SEO + GEO Videos

Lightly edited for clarity.

When you use AI in a chat interface, you’ll see that it sometimes searches the web. When it does that it creates a query, retrieves text, and then adds that text into the context window, so that it has richer context to produce a response. Large language models predict language, based on the context they’re given, so connecting a model to the web gives it additional context.

If the retrieved content is clear and factual and complete, then the output from the LLM is usually pretty solid. But if the content has gaps, or it’s outdated or it’s conflicting, then it’ll fill that in with statistically probable tokens, but not necessarily correct ones.

So even when you see fewer people visiting your website, they are still likely consuming that information. But through AI, your content is being extracted and summarized, and recombined and presented to the user. So this means that your website isn’t just a place for people to read, and transact although it will likely continue to be that for years, but your website becomes a source of truth for other systems, that are presenting information to consumers based on your content.

So websites can’t just be brochureware, they become more like an encyclopedia, for the niche that your website covers. If your website’s vague or incomplete, then models are going to guess, and if your site is structured, explicit and authoritative, then models can reference it properly.

And this is also why, a lot of your traditional analytics is starting to feel wrong. Influence in the digital space doesn’t map cleanly to visits, time on site or marketing funnels anymore. AI can shape decisions without a consumer ever visiting your website. And even when they do visit your website, they’re often dropped into the middle or the end of the funnel, and then attribution becomes very difficult.

Lightly edited for clarity.

When you notice fewer visitors coming to your website, your instinctive reaction is that your website matters less. But, part of the problem is that we’re measuring visitors based on clicks, and people are now getting information through AI, and while they may not be visiting your website, your content may still be reaching them, but the process and the way to measure it has changed.

So SEO or search engine optimization, was never really about clicks. It was about people finding your website, and SEO determines whether content is indexed and retrievable, and surfaced when someone goes looking for information. And that interface is changing, but the need has not.

When an AI chat searches the web, it relies on existing search infrastructure to retrieve content, and if your content’s not discoverable, it never enters the context window. So SEO now determines whether your content shows up in AI at all, and all of that happens upstream, ahead of any visits to your site.

So, you see declining traffic and assume your content is losing relevance. But what’s happening potentially, is that instead of a person visiting your site, and reading the content on a page, there’s an agent doing that, extracting parts of that content, combining it with other content, and producing a response. So your content can influence people, without producing visits to your website.

And when people do land on your site, they’re dropped into the middle or the end of the process, and funnels, and attributions start to look really strange in your analytics.

And now this is where GEO, or generative engine optimization starts to come in. It does not replace SEO it extends it. SEO makes content retrievable, and GEO influences how that content is summarized and weighted, and represented once it’s inside a model’s context window.

If SEO fails there’s nothing to optimize for generation. But if generation isn’t considered, the content that is retrieved may have gaps or conflicting information, and the user can receive an answer that is coherent but incorrect.

Ignoring SEO means your content isn’t seen, ignoring GEO means your content may be seen, but not accurately reflected. And this is why the website doesn’t become less important, even though traffic declines. It becomes harder to measure and harder to manage, but also more important.