SEO, AEO, GEO: Your Customers Are Already Asking AI. Is Your Brand Answering?
Google is no longer the only front door to the internet. Half of consumers now use AI-powered search intentionally, according to McKinsey's 2025 study. And for the businesses that haven't noticed, the numbers are uncomfortable.
Organic click-through rates on queries with AI Overviews have fallen 61%. Search referral traffic to small publishers is down 60% in two years. Even queries without AI Overviews saw a 41% decline in organic clicks. People, or dare I say, Agents are finding answers elsewhere before they even get to Google.
The question for businesses is simple. What are you doing about it?
From Links to Answers
For 25 years, the game was clear. Create content, optimise for keywords, earn backlinks, rank on page one. That model still works, but it is rapidly shrinking as a percentage of how people find information.
60% of Google searches in the US end without a single click, according to a study by SparkToro. ChatGPT doubled its weekly active users from 200 million to 400 million in six months. Perplexity processes 30 million queries a day, growing 20% month on month.
Or to put it another way: a meaningful chunk of your potential customers are now getting answers from AI before they ever see your website.
This has given rise to two new disciplines alongside traditional SEO. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) focuses on structuring content so AI assistants can pull direct answers. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) goes further, optimising for how large language models select, reference and recommend sources in their generated responses.
The Princeton and Georgia Tech research team that formalised GEO demonstrated that the right optimisation strategies can boost visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%. That is not a marginal gain. That is the difference between being recommended and being invisible.
What ‘Actually’ Drives AI Visibility
Here is where it gets interesting. The signals that make AI recommend your brand are not the same signals that make Google rank your page.
A 2025 AI visibility study found that brand mentions had a correlation of 0.664 with AI visibility, while backlinks had only 0.218. Being talked about now matters more than being linked to. This is a fundamental change in how digital authority works.
Seer Interactive's research reinforces this. Brands that are cited in Google's AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than non-cited brands on the same queries. Being included in the AI answer is becoming the new position one.
The content that AI systems prefer to reference tends to share common characteristics. It contains original data and specific statistics. It uses clear, structured formatting with proper schema markup. It demonstrates genuine expertise through depth rather than breadth. It is frequently mentioned across multiple sources and platforms.
Perhaps the most telling stat: McKinsey found that a brand's own website only makes up 5 to 10% of the sources that AI search references. The other 90% comes from third-party mentions, reviews, affiliate content and user-generated discussions. Put that another way; your reputation across the web matters more than what you say about yourself.
What Businesses Should Be Doing Now
This is not about abandoning SEO. Not at all. Traditional search optimisation remains the foundation and organic search still delivers stronger conversions than AI referral traffic.
BrightEdge's 2025 data confirmed that AI search, despite explosive growth, accounts for less than 1% of total referral traffic. But the trajectory and what it tells us is unavoidable. The businesses that start preparing now will have a significant advantage over those that wait.
1. Audit your AI visibility
Before optimising anything, understand where you stand. Search for your brand, your products and your key topics in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. Are you being mentioned? Are you being cited accurately? Are competitors appearing instead?
Only 16% of brands systematically track AI search performance, according to McKinsey. That gap represents an opportunity for those willing to look.
2. Invest in content that AI wants to cite
AI systems favour content that answers specific questions with verifiable data. Think original research, proprietary statistics, expert analysis and clear how-to guidance. The content needs to be genuinely useful, not just optimised for keywords.
Structured data matters here too, though the picture is nuanced. FAQ schema can significantly improve your chances of appearing in Google's AI Overviews. One study found pages with FAQ Page markup were roughly 2.7 times more likely to appear. But a SearchAtlas study found no measurable effect of schema markup on direct LLM citations from ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity.
The takeaway is, structured data helps with AI Overviews specifically, but it will not make ChatGPT recommend you.
3. Build brand presence beyond your website
Since AI pulls from a wide range of sources, your brand needs to exist in the places those models are trained on and retrieve from. That means earning mentions in industry publications, contributing to relevant communities, maintaining active presence on platforms like Reddit and YouTube where AI systems look for real opinions.
This is not a shortcut. It is a long-term investment in genuine reputation.
4. Prepare your technical infrastructure
Make sure your content is structured for machine consumption, not just human reading. Proper heading hierarchies, clean semantic HTML, comprehensive schema markup and well-organised content taxonomies all make it easier for AI to understand and reference your content.
Some platforms are already building this in. Optimizely's Opal AI now includes GEO scanning capabilities. Other vendors are following. The technology is catching up to the need.
One global beverage brand working with Niteco reduced brand creative effort cost by over 80% after deploying custom AI agents via Opal. Asset creation became six times cheaper compared to their previous manual process, with no compromise to brand standards or output volume. That is not a pilot result. It was delivered at enterprise scale, with measurable ROI tracked from the first sprint.
5. Think about the measurement gap
Traditional analytics were built for a click-based world. When someone gets their answer from AI without clicking through, your analytics show nothing. New metrics are emerging: Share of Voice in AI responses, citation rate, AI Overview appearance rate, brand mention frequency across LLM outputs.
The tools for measuring this are still maturing, but waiting for perfect measurement means falling behind while competitors learn.
The Bigger Picture
The DXP market is worth nearly $69 billion. Every major platform vendor is racing to embed AI capabilities. Gartner predicts that 40% of enterprise applications will have AI agents by 2028. Walmart, Etsy and Shopify are already integrated with ChatGPT's shopping features. Agentic commerce, where AI agents negotiate and purchase on behalf of consumers, is moving from theory to reality.
This is not Science Fiction. It is happening now.
The businesses that will thrive are those that treat AI search optimisation as an extension of their existing strategy, not a replacement. SEO, AEO and GEO are layers, not alternatives. The foundation of good content, clear structure and genuine expertise has not changed. What has changed is how that content gets discovered, interpreted and recommended.
37% of marketing teams are already actively optimising for AI search. The remaining 63% are not behind yet, but the window is closing. The cost of waiting is not catastrophic today. In twelve months, it might be.
Where We Stand
At Niteco, we have been tracking these shifts closely. As Optimizely's largest global agency partner, we work with businesses navigating exactly this transition: how to maintain what works in traditional search while building readiness for how AI is changing discovery.
If you are thinking about this for your own organisation, whether it is understanding your current AI visibility, restructuring your content strategy or evaluating how your DXP supports these new requirements, you should speak to us.
Because the one thing we know for certain is that the way people find information has changed. The only question is whether your brand is part of the answer.
FAQ
Yes, and the gap between platforms is widening quickly.
AI systems favour content that is well-structured, semantically clear, and technically accessible for machine consumption. Your CMS determines how easily your content can be formatted with proper heading hierarchies, schema markup, clean semantic HTML, and organised content taxonomies. Platforms that are slow to adopt AI-native capabilities will make this harder, not easier, over time.
Optimizely has moved faster than most. Optimizely’s Opal AI now includes GEO scanning capabilities that assess how your content performs in generative engine responses. For businesses already on Optimizely, this is available within your existing platform. For those still on legacy systems, it is one more reason to evaluate whether your current stack is holding your visibility back.
Learn more about Optimizely Opal AI and what it can do for your content strategy.
Faster than most brands expect, but only with the right infrastructure in place.
Traditional SEO improvements can take three to six months to surface in rankings. AEO and GEO operate differently. Content that directly answers specific questions with structured formatting and verifiable data can appear in AI Overviews and generative responses within weeks of publication, provided it is technically accessible and genuinely authoritative.
The bigger time variable is not the AI system. It is your own content production capacity. Teams that rely on manual workflows for content creation, variation, and updating are the ones that fall behind. Brands using AI-assisted content tools, such as the custom agents Niteco builds on Optimizely Opal, can produce, test, and iterate content at a pace that keeps up with how AI search systems refresh their outputs.
One client reduced their content production effort by over 80% after deploying Opal-based workflows, which meant faster indexing cycles and more content surface area for AI systems to reference.
If you want to understand where you currently stand and what the realistic timeline looks like for your organisation, start with a free AI Health Check.
Start manually. Search for your brand, your key topics, and the problems your customers have in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot. Note where you appear, where competitors appear instead, and whether any information about you is inaccurate.
For ongoing tracking, the metrics that matter are citation rate, AI Overview appearance rate, and share of voice in AI responses. Tools including Ahrefs, BrightEdge, and Semrush now offer AI visibility monitoring. Google Search Console also surfaces AI Overview data for pages that appear in them.
Only 16% of brands track this systematically, according to McKinsey. That gap is the opportunity.
Migration is one of the fastest ways to lose organic rankings if it is not planned properly. The essentials are a complete URL mapping with 301 redirects, pre- and post-launch crawl comparisons, preserved or improved meta data, and verified internal linking before cutover. Parallel testing before launch eliminates most post-migration traffic loss.
It is also the right moment to build AEO and GEO readiness into your page structure. Adding FAQ schema and improving heading hierarchies during a migration costs far less than retrofitting it later.
Check out our full SEO migration checklist to prevent traffic lost.
Planning a migration now? https://niteco.com/our-services/replatform/