Beyond SEO: How to win visibility and influence in AI search

Same game, new rules

You’ve memorized every opening, perfected every tactic, and calculated every endgame. But somehow, it’s no longer enough to win. Though the board may look the same, the moves that once guaranteed you victory in SEO (search engine optimization) now seem dull and ineffective.

If this has been your experience lately, you’re not alone. Keywords have dominated search engine rankings for years, but something is beginning to change. Many brands have noticed that, despite investing in a website that’s technically flawless, with content that’s optimized for every conceivable query, traffic is slipping. Could customers be transitioning away from traditional search?

When shopping becomes a conversation

Conversational AI platforms like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity have turned online shopping on its head, partly because, instead of finding an individual product, customers can get a bundle of recommendations that help solve their specific need. For example, a query like “how can I boost my energy and wellness?” can spark a conversation that lets AI learn the exact goal and offer a list of solutions based on a person’s unique preferences.

The brands that appear in this list aren’t just lucky. Through GEO (generative engine optimization) they’ve increased their visibility, refined their messaging, and adjusted their content structure – allowing them to adapt to a marketing model where AI search is outpacing the established SEO practice.

A new search frontier?

Gartner predicts that traditional search engine volume will keep falling as more and more traffic moves to popular AI platforms.[1]

And this doesn’t only apply to retail purchases. Forrester revealed that when it comes to B2B buyers, “95 percent plan to use generative AI in at least one area of a future purchase.”[2]

Signals like OpenAI’s push into AdTech, Google’s AI mode, and the rapid evolution of AI-native search solutions further confirm this acceleration. Brands that stop thinking in terms of “ranking” and start thinking in terms of “being referenced” will be those that teach AI engines to understand, trust, and recommend their brand.

Simply put, brands that expand their visibility and content strategies to include AI search will capture the next wave of digital growth. While those without GEO risk losing relevance if customers make AI search their new preferred way to shop online.

How to make GEO work

Balance GEO and SEO. Most traffic still comes from standard keyword search results, so abandoning the traditional approach isn’t yet an option. The trick is to build a layer of GEO so it harmoniously co-exists with SEO. This will ensure your brand is visible both in conventional search listings and within AI-generated recommendations.

Improve GEO methods to keep pace with LLMs. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and others are constantly changing how they interpret and surface content. That’s why you need to monitor their algorithm updates and adapt quickly, which requires continuous GEO iteration and testing.

Think topics, not keywords. Since GEO demands a broader approach than just honing in on popular words and phrases, your website needs to be optimized for specific topics that reflect users’ conversational queries. Brand-level optimization will also be important so that AI engines associate your brand as an authority within your product range.

Define new metrics for GEO. Clicks and keyword rankings are no longer the ultimate success benchmarks. GEO performance is measured by mentions and brand visibility in user queries and AI-generated answers. This requires new dashboards, analytics tools, and reporting frameworks, a major shift for marketing teams accustomed to SEO metrics.

An action plan for GEO readiness

GEO may feel complex and unfamiliar at first. But with a discovery audit, you can find out exactly what to improve. Start by looking at your site’s AI visibility, technical health, and content.

1. AI visibility

Understanding how your brand appears within AI engines can help you identify missing entities, so you can prioritize where to focus content and technical enhancements. This isn’t just about awareness. It’s about ensuring your brand is discoverable and recommended.

Using data from various analytics tools, we’ve created visibility dashboards that offer a complete picture of how AI views a brand. 

2. Technical health:

A technically sound site can be easily crawled and interpreted by AI bots and SEO crawlers. One way to ensure this is by adding an “ItemList” schema to your product listing pages. This will improve the site’s structure and make your products visually prominent and informative in search results. Here are some other ways:

• Regularly monitor and optimize your site’s core web vitals such as loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
• Whenever possible, deliver critical content through server-side rendering.
• Use user-friendly infinite scroll, filters, and dynamic elements to be easily navigable by both users and AI crawlers.
• Analyze your server log files to confirm that search engine and AI crawlers are reaching and indexing your most important pages.

Capgemini recently optimized a hunting brand’s site to increase its exposure on AI platforms. After our optimization, the brand was pleased to be ranked at the top of Google AI overviews for category searches, with a 200%+ increase in visibility. Its ChatGPT traffic was also up, by as much as 75%.

3. Content

AI engines learn through structured data and language patterns. To be recognized by these systems, you must create entity-rich, intent-aligned content that reflects how users ask, not just how they search. This may mean restructuring content around seasonal or thematic prompts like “best gifts under $50” or “eco-friendly stocking stuffers.”

At Capgemini, we use an accelerator to make content more relevant for AI search. For instance, it can:

• Map high value topics to current content and identify entity pages, weak coverage, and opportunities for expansion
• Review content for freshness, depth, and diversity, as well as proper structure, e.g., checking for header tags
• Evaluate content for EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) to determine whether the brand stands out as credible and reliable for both humans and AI search engines.

Since AI engines rely heavily on forums, social media posts, and expert reviews to shape brand rankings, an equally important focus area needs to be user-generated content that mentions or cites brands. Our accelerator can identify gaps in this landscape, analyze their impact, and propose recommendations to strengthen your brand’s presence and reputation.

Next come AI-powered tests and simulations to see how your brand actually appears in AI results. Our accelerator works in three phases – simulation, analysis, and recommendation. Using up to 35 parameters, we build “synthetic” personas that accurately represent your brand’s customer segments. Rather than just testing a single prompt, we simulate realistic multi-turn conversations with AI engines. The way the AI responds to each prompt helps us pinpoint exactly where your brand can improve.

From GEO to “AI buys for me”

Brands that use GEO to improve AI visibility will be well-positioned for the next evolution of online shopping: agentic commerce. In this fast-emerging model, autonomous AI agents won’t just recommend products to customers; they’ll make decisions and complete purchases on their behalf.

With a query like “plan my week of healthy meals under $50,” an agent will instantly select recipes, add groceries to a basket, and check out, all without the customer visiting a single site. This is a market that’s projected to surpass $1.7 trillion by 2030.[3]

GEO is a technical and strategic foundation of agentic commerce. Agents will rely entirely on structured, trusted GEO-optimized brands to make decisions, so a brand that’s GEO deficient simply won’t appear in the agent’s decision space, not even as an alternative.

Getting a head start now will ensure your brand remains relevant and competitive when the rules change yet again.

Ready to future-proof your brand for AI search and agentic commerce?

[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-02-19-gartner-predicts-search-engine-volume-will-drop-25-percent-by-2026-due-to-ai-chatbots-and-other-virtual-agents

[2] https://www.forrester.com/blogs/from-keywords-to-context-impact-and-opportunity-for-ai-powered-search-in-b2b-marketing/

[3] https://www.edgardunn.com/articles/agentic-commerce-the-future-of-payments