Artificial intelligence is transforming online search.
Rather than peruse the list of long links on a search engine results page, users are increasingly being served AI overviews — snippets of content that aim to immediately answer their questions — or consulting chatbots and answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity when researching purchases.
About half of US consumers are using AI-powered search to evaluate and discover brands, per a recent McKinsey report.
The shift is upending the world of search engine optimization (SEO), a practice that involves designing web pages and securing links from high-quality sites to help brands rank highly on search engine results pages.
New cottage industries like generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO) are emerging as companies strive to keep their brands visible — and accurately represented — within AI-driven interfaces.
For Business Insider’s recent series on the shifting search landscape, we asked experts at some of the biggest AI platforms how brands can best position themselves for this new era of conversational, AI-powered search.
This story is part of a series exploring the changing online search landscape and its impact on consumers, media companies, advertisers, and tech platforms.
Here are some key GEO tips from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity
Google:
Danny Sullivan, director at Google Search, said the core principles of SEO generally apply to new forms of AI search.
“Plenty of sites succeed because they don’t do SEO, or hire SEOs,” Sullivan said. “They don’t think about it because they’re just focused on making great content.”
General website and structured data hygiene are important for ensuring Google’s search crawlers can get to the relevant content, Sullivan said, and are also important for AI answers because they still have a lot of traditional search results at their core.
AI formats are also getting better at multi-modal queries, such as when a user asks, “What’s in this video?” That’s an extra reason for brands to incorporate more images and videos, Sullivan said.
“If you’ve still been a text-only kind of player, more images and videos may help you. But they would have helped you anyway,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan said any GEO tools that advise designing content solely for rank and visibility purposes lose “track of the big picture.”
“Are you doing things that are useful for human beings?” he said. “That’s what we want to reward.”
Microsoft:
Krishna Madhavan, principal product manager for Microsoft Bing, said the fundamentals of SEO are still critical, including structure and freshness signals that make content easier for AI to consume.
This includes using Q&A sections, sitemaps, and schema — a code that helps search engines understand sites — as well as adopting IndexNow, a protocol that tells search engines when a site changes.
Stylistically, Madhavan also suggests lists and tables instead of long walls of text, and advises keeping punctuation simple, including avoiding em dashes and symbols.
“The way to win remains the same: disciplined fundamentals, not shortcuts or hype, then quick innovation,” Madhavan said.
What is new, Madhavan said, is that companies must think about optimizing for inclusion in a synthesized answer, rather than simply a list of links on a search results page.
“Think beyond keywords to user intent, question‑answer structure, and machine‑readable cues that make your content easy to parse,” Madhavan said.
Perplexity:
“There’s going to be a lot of people who benefit from implying that they’re very good at GEO,” said Jesse Dwyer, head of communications at Perplexity. “And then there’s going to be a lot of tech companies, specifically AI companies, who benefit from saying that it’s all hogwash. The reality is always somewhere in between.”
With the shift from SEO to GEO, “the biggest mistake you can make is to just try and transfer your understanding apples to apples,” Dwyer said — and a lot of the companies offering GEO services are doing just that.
Dwyer said he’s also been advising marketers that AI search will shift budgets toward old-fashioned brand marketing. AI removes the “friction” of search and lets people buy things just by asking for them. As a result, building a strong brand will become increasingly important, he said.
