The data from when Google rolled out AI Overviews at scale is stark and worth sitting with for a moment. Organic click-through rates did not gradually decline. They dropped 61 percent on queries where AI Overviews appeared. Not over months, but essentially as a step change, a before and after.
And yet the brands that were cited inside those AI Overviews saw something different. They earned 35 percent more organic clicks than comparable pages not included in the answers. Visitors arriving through AI-cited links converted at roughly 4.4 times the rate of traditional organic search visitors, because they had already gotten context about the brand from the AI's answer before they clicked.
The traffic did not disappear. It concentrated. It moved to whoever the AI decided was the most credible source.
This is the strategic reality that Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, is built around. Traditional SEO gets you ranked. GEO gets you referenced. In an environment where AI Overviews appear on more than half of high-traffic queries, where ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users asking questions that once went directly to Google, and where AI-referred traffic grew 527 percent in a single year, the distinction between ranking and being cited is increasingly the distinction between visibility and invisibility.
What GEO Actually Is
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring your content and digital presence so that AI-powered platforms including Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT with browsing, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot choose to cite, recommend, or reference your brand when generating answers to user queries.
It is different from traditional SEO in its mechanism, its metrics, and the actions required to improve at it. Traditional SEO focuses on page rank, a position in a list of results that a user then chooses from. GEO focuses on citation, appearing directly inside the AI's synthesised answer, where the user may not click through at all but receives your brand name and framing as the authoritative source before they ever visit your site.
That last point reveals why GEO matters even when it does not directly drive clicks. When a potential customer asks ChatGPT which marketing analytics platform to consider and your brand is named with a specific, credible explanation of what you do best, that mention shapes their perception before any sales conversation happens. AI visibility is brand building at the research stage, the moment when buyers are forming their shortlists.
The good news for anyone already doing serious SEO: a Princeton, Georgia Tech, and Allen Institute study found that GEO-optimised content saw up to 40 percent improvements in AI visibility, and the tactics that produce these improvements overlap substantially with high-quality SEO fundamentals. You are not starting from scratch. You are building a layer on top of work that, if done well, already exists.
Why Each AI Platform Is Different
The most common and costly mistake in GEO is treating all AI platforms as a single target. They are not. Each has meaningfully different citation patterns driven by different architectures and training approaches.
ChatGPT draws heavily on established, high-authority domains. Analysis of ChatGPT's citation patterns shows Wikipedia accounts for 47.9 percent of its top citations. Forbes, established business publications, and G2 (for software categories) also feature prominently. For base model responses, without browsing enabled, ChatGPT is drawing on what it learned during training. For browsing-enabled responses, it is fetching real-time content with a strong preference for structured, factual, encyclopedic content.
The implication for brands: being cited by ChatGPT consistently requires building the kind of authoritative, factual presence that feels encyclopedic. Getting your brand discussed in high-authority publications, maintaining an accurate and comprehensive presence in knowledge bases, and creating content that reads as definitive reference material rather than marketing content are the building blocks.
Perplexity operates very differently. Reddit accounts for 46.7 percent of Perplexity's citations, reflecting the platform's emphasis on community-sourced, authentic, real-person perspectives. This shifts the strategy substantially. Brands visible in genuine Reddit discussions within their category, with real practitioners mentioning and recommending them, are significantly more likely to be cited by Perplexity than brands with polished marketing pages alone. Perplexity also weights recency strongly: 76.4 percent of its most-cited pages were updated within the last 30 days.
Google's AI Overviews balance citations more broadly, drawing from YouTube, LinkedIn, Quora, and professional sources alongside traditional web content. This reflects Google's breadth of data and its intent to represent diverse source types. For AI Overviews, the key insight is that 76.1 percent of citations also rank in Google's top 10. Strong traditional SEO remains the foundation, but content structured for direct answer extraction, with clear definitions, structured sections, and answer-ready formatting, performs better than long-form narrative content alone.
Microsoft Copilot shows a particularly strong preference for Forbes-style business publications, with the highest citation density from that source across any platform. For B2B brands targeting enterprise buyers who use Copilot through their Microsoft environments, this points toward a media relations strategy focused on business journalism coverage.
Only 11 percent of domains receive citations from both ChatGPT and Perplexity. Add the other major platforms and the overlap shrinks further. A GEO strategy that focuses only on one platform leaves significant AI visibility on the table.
The Content Changes That Drive AI Citation
Beyond platform-specific tactics, certain content characteristics improve citation likelihood across most AI systems.
Answer-first structure is probably the single most impactful change most content can make. Traditional long-form content often buries the core answer under context-setting, background, and caveats. AI systems need to extract a clear, usable answer efficiently. When a query asks what something is, the first paragraph should define it. When a query asks how to do something, the first substantive section should state the core approach. This is the opposite of the inverted pyramid that keeps readers on-page by withholding the answer, but it is the structure that AI systems can extract and cite.
Self-contained answer blocks work for the same reason. A section of your content should be able to stand alone as a usable answer without requiring the surrounding context. Write as if each key section might be excerpted and placed in an AI response without any surrounding text. If the excerpt would be confusing or incomplete, restructure until it is not.
Specific data points with clear attribution improve citation rates measurably. AI systems, particularly those with retrieval capabilities, have learned to prefer content that makes concrete, verifiable claims. Vague assertions and general guidance are harder to cite confidently. When your content states that campaigns using AI Max delivered a specific percentage improvement in unique search queries with conversions, or that content clusters drive 30 percent more organic traffic than standalone pages, it becomes directly quotable. The source of those figures should be clear, either cited inline or evident from context.
Question-and-answer formatting aligns with how users interact with AI systems, which is conversationally. A section heading phrased as a question, followed by a direct, complete answer, is an inherently citable format. It mirrors the query-response structure of AI conversations and makes it easy for the system to match your content to user questions. FAQ sections at the end of comprehensive articles serve this purpose efficiently, but so does framing section headers throughout the body as questions whenever it is natural.
Content freshness is weighted heavily by retrieval-based systems. Content under three months old is roughly three times more likely to be cited than older content, according to citation pattern analysis. For time-sensitive subjects, this means regular updates are not just an SEO best practice but a GEO necessity. Establish a refresh cycle for your most important content, at minimum updating statistics, adding recent examples, and revising any guidance that has shifted.
Schema Markup and Machine Readability
AI systems that retrieve web content need to parse and understand it efficiently. Schema markup helps them do this by providing explicit, machine-readable declarations about what your content is and what it contains.
FAQ schema is particularly valuable for GEO purposes because it directly structures your content in the question-and-answer format that AI systems use to match queries to answers. Article schema with proper author attribution supports trust evaluation by giving AI systems clear information about who produced the content and in what context. HowTo schema for procedural content and Speakable schema for content designed to be cited in voice or conversational AI contexts are also worth implementing for relevant content types.
Schema does not guarantee citation. It lowers the friction for AI systems to understand and use your content correctly. Combined with quality content structured for citability, it reinforces the signals that make your pages attractive as sources.
Building AI Visibility Off Your Own Site
A significant portion of GEO strategy involves your presence on platforms other than your own website, because that is where AI systems go to find social proof, community validation, and third-party verification of your brand's standing.
Reddit is the clearest example, given Perplexity's heavy citation of it. This does not mean creating fake Reddit discussions about your brand, which would be both ineffective and against Reddit's policies. It means genuinely participating in relevant communities, answering questions in your area of expertise, and building a presence that earns organic mentions when practitioners discuss tools and services in your category. Brands that are genuinely helpful on Reddit end up discussed in threads that AI systems then cite.
Review platforms matter significantly for product and service categories. G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, and industry-specific review sites carry weight in AI citations for comparison and recommendation queries. Having a claimed, well-maintained profile with substantial reviews on the platforms most relevant to your category is a GEO building block.
YouTube is cited by Google's AI Overviews at 18.8 percent, making video content a meaningful AI visibility channel beyond its usual traffic contribution. If your brand produces video content addressing questions your target audience asks, optimising those videos with transcripts, clear chapter markers, and descriptive titles improves their citeability in AI-driven answers.
LinkedIn matters for B2B brands specifically. Content published natively on LinkedIn by recognised industry practitioners, particularly long-form posts that provide substantive insight rather than engagement bait, surfaces in AI responses to professional and business queries.
Measuring AI Visibility: The New Dashboard
Traditional SEO metrics, clicks, impressions, positions, are insufficient for measuring GEO performance because AI systems can create brand impressions and influence decisions without generating a click to your site.
Share of AI Voice (SoAV) is the emerging primary GEO metric. It tracks how often your brand appears in AI responses to queries relevant to your category, expressed as a percentage of total citations. This is your AI visibility market share, analogous to impression share in paid search.
Tracking this manually is possible at small scale: open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google with AI Overviews enabled, ask the questions your target customers ask, and record which brands appear. Do this monthly for a consistent set of queries and you will see your AI visibility trend over time. At scale, dedicated tools including Otterly.AI, Semrush's AI Visibility Toolkit, and others automate this tracking across platforms.
Sentiment in citations matters alongside frequency. AI systems sometimes reference brands in neutral or negative contexts. Tracking not just whether you appear but how you are characterised in AI responses tells you whether your AI visibility is building or undermining brand perception.
The connection between AI citations and downstream conversion is the hardest thing to measure and the most important. When a customer says they heard about you from ChatGPT or mentions that AI recommended you, that is GEO attribution. Building the habit of asking how customers found you, and specifically whether AI tools played a role, captures the customer journey data that makes GEO ROI visible.
The 90-Day Starting Point
GEO strategy builds over three to six months of consistent effort. The starting moves that establish the foundation are relatively clear.
In the first 30 days, run a citation audit. Test 15 to 20 queries your target customers use across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google with AI Overviews. Document who is cited, how they are framed, and where your brand does or does not appear. This gives you a baseline and identifies the highest-priority gaps.
Identify your five must-win queries, the questions where appearing in AI responses would most directly impact pipeline. These are typically comparison queries, recommendation queries for your category, and decision-stage questions that buyers ask when evaluating vendors. Structure your content strategy in the next 60 days around making your content the most citable answer to these specific queries.
Implement quick wins on your existing high-traffic pages: add FAQ sections addressing common follow-up questions, restructure introductions to put the core answer first, add specific data points with clear sources, and ensure schema markup is implemented. These changes can improve AI visibility on existing content within weeks.
Build the off-site presence in parallel. Establish or refresh your G2 and relevant review platform profiles. Identify two or three Reddit communities where your target audience is active and begin participating genuinely. Pitch one piece of original research or data analysis to a publication in your industry that would both rank well and carry the authority signals AI systems weight.
The brands that will dominate AI-driven discovery in 2027 and beyond are building these foundations now, while the majority of competitors have not yet updated their content strategy to account for where their audience's attention is going.
Knowing which queries are sending customers to your competitors through AI citation, and which ones you are already winning, is the first step to a GEO strategy that builds real pipeline. ClickHub's content and visibility tools help you see where your brand is appearing and where the gaps are across AI-driven search surfaces.