hogging the view?

The majority of people who entered a search query never made it past the top of the search result page (SERP) in 2024.

For users, these updates to Google’s SERPs are technically efficient.

For you, changes like AI Overviews are another strategy to master, and at worst, a direct competitor for attention.

So how do you increase brand awareness and search presence when Google is taking away your bids for top-of-funnel (TOFU) content?

The Rise of Zero-Click: Why Rankings Don’t Equal Traffic Anymore

As search evolves, AI-powered summaries now appear in more than 13% of queries.

This resulted in nearly 60% of Google searches ending without a click last year, dramatically shrinking the traditional flow of search traffic to a website.

Not only are you fighting for space against the usual blue links, you’re now competing with AI-generated answers that package everything up before a user even considers a click.

Which means that “we made it to the top” moment doesn’t guarantee anyone actually sees your brand.

So, even if your brand earns a top ranking, it may never translate into visibility. That’s the reality of today’s zero-click environment, and it is what creates the awareness gap — a challenge that every marketer now has to solve.

What Is Zero Click?

A “zero-click” search happens when a user gets their answer directly on the search results page through featured snippets, knowledge panels, or AI-generated overviews without ever clicking through to a website.

For users, it’s fast and convenient. For brands, it means fewer chances for visitors to actually land on your site, even when you’ve earned a top ranking. Think of it as Google (and increasingly, AI) keeping people inside its own ecosystem rather than sending them out to explore yours.

This is where the awareness gap comes in.

What Is The Awareness Gap?

The awareness gap is the space in which your content is seen, but it is not tied to your brand.

Even if your brand appears in these results, you may never see the traditional signals like traffic or time on site that prove your influence. People might recognize your name or absorb part of your story, but that exposure is not reflected in your metrics.

The gap is the difference between being seen and being measured, and closing it requires a new playbook for visibility and recall.

How Zero-Click Reshapes Discovery

The zero-click trend is most disruptive at the very start of the customer journey. Your website used to be Rome; eventually, all roads led there. Now? Fewer and fewer organic roads exist. That means the earliest brand touchpoints are disappearing.

Here’s what that means for marketers today:

  • Fewer chances for discovery. If users never click, they never see your story. All things that shape early perception, such as your messaging, your visuals, your value props, get skipped.
  • SEO loses some steam. While organic optimization still matters for long-term discoverability (hello, LLMs absorbing and citing content), its ability to drive top-of-funnel awareness isn’t what it used to be. In a zero-click world, amazing content may rank, but still never get seen.
  • Competition gets fiercer. If you’ve relied heavily on organic strategies alone, competitors who invest in paid ads are now likely to edge you out. Ads still sit above AI overviews in many results, and that’s prime real estate that’s hard to ignore.
  • Research shifts elsewhere. With crowded SERPs and often confusing AI answers, users are taking their research off of traditional search platforms to other places. Social media, communities, and unowned channels are becoming important sources for educational content that feels clearer and more trustworthy.

Bottom line: the early doors to discovering your brand are closing faster than they’re opening. It takes a new mix of channels to ensure you’re still part of the conversation.

3 Steps to Reclaim Top-of-Funnel Presence

So what’s a marketer to do? Is all hope lost?

Show up where they are still landing: relevant active sites that deliver clear ad space to your target audience.

Advertising offers a direct and reliable solution to the awareness gap.

Unlike organic results, paid campaigns guarantee an immediate and prominent presence on SERPs and other digital platforms. That means eyeballs on your ads, even if a user doesn’t click on them.

Consider paid campaigns as a type of insurance policy against brand invisibility on the SERP.

Remember: early impressions = stronger recall later in the funnel. The power of showing up first cannot be overstated. Even if a user doesn’t click on your ad, the exposure to your name, logo, or key message fosters familiarity. Early recognition makes your brand more memorable when it comes time to convert.

Step 1: Implement An Awareness-Focused Advertising Strategy

If you’ve made it this far, you’re likely nodding along: zero-click is here, and advertising has to play a bigger role. But where do you start? The good news is you don’t need to overhaul everything overnight. Instead, think of paid as a strategic layer that enhances the visibility you’ve already worked hard to build organically.

Here’s the first step in making that shift in a way that feels purposeful, not scattered:

Leverage common queries

Run search and display ads tied to common zero-click queries. Many of the searches most impacted by zero-click are informational: “what is,” “how to,” and “why does” questions that rarely result in clicks. Instead of letting that traffic disappear into AI overviews, run search and display campaigns against these queries. Your brand may not get the click, but it will get the visibility, ensuring you stay part of the conversation even when Google is trying to keep people on the page.

Connect with tomorrow’s customers today. AdRoll makes brand awareness ads work for you. Get started with a demo.

Use what you already know

Build awareness campaigns in categories where your brand already shows up. If you’ve earned a featured snippet or knowledge panel, don’t leave it unsupported. Pair that organic placement with a targeted ad so your brand appears twice on the same page. This kind of overlap creates a halo effect: users perceive your brand as both authoritative and unavoidable. It’s one of the fastest ways to reinforce recall.

Enhance, don’t replace SEO

Paid advertising isn’t a substitute for strong organic presence, it’s an amplifier. Use ads to reinforce your authority and extend the reach of your organic work, not cover for it. Think of the two channels as partners: SEO earns you credibility, while ads guarantee visibility. Together, they create a more holistic visibility strategy that keeps you top of mind across formats and touchpoints. And don’t forget: LLMs and AI overviews are still learning from organic signals. If your content isn’t strong, your ads won’t carry the same weight.

At the end of the day, this isn’t about abandoning what has always worked. It’s about making sure your brand shows up where discovery is actually happening, whether that’s in a blue link, a snippet, or a sponsored placement.

Step 2: Measure Zero-Click Strategies The Right Way

Here’s the tricky part: in a zero-click world, traditional metrics don’t always tell the whole story. If you’re only watching organic traffic, it may look like your efforts are failing. But the reality is that influence is happening upstream, before a user ever lands on your site.

Here’s what to measure instead:

  • Branded search volume. If more people are searching for your brand name specifically, you know your awareness strategy is working. This is often the clearest leading indicator of recall.
  • Visibility share. Track how often your brand appears in SERPs, featured snippets, AI overviews, and paid placements, even if it doesn’t result in a click.
  • Impression lift. Ads may not drive immediate conversions, but consistent exposure increases recognition. Measuring impressions alongside recall surveys can help connect the dots.
  • Engagement on unowned channels. As research moves to social and communities, track where your educational content sparks conversations and shares outside of your own site.

The key is to shift from measuring traffic to measuring presence. Visibility in high-authority spaces, whether through organic or paid efforts, is the new top-of-funnel KPI.

Step 3: Connect The C-Suite To Zero-Click Strategies

Of course, metrics only matter if your leadership team understands them. However, many executives are still trained to see organic traffic as the gold standard. So when traffic dips, even for reasons outside your control, it can look like a problem.

This is where your role as translator becomes critical. You need to reframe the conversation from clicks to visibility, from pageviews to presence. The message to the C-suite should sound less like an apology and more like a strategic shift:

  • A decline in organic traffic doesn’t equal a decline in influence. Zero-click means users may never land on your site, but they’re still seeing your brand. Visibility is impact.
  • Your brand may actually be showing up more often. The problem is measurement, not presence. Snippets, AI overviews, and social conversations don’t show up in traffic charts, but they absolutely shape perception.
  • Advertising fills the gap. Paid campaigns guarantee your brand isn’t invisible at the exact moment prospects are forming their first impressions, making it the perfect complement to organic efforts.

The way to make this stick with leaders is through narrative. Show them that early impressions are building brand memory. Connect branded search growth to that recall. Paint the picture that what looks like “less traffic” is often “more visibility in new places.”

Executives care about competitive positioning and long-term growth, not just line graphs. So remind them: being the brand people remember when it’s time to buy is the real win. Presence is what creates that memory, and memory is what drives future pipeline.

Zero-Click Isn’t the End. It’s Your Advantage If You Move First

Zero-click isn’t the end of marketing as we know it. It’s just the latest evolution in how people discover and remember brands. The marketers who win will be the ones who adapt their strategies, blending organic authority with paid presence, reframing their KPIs, and helping their companies understand what visibility really means today.

The awareness gap is real, but it’s also an opportunity. By rethinking how you measure, how you communicate results, and how you show up at the top of the funnel, you can set your brand up to thrive in an environment where discovery no longer depends on a click.

And this is only Part 1. In Part 2, we’ll dig into the real secret weapon in a clickless world: recall. Because the brands that stay top of mind are the ones that get chosen later. Advertising’s biggest power isn’t in driving a click, it’s in building the kind of recognition that lasts.

Check back soon on the AdRoll website for Part 2: How to Build Recall in a Clickless World.

Get A Free Trial

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by AdRoll. Used with permission.

In-Post Images: Image by AdRoll. Used with permission.

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Sep 17 2025
How To Win Brand Visibility in AI Search [Webinar] via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

AIOs, LLMs & the New Rules of SEO

AI Overviews are changing everything.

Your impressions might be up, but the traffic isn’t following. Competitors are showing up in AI search while your brand remains invisible.

How do you measure success when ChatGPT or Gemini doesn’t show traditional rankings? How do you define “winning” in a world where every query can produce a different answer?

Learn the SEO & GEO strategies enterprise brands are using to secure visibility in AI Overviews and large language models.

AI Mode is growing fast. Millions of users are turning to AI engines for answers, and brand visibility is now the single most important metric. 

In this webinar, Tom Capper, Sr. Search Scientist at STAT Search Analytics, will guide you through how enterprise SEOs can adapt, measure, and thrive in this new environment.

You’ll Learn:

  • How verticals and user intents are shifting under AI Overviews and where SERP visibility and traffic opportunities still exist.
  • Practical ways to leverage traditional SEO while optimizing for generative engines.
  • How to bridge the gap between SEO and GEO with actionable strategies for enterprise brands.
  • How to measure success in AI search when impressions and rankings no longer tell the full story.

Register now to gain the latest, data-driven insights on maintaining visibility across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, and more.

🛑 Can’t attend live? Sign up anyway, and we’ll send you the recording.

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Sep 10 2025
GEO: How To Position Your Agency As An AI Search Authority

This post was sponsored by Visto. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Clients keep asking a new question: “Are we visible in AI search?”

This is the reality: Google’s AI Overviews are reducing organic traffic by 30-70% for many businesses.

In fact, we’re seeing that SEO agencies that incorporate GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) tactics into their SEO strategy and offerings are charging $4,000/month for these additional menu services.

However, when it comes to GEO, a newly evolved and still-evolving branch of SEO, answering the AI visibility question is:

  • Less about grand strategy.
  • More about a quick field check.

But if you skip the check and jump straight to fixes, you risk solving the wrong problem.

Phase 1. Perform An AI Visibility Audit To Confirm If There Is A Visibility Gap

Start with a simple AI Visibility Audit:

  1. Select five to 10 key phrases that align with the business’s goals.
  2. Search those phrases across Google’s AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, Perplexity, and ChatGPT.
  3. Look at the AI answer first, not the classic blue links.
  4. Do you show up? Are you cited? Which competitors are visible and cited? Notate this for each phrase.
  5. Notate down which competitors are cited and where any links point; take screenshots to showcase in any presentations.

Once you identify which phrases you display and those you do not, you can begin to build a comprehensive audit, repeating the steps as you would for keyword research or, traditionally, People Also Ask research.

The Easy Way: Use this AI Visibility audit and bring the snapshot to your next client call. It gets you out of the “we think” zone and into “here’s what we saw today.”

Phase 2. Interpret Your AI Visibility From The Audit Results

Once you have your audit results in hand, it’s time to determine where you stand:

  • Highly visible: Your brand is named inside the answer. Great. Assess what’s working, and expand upon it.
  • Partially visible: Your content fuels the answer, but the brand is missing. That erodes authority over time.
  • Absent: The answer engines are leaning on other sources. That’s your gap, and your opportunity.

Notice how some of this is traditional ranking talk, and other facets are new.

So, it’s time for a new lens here.

Look at GEO as more of a traffic channel, as opposed to a new technique: Do we show up in the answer people actually read?

This is where agencies need to act fast. If you’re not helping clients with GEO now, they’ll find someone who will.

Phase 3. Showcase The Real Problem Behind Falling Organic Traffic

In this step, it’s time to connect the dots for everyone outside of your SEO team.

How will clients or bosses handle a change to your reporting?

What is the best way to convince a stakeholder that they need additional SEO services to stay ahead during the GEO boom?

How To Clarify The AI Addition To SEO For Clients & Stakeholders

This is how to turn a vague “traffic is down” conversation into “here’s where we’re missing in the answer and what we’ll fix.”

Within your audit presentation, the AI Search findings should follow this structure:

  1. Rule out serving issues that can tank crawl or clicks. Do not include these in the report during this part of the conversation.
  2. Split branded from non-branded terms, as AI answers often cluster around certain intents. Display this information broken out.

Pro Tip: Leverage a side-by-side comparison. The left side could include the AI answer with your brand’s status. The right side a quick look at on-site metrics for those same topics.

Phase 4. Consider The Perfect Mix Of Traditional SEO & GEO

Once your audit is approved, and a contract is in place to expand your SEO offerings to include GEO techniques, it’s time to apply the perfect mix of traditional SEO and GEO to improve visibility in the areas you’ve identified in the audit.

From a high level, there are two constraints that change the game, especially when adding GEO tactics to your SEO offerings:

  • Speed (“time to first token”). AI systems have to answer fast. Crawlers are impatient, so pages that surface the right answer early tend to win the tie.
  • Context window. Models skim and compress. Think skim-friendly, middle-school clarity: straightforward headings, unambiguous entities, and no padding.

That’s why old habits can backfire. You’re optimizing for clarity, entities, and extractability, not density.

How Do I Approach SEO & GEO The Right Way?

The way we think about it is this: if SEO is about ranking for keywords, GEO is about showing up for prompts.

How Does A Prompt Differ From Keywords?

When someone types a prompt, modern AI doesn’t just “look up” one thing. It:

  1. Breaks the prompt into sub-questions.
  2. Runs background searches.
  3. Shortlists a small set of pages worth crawling right now.

From our perspective, that’s the bridge between SEO and GEO: your classic search visibility still matters, but only as a feeder into which sources the AI decides to read.

What To Focus On When Incorporating GEO Into Your SEO Strategies

You will see overlaps here; that’s because there are slight changes to traditional methods that you’ll need to consider when optimizing for answer engines.

What to focus on, from a traditional SEO angle:

  • On-page SEO: answer-first structure, clean headings, scannable evidence.
  • Technical SEO (or GEO for Answer Engines): Fast paths to answers; crawlability that supports quick fetches.
  • Content gaps your competitors are filling in AI answers. We’re consistently surprised by how often the “nearly there” pages win. If the AI crawler already understands a page, one sharp paragraph and a clearer H1 can push it over the top.
  • Link analysis to strengthen credible citations.
  • Competitor analysis of who’s being named in answers (and why).
  • Sentiment analysis to catch how your brand is described when it’s mentioned.

What to focus on, from the GEO perspective:

  • The semantic space AI explores vs. the entity mapping in your content.
  • Technical GEO (or SEO for Answer Engines): Fast paths to answers; crawlability that supports quick fetches.
  • Content gaps your competitors are filling in AI answers.

The Easy Way: Visto can consolidate these checks into a single workflow, allowing you to baseline quickly and track progress without needing a dozen tools.

Phase 5. Implement GEO Tactics Into Your SEO Strategy To Regain & Grow Visibility

Step 1. Provide Answers Upfront

Within traditional SEO, this refers to improving readability.

Your goal here is to give the answer engine what it needs as quickly as a good support team would:

  • Lead your most important pages with the plain-English answer your buyer is after.
  • One or two sentences up top, then the detail and sources.

If the reader needs to scroll to find the point, the crawler will likely give up at that same point.

Step 2. Strengthen Entity Clarity

Next, make the page unambiguous with consistent:

  • Product names.
  • Categories.
  • Specs.
  • Simple schema to help the system map your entity to the right concepts.

Think of this as labeling the shelves in a small shop. If the labels are clear, the model finds what it came for without guessing.

Step 3. Implement Technical GEO

Then handle the technical side of GEO. AI crawlers care about time to the first useful token, so shorten the path to the answer.

Tighten titles and H1s, move key facts above the fold, and keep interstitials from blocking the first read. The AI crawler has a limited context window and reads fast. Help it skim the right lines.

Step 4. Assess Comparison Coverage

If your customers compare options, publish a straightforward comparison that highlights only the differences people ask about.

What we’ve seen is that honest tables and short “who it’s for” notes get cited more than glossy positioning.

Step 5. Manage Links & Sentiment

Finally, reinforce what supports the page. Link credible sources to the version you want cited. Check how your brand is described in the existing answers. If the tone is off, correct the original source you’re referencing.

Then, regularly review your metrics: presence, named mentions, and competitor share. GEO isn’t a set-and-forget channel, so a light monthly review helps prevent drift.

Visto’s platform automates much of this tracking, giving agencies the tools to prove value with measurable, prompt-level insights and easy-to-share reports.

Examples: Learn From Early GEO Adopters Who Are Rebuilding Traffic

“In the first two quarters, we have seen an 88% year-over-year increase in organic traffic and a 42% YoY increase in unique pageviews from organic traffic.“

Agencies using a platform like Visto’s see their clients’ brands referenced more in AI answers after tightening entities and updating a handful of high-value pages.

The agencies succeeding are those positioning themselves as AI search authorities now, not waiting to see how things shake out.

Get Started With Visto

Visto helps agencies measure AI visibility and manage the work.

Built specifically for marketing agencies, the platform shows where your brand appears in AI answers, summarizes citations across engines, and highlights the pages most likely to move the needle.

Visto provides:

  • Direct access to GEO experts who understand agency needs.
  • Consistent product updates aligned with the latest AI search trends.
  • The ability to influence the roadmap with your input.
  • Education and support to confidently lead your clients through the AI shift.
  • Sales enablement tools that are purpose-built for marketing agencies to prospect clients.
  • A focus on actionability and optimization, in addition to visibility and analytics.

Don’t wait for your clients to ask why they’re invisible in AI search. Position your agency as the AI search authority they need right now.

Special Offer: For SEJ readers, sign up for three months free access and start prospecting and serving clients.

SIGN UP NOW

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Visto. Used with permission.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Sep 10 2025
AI Is Changing Local Search Faster Than You Think [Webinar] via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

For multi-location brands, local search has always been competitive. But 2025 has introduced a new player: AI. 

From AI Overviews to Maps Packs, how consumers discover your stores is evolving, and some brands are already pulling ahead.

Robert Cooney, VP of Client Strategy at DAC, and Kyle Harris, Director of Local Optimization, have spent months analyzing enterprise local search trends. Their findings reveal clear gaps between brands that merely appear and those that consistently win visibility across hundreds of locations.

The insights are striking:

  • Some queries favor Maps Packs, others AI Overviews. Winning in both requires strategy, not luck.
  • Multi-generational search habits are shifting. Brands that align content to real consumer behavior capture more attention.
  • The next wave of “agentic search” is coming, and early preparation is the key to staying relevant.

This webinar is your chance to see these insights in action. Walk away with actionable steps to protect your visibility, optimize local presence, and turn AI-driven search into a growth engine for your stores.

📌 Register now to see how enterprise brands are staying ahead of AI in local search. Can’t make it live? Sign up and we’ll send the recording straight to your inbox.

Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Sep 4 2025
8 Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Strategies For Boosting AI Visibility in 2025 via @sejournal, @samanyougarg

This post was sponsored by Writesonic. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

AI search now makes the first decision.

When? Before a buyer hits your website.

If you’re not part of the AI answer, you’re not part of the deal. In fact, 89% of B2B buyers use AI platforms like ChatGPT for research.

Picture this:

  • A founder at a 12-person SaaS asks, “best CRM for a 10-person B2B startup.”
  • AI answer cites:
    a TechRadar roundup,
    a r/SaaS thread,
    a fresh comparison,
    Not you.
  • Your brand is missing.
  • They book demos with two rivals.
  • You never hear about it.

Here is why. AI search works on intent, not keywords.

It reads content, then grounds answers with sources. It leans on third-party citations, community threads, and trusted publications. It trusts what others say about you more than what you say about yourself.

Most Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tools stop at the surface. They track mentions, list prompts you missed, and ship dashboards. They do not explain why you are invisible or what to fix. Brands get reports, not steps.

We went hands-on. We analyzed millions of conversations and ran controlled tests. The result is a practical playbook: eight strategies that explain the why, give a quick diagnostic, and end with actions you can ship this week.

Off-Page Authority Builders For AI Search Visibility

1. Find & Fix Your Citation Gaps

Citation gaps are the highest-leverage strategy most brands miss.

Translation: This is an easy win for you.

What Is A Citation Gap?

A citation gap is when AI platforms cite web pages that mention your competitors but not you. These cited pages become the sources AI uses to generate its answers.

Think of it like this:

  • When someone asks ChatGPT about CRMs, it pulls information from specific web pages to craft its response.
  • If those source pages mention your competitors but not you, AI recommends them instead of your brand.

Finding and fixing these gaps means getting your brand mentioned on the exact pages AI already trusts and cites as sources.

Why You Need Citations In Answer Engines

If you’re not cited in an answer engine, you are essentially invisible.

Let’s break this down.

TechRadar publishes “21 Best Collaboration Tools for Remote Teams” mentioning:

  • Asana.
  • Monday.
  • Notion.

When users ask ChatGPT about remote project management, AI cites this TechRadar article.

Your competitors appear in every response. You don’t.

How To Fix Citation Gaps

That TechRadar article gets cited for dozens of queries, including “best remote work tools,” “Monday alternatives,” “startup project management.”

Get mentioned in that article, and you appear in all those AI responses. One placement creates visibility across multiple search variations.

Contact the TechRadar author with genuine value, such as:

  • Exclusive data about remote productivity.
  • Unique use cases they missed.
  • Updated features that change the comparison.

The beauty? It’s completely scalable.

Quick Win:

  1. Identify 50 high-authority articles where competitors are mentioned but you’re not.
  2. Get into even 10 of them, and your AI visibility multiplies exponentially.

2. Engage In The Reddit & UGC Discussions That AI References

Social platformsImage created by Writesonic, August 2025

AI trusts real user conversations over marketing content.

Reddit citations in AI overviews surged from 1.3% to 7.15% in just three months, a 450% increase. User-generated content now makes up 21.74% of all AI citations.

Why You Should Add Your Brand To Reddit & UGC Conversations

Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn Pulse, and industry forums together, and you’ve found where AI gets most of its trusted information.

If you show up as “trusted” information, your visibility increases.

How To Inject Your Brand Into AI-Sourced Conversations

Let’s say a Reddit thread titled “Best project management tool for a startup with 10 people?” gets cited whenever users ask about startup tools.

Since AI already cites these, if you enter the conversation and include your thoughtful contribution, it will get included in future AI answers.

Pro Tip #1: Don’t just promote your brand. Share genuine insights, such as:

  • Hidden costs.
  • Scaling challenges.
  • Migration tips.

Quick Win:

Find and join the discussions AI seems to trust:

  • Reddit threads with 50+ responses.
  • High-upvote Quora answers in your industry.
  • LinkedIn Pulse articles from recognized experts.
  • Active forum discussions with detailed experiences.

Pro Tip #2: Finding which articles get cited and which Reddit threads AI trusts takes forever manually. GEO platforms automate this discovery, showing you exactly which publications to pitch and which discussions to join.

On-Page Optimization For GEO

3. Study Which Topics Get Cited Most, Then Write Them

Something we’re discovering: when AI gives hundreds of citations for a topic, it’s not just citing one amazing article.

Instead, AI pulls from multiple sites covering that same topic.

If you haven’t written about that topic at all, you’re invisible while competitors win.

Consider Topic Clusters To Get Cited

Let’s say you’re performing a content gap analysis for GEO.

You notice these articles all getting 100+ AI citations:

  • “Best Project Management Software for Small Teams”
  • “Top 10 Project Management Tools for Startups”
  • “Project Management Software for Teams Under 20”

Different titles, same intent: small teams need project management software.

When users ask, “PM tool for my startup,” AI might cite 2-3 of these articles together for a comprehensive answer.

Ask “affordable project management,” and AI pulls different ones. The point is that these topics cluster around the same user need.

How To Outperform Competitors In AI Generated Search Answers

Identify intent clusters for your topic and create one comprehensive piece on your own website so your own content gets cited.

In this example, we’d suggest writing “Best Project Management Software for Small Teams (Under 50 People).”

It should cover startups, SMBs, and budget considerations all in one authoritative guide.

Quick Win:

  • Find 20 high-citation topic clusters you’re missing.
  • Create comprehensive content for each cluster.
  • Study what makes the top versions work, such as structure, depth, and comparison tables.
  • Then make yours better with fresher data and broader coverage.

4. Update Content Regularly To Maintain AI Visibility

AI platforms heavily favor recent content.

Content from the past two to three months dominates AI citations, with freshness being a key ranking factor. If your content appears outdated, AI tends to overlook it in favor of newer alternatives.

Why You Should Keep Your Content Up To Date For GEO Visibility

Let’s say your “Email Marketing Best Practices” from 2023 used to get AI citations.

Now it’s losing to articles with 2025 data. AI sees the date and chooses fresher content every time.

How To Keep Your Content Fresh Enough To Be Cited In AIOs

Weekly refresh for top 10 pages:

  • Add two to three new statistics.
  • Include a recent case study.
  • Update “Last Modified” date prominently.
  • Add one new FAQ.
  • Change title to “(Updated August 2025)”.

Bi-weekly, on less important pages:

  • Replace outdated examples.
  • Update internal links.
  • Rewrite the weakest section.
  • Add seasonal relevance.

Pro Tip: Track your content’s AI visibility systematically. Certain advanced GEO tools alert you when pages lose citations, so you know exactly what to refresh and when.

5. Create “X vs Y” And “X vs Y vs Z” Comparison Pages

Users constantly ask AI to help them choose between options. AI platforms love comparison content. They even prompt users to compare features and create comparison tables.

Pages that deliver these structured comparisons dominate AI search results.

Common questions flooding AI platforms:

  • “Slack vs Microsoft Teams for remote work”
  • “HubSpot vs Salesforce for small business”
  • “Asana or Monday for creative agencies”

AI can’t answer these without citing detailed comparisons. Generic blog posts don’t work. Promotional content gets ignored.

Create comprehensive comparisons like: “Asana vs Monday vs ClickUp: Project Management for Creative Teams.”

How To Create Comparisons That Have High Visibility On SERPs

Use a content structure that wins:

  • Quick decision matrix upfront.
  • Pricing breakdown by team size.
  • Feature-by-feature comparison table.
  • Integrations.
  • Learning curve and onboarding time.
  • Best for: specific use cases.

Make it genuinely balanced:

  • Asana: “Overwhelming for teams under 5”
  • Monday: “Gets expensive with add-ons”
  • ClickUp: “Steep learning curve initially”

Include your product naturally in the comparison. Be honest about limitations while highlighting genuine advantages.

AI prefers citing fair comparisons over biased reviews. Include real limitations, actual pricing (not just “starting at”), and honest trade-offs. This builds trust that gets you cited repeatedly.

Technical GEO To Do Right Now

6. Fix Robots.txt Blocking AI Crawlers

Most websites accidentally block the very bots they want to attract. Like putting a “Do Not Enter” sign on your store while wondering why customers aren’t coming in.

ChatGPT uses three bots:

  • ChatGPT-User: Main bot serving actual queries (your money maker)
  • OAI-SearchBot: Activates when users click search toggle.
  • GPTBot: Collects training data for future models.

Strategic decision: Publications worried about content theft might block GPTBot. Product companies should allow it, however, because you want future AI models trained on your content for long-term visibility.

Essential bots to allow:

  • Claude-Web (Anthropic).
  • PerplexityBot.
  • GoogleOther (Gemini).

Add to robots.txt:

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /
User-agent: Claude-Web
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

Verify it’s working: Check server logs for these user agents actively crawling your content. No crawl activity means no AI visibility.

7. Fix Broken Pages For AI Crawlers

Just like Google Search Console shows Googlebot errors, you need visibility for AI crawlers. But AI bots behave differently and can be aggressive.

Monitor AI bot-specific issues:

  • 404 errors on important pages.
  • 500 server errors during crawls.
  • Timeout issues when bots access content.

If your key product pages error when ChatGPT crawls them, you’ll never appear in AI responses.

Common problems:

  • AI crawlers triggering DDoS protection.
  • CDN security blocking legitimate bots.
  • Rate limiting preventing full crawls.

Fix: Whitelist AI bots in your CDN (Cloudflare, Fastly). Set up server-side tracking to differentiate AI crawlers from regular traffic. No errors = AI can cite you.

8. Avoid JavaScript For Main Content

Most AI crawlers can’t execute JavaScript. If your content loads dynamically, you’re invisible to AI.

Quick test: Disable JavaScript in your browser. Visit key pages. Can you see the main content, product descriptions, and key information?

Blank page = AI sees nothing.

Solutions:

  • Server-side rendering (Next.js, Nuxt.js).
  • Static site generators (Gatsby, Hugo).
  • Progressive enhancement (core content works without JS).

Bottom line: If it needs JavaScript to display, AI can’t read it. Fix this or stay invisible.

Take Action Now

People ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity for recommendations every day. If you’re missing from those answers, you’re missing deals.

These eight strategies boil down to three moves: get mentioned where AI already looks (high-authority sites and Reddit threads), create content AI wants to cite (comparisons and fresh updates), and fix the technical blocks keeping AI out (robots.txt and JavaScript issues).

You can do all this manually. Track mentions in spreadsheets, find citation gaps by hand, and update content weekly. It works on a smaller scale, consumes time, and requires a larger team.

Writesonic provides you with a GEO platform that goes beyond tracking to giving you precise actions to boost visibility – create new content, refresh existing pages, or reach out to sites that mention competitors but not you.

Plus, get real AI search volumes to prioritize high-impact prompts.

Track & Boost your AI Visibility with Writesonic

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Writesonic. Used with permission.

In-Post Image: Image by Writesonic. Used with permission.

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