GEO/AEO Strategy – Content & Technical Optimizations for AI Search

17th Oct 2025 | 10 min read

Get Your Brand Mentioned by AI: Technical + Content GEO/AEO Tactics You Can Actually Use

Want your content to be found, understood, and cited by AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, or Google Gemini? It’s time to get familiar with GEO: generative engine optimization (aka AEO: answer engine optimization).

Gain the latest insights into GEO/AEO strategies and tactics, encompassing both content and technical considerations, from our expert speakers: Jon Earnshaw, CTO at Pi Datametrics, Richard Barrett, Director of SEO Pro Services at Lumar, and Lumar host Matt Hill.

No hype. No silver bullets. Just clear, evidence-based AI and LLM optimization best practices to help your brand stay competitive in the evolving AI search landscape.

Watch the full webinar above – including audience poll results and Q&A session — or read on for our key takeaways from this GEO strategy session.

Meet the GEO Webinar Speakers:

• Jon Earnshaw – CTO at Pi Datametrics
• Richard Barrett – Director of SEO Professional Services at Lumar
• (host) Matt Hill – Senior Solutions Engineer at Lumar

TLDR; Top Tips to Boost AI Brand Visibility

Structure Your Content for Conversation 💬: Abandon keyword-first tactics. Optimize instead for layered query intent that anticipates users’ follow-up questions. Design pages (and your site’s internal links) to answer the user’s first question and the next three or four logical follow-up questions to secure sustained brand citation presence in AI conversations.

The Technical Prerequisite 🚧: Technical SEO is still a non-negotiable first step in GEO/AEO. If your site is not efficiently crawlable and indexable, AI cannot access, understand, and include your content in its responses to users.

Build Authority with E-E-A-T ✅: Combat “bland AI fluff” by emphasizing EEAT (experience, expertise, authority, and trust) principles, flagging clear human authorship, and creating Firsthand, Authentic, Social, Trusted (FAST) content.

Master Internal Linking to Build Conversational Topic Connections 🗺️: Use internal links as conversational bridges to connect topics and build topical ecosystems that LLMs can use for better synthesization.

Monitor Conversational Brand Endurance 📊: Shift measurement from simple clicks and page-one rankings to brand endurance (i.e., being cited across turns 2, 3, and 4 of an LLM conversation) to reflect success in the multi-turn AI search journey.

AI is changing the way users search — and the way SEOs need to optimize.

The SEO world is experiencing a shift. Generative AI search optimization (aka AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, or GEO, Generative Engine Optimization) is reshaping how we optimize our content for the new ways that users find and interact with information, turning traditional online search into a rich, multi-turn conversation.

The generative AI paradigm shift: it’s all about user behavior and conversational search

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) is fundamentally a user behavior challenge for SEOs.

“Make no doubt about it: behavior is changing as much as technology when it comes to search,” notes Jon Earnshaw. This shift is accelerated by younger users (Gen Z and Gen Alpha) who prioritize content that is faster to digest, authentic, and multimodal.

Search is no longer a simple lookup; it’s a dialogue. This is immediately visible in the length and complexity of user prompts on AI systems. Earnshaw revealed that LLM queries now average 23 words —a far cry from the short-tail search engine keywords of the past.

Content structure for AI visibility

The most effective content for AI search is therefore layered and anticipatory. This means:

1. H1/Main Content: Addresses the primary, broad intent.
2. Supporting Headings/Sections: Anticipate the next three or four logical questions a user might ask after the initial LLM answer.
3. Synthesization-Ready Structure: Earnshaw emphasized that structured content now means: cutting the fluff, being accurate, chunking content neatly, and using schema/structured data for better synthesization.

The EEAT and FAST content imperative for GEO/AEO

In a world flooded with AI-generated text, building trust and demonstrating authority are not optional; they are the required ticket to play in search today. Google’s foundational signals of content authority and trustworthiness ( E-E-A-T, or “Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust”) are more important than ever in the AI search era.

Earnshaw also introduces a new acronym for content optimization that is poised to entice younger generations searching for information beyond traditional search engines and AI alike: FAST content.

FAST content, he explains, is:

• Firsthand
• Authentic
• Social
• Trusted

Creating content that is both FAST and EEAT-optimized should be at the forefront of SEO/GEO strategies moving forward.

The role of internal linking in the AI search era

Internal linking is a critical technical lever SEOs can pull to enable layered topic coverage in the AEO / GEO era. As Lumar’s Richard Barrett explained, internal links are “literally how they discover stuff. Same as Google. They crawl your page, they find the links, they make a big list… It’s also your opportunity to link topics together and build that conversation from your existing site content.”

• Conversation Mapping: Internal links should act as conversational bridges. When answering Question A on Page 1, the anchor text should directly and contextually link to Page 2, which answers the anticipated follow-up Question B.
• Conversion Efficiency: Internal linking is also about maximizing ROI. SEOs should monitor the click depth from the homepage to a piece of content, but more importantly, the click depth from that content to the desired conversion action.

Measuring GEO/AEO success with a conversational presence index

The era of measuring success by just simple clicks and first-page ranking is over. LLMs increasingly deliver answers directly to users, reducing traditional click-through rates. The new metric for success may be brand endurance within the LLM conversation.

“What matters is your content turning up at the next question, and the next one, and the next one,” explains Earnshaw.

Practical GEO/AEO example: restructuring seasonal content for AI conversations

The strategic GEO/AEO principles of layered content and internal linking can be impactful for seasonal content (e.g., Black Friday, Christmas, or back-to-school sales). For example, rather than creating and then redirecting a siloed Black Friday 2025 page, Barrett advises a content reinvestment strategy for GEO:

• Break the Page into a Conversation: Instead of treating a 2025 “trending gifts” page you’ve created ahead of holiday sales as a dead end, use it as the starting point for a deeper conversation.
• Establish Conversational Links: Link the current 2025 trends page to historical data (“What were the top trends in 2024? That’ll give you some gift ideas”).
• Create Evergreen Intent Hubs: Use the high-visibility seasonal page to pass authority and context to lower-volume, evergreen intent pages (e.g., “Gift ideas for Dad” or “Best Smart Casual Blazers for Work”).

This approach ensures the high-authority, time-sensitive content fuels the next stage of the conversation, maximizing long-term impact rather than letting valuable visibility dissipate post-season.