Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
What are the best AI strategies for online performance? Lots of online businesses will now have either started or considered how they should be using the ever growing AI capabilities to improve their online performance. In this article, we will take you through what optimization for AI is, what strategies you can implement to achieve it and all the relevant metrics your business should be tracking to make sure you are up to date with the latest in search performance techniques.
What is GEO
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation and the twin to SEO. While SEO focuses on improving search performance, GEO focuses on improving generative engine performance aka performance in AI Chatbots. This means GEO develops tactics to make it easier for chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to discover, understand and cite your brand in their answers.
How to optimise for GEO
There are several different ways you can improve your site and content to make it more accessible to appear in AI search.
Extractible Content – Front load descriptions in your content and make sure they are concise so that AI chatbots can easily extract definitions to use for answering users’ queries. Other structures you can use include listicles, bullet points and tables for data extraction.
E-E-A-T – Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. These are core principles of SEO that carry over into GEO. If AI chatbots view you as credible they are more likely to use your content, so make sure to build your trustworthiness, by creating strong pillar content.
Natural Language – It may sound counter-intuitive to write for humans when trying to rank in AI chatbots, however AI uses natural language processing. Trying to game the system using methods such as keyword stuffing will see your content penalized.
Digital PR – AI is trained on sources from all over the web therefore making sure your website is relevant and mentioned heavily within your industry will help to appear in AI chatbots and increase your E-E-A-T.
What AI metrics to track
Once you’ve optimised your site for GEO, you need to make sure you are tracking, measuring and analysing your data to see if your content is creating the desired outcomes, if not you may need to readjust your strategy. There are a few different key metrics to monitor to make sure your AI performance is on track.
AI Citations – AI Citations refers to the total amount of times your brand has been mentioned in AI, when tested across enquiries in different AI chatbots such as AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and more.
Share of Voice – Share of Voice is a competitor metric which determines how much you are mentioned in AI compared to your competitors. This determines who has the biggest reach in your industry in terms of AI, you can do this by tracking competitor citations and comparing to your own in terms of citations.
Sentiment Tracking – Sentiment tracking is a manual data tracking method where you investigate the citations of your site on AI platforms and see how you’re described. This lets you know if your brand identity is being represented properly in your content.
AI Referral Traffic – Using GA4 you can see how much of the traffic of your site is coming to you through AI, with over 30% of users now using AI for initial enquiries, it should be an ever-growing traffic source.
Making sure you optimise your content for AI and use in depth analysis to make informed decisions about what is working and how to tailor your approach. This will improve your brand’s presence online as more and more users are moving toward using AI to answer their search queries.
