How are AI Overviews and chatbots impacting traditional search engine optimisation? And what do I need to know?
The way in which we use search engines is changing. Creating a need to move beyond traditional search engine optimisation (SEO) and also include AI overview optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). This doesn’t mean forgetting the principles of SEO as this isn’t going to disappear but adding additional steps to your optimisation toolkit.
How people use search is changing?
This isn’t new! Voice search started this change, with traditional SEO needing to make sure that we also optimised for long tail search terms and questions. A greater focus of matching to how we speak and making things seem more authentic and human happened. These principles have not changed. There is a fine line between optimising for search engine or AI crawlers and making sense to a human.
SEO, AIO and GEO terminology explained
Traditional SEO was split into three categories: onsite SEO, offsite SEO and technical SEO. We have been exploring implications AIO and GEO and what actions brands should take and we believe that optimising for AIO and GEO seems to also fit nicely with these three categories. Before, we dive in any further let’s do a quick reminder of the terminology.
What is SEO?
SEO is improving a websites content, structure and visibility to rank higher in search engine results, like Google. Split into three categories: onsite SEO, offsite SEO and technical SEO.
What is AI overview Optimisation (AIO)?
AIO is about influencing google AI-powered summaries that appear at the top of search results.
What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?
GEO refer to AI chatbots and answer engines like Claude, ChatGPT and perplexity.
Onsite optimisation
In today’s blog we are going to explain what onsite optimisation would look like comparing traditional SEO, AIO and GEO.
How does the keyword strategy differ for SEO, AIO and GEO?
Traditional SEO is centred in keywords and going after high-volume relevant keywords. These could include long tail keywords, which could be phrases or questions which shows the step towards more authentic human sounding copy. AIO is less strict to the keyword, it understands natural language and semantic variations.
A working example of this would be:
In traditional SEO we were optimising for the keyword: Marketing and Communications Strategy and this would be the only variation we used throughout to ensure that we had the keyword density.
Whereas AI will understand the semantic variations such as Marcomms strategy. Therefore, with AIO you are helping to join the dots between your keyword and the wider variations. Creating more varied, context-rich language.
With GEO you are optimising for prompts and conversational queries. This has similarities to voice search growth when we saw an increase in people optimising content to contain more questions and restructuring content to fit with how people talk. Sticking with content about a marketing strategy, a GEO optimised sentence could be:
“Looking for ways to improve your marketing strategy? Here’s how to create focus, clarity based on what is working for your brand.”
Do I need to change how I write meta-titles and descriptions to feature in AI overviews or chatbots?
Maybe, we think there is a way to optimise meta-titles and descriptions to fit the need of search engines traditional listings and AI. If you need to update it will depend on how you currently write your meta titles and descriptions.
For traditional SEO meta-title and descriptions we include the primary keyword and compelling call to action. Why should they click through and visit your website.
Whereas AIO is looking for semantic richness linking words together that it understands belong together in that topic. And GEO is looking for it to begin with a prompt-style question that uses a conversational tone.
Sticking with our marketing strategy example we would create:
Meta-title: Strategic marketing support for charities | Marketing Moments Agency
Meta-description: Looking to grow your charity with ethical, insight-driven marketing? Discover tailored strategies, audience personas, and scalable solutions designed to elevate purpose-led impact.
How important is having a logical structure and header tags to grow rankings?
Very. When thinking about header tags, structure and logical content is still your friend for traditional SEO and AIO, but when thinking about GEO take this a step further and think about the prompts or topic clusters people are using. Having short, structured sections will help chatbots to create modular content that they can remix based on the query. For example, throughout this blog we have created prompt questions as our header tags.
There is a lot more that we could say or explore about SEO, AIO and GEO, but we also want to make this content easy to read, digestible and actionable. So, we are going to create separate blog posts to tackle more thoughts and insights. But one thing we are certain about is that quality content is still at the heart of everything and brands need to focus on creating high quality content.
Author bio
Natasha Milsted, Chartered Marketer has over 15 years’ marketing experience and has worked in a wide variety of sectors. She has extensive experience of creating SEO content for ecommerce and charity websites and created this blog to share what she is learning and how she will be changing her approach to include AIO and GEO tactics moving forward. She would love to hear your thoughts or comments.
