The rapid integration of AI into search engines and conversational platforms like Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity are changing how we discover and interact with retailers. Traditional search engines and SEO still dominate, and retailers still need to optimise for the first page of ten blue links. Against this backdrop, generative engine optimisation (GEO) is a new, rapidly evolving landscape on an upward adoption curve, where success is being the best answer to a question followed by a rich, contextual conversation.
The good news is that the rise of GEO is more evolution than revolution. Much of your current investment in SEO skills still applies, and is a solid foundation to capitalise on the opportunities GEO brings.
What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?
GEO refers to optimising content and digital strategies for generative AI models that are increasingly integrated into search engines and customer touchpoints. Unlike traditional SEO, which primarily focused on keywords and backlinks to rank in deterministic search algorithms, GEO emphasises creating content that is naturally understandable, contextually relevant, and directly answerable by AI systems. These systems are designed to synthesise information and provide comprehensive, conversational responses, shifting the focus from simply listing search results to delivering direct answers and personalised experiences.
The good news is that for all that is changing, many of the technical and practical foundations remain the same: 1) we still need to make it easy for bots to find and interpret our content, 2) We will need to monitor and experiment to understand what works, and 3) we still need to produce great content that’s trustworthy.
What’s changing for GEO?
- There are no ads and there is no page two: Traditional search engines behave in similar ways. In June 2025, searching google.com and bing.com for “where can I buy a nintendo switch 2” yielded similar results – multiple pages, numerous retailers, ads everywhere. Asking the same questions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT mentions six retailers in total, whereas Google’s Gemini gives me 8 UK-based retailers and a dozen in the US. If you’re not in those lists, you’re invisible.
- Shift from keywords to conversational queries: While keywords still hold some importance, the emphasis is now on understanding the intent behind conversational queries. Retailers need to anticipate how customers will ask questions using natural language and structure content to directly address those questions. This includes long-tail queries and more complex, multi-part questions. Where traditional SEO is famously opaque, these conversational interfaces can aid optimisation, revealing insights into why and how an answer was given.
- Personalisation at scale: Generative AI enables a level of personalisation previously unimaginable. Retailers can leverage AI to understand individual customer preferences and provide highly tailored product recommendations, content, and even conversational support, leading to more engaging and effective customer journeys.
- Voice search and assistant optimisation: AI is enabling the rise of voice interactions and voice assistants. This trend seems likely to continue, so optimising for voice search becomes even more critical. GEO requires content to be optimised for natural language patterns and spoken queries, which often differ from typed searches.
- Rate and scale of change: The search engine landscape has been largely the same for a decade or more. In 2025, AI has gone mainstream and disrupted the industry, but AI behaviour, user experiences and performance optimisation tooling are all immature and rapidly evolving. Taking full advantage of the opportunities this disruption presents will need active engagement with what’s changing.
What remains the same?
Despite the significant shifts, the solid skills you’ve already built in fundamental principles of SEO are still vital.
- Technical SEO foundations: A technically sound website remains paramount. Fast loading speeds, mobile responsiveness, secure connections (HTTPS), and clean site architecture are essential for both human users and bots to access and understand your content. Thinking in terms of crawl budgets is still useful, and avoiding changes in site structure that break links is still crucial!
- Emphasis on EEAT: In 2022, Google added “Experience” to the existing “EAT – Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness” guidelines. AI is much more context-aware than traditional search, which means that context like author profiles, buyer’s guides, comparison charts, reviews and FAQs are even more important to support your product descriptions. Awareness and interactions with off-site forums such as Reddit and Quora, where customers may go to have product-related conversations also help build the relationship of your site with the wider world.
- Importance of structured data: Structured data (e.g., product schema, review schema, local business schema) still helps models understand your content. Whilst it’s difficult to know how impactful it is, ensuring this type of information is present and agrees with the textual content increases the information available to models and ensures you aren’t at a disadvantage compared to others who provide it.
- Customer experience: While it is evolving, the core principles of good experience remain constant. Easy navigation, clear calls to action, and intuitive interfaces are essential for keeping users engaged and reducing bounce rates, which indirectly signals positive content quality to AI.
- Analytics and iteration: Continuous monitoring of performance through analytics tools is still critical. Understanding what’s working, what’s not, and how user behaviour is changing allows for agile adaptation of GEO strategies. GEO tooling is immature, but developing rapidly.
How to use GEO to your advantage
GEO is a force in the retail environment that presents both challenges and time-critical opportunities. For corporate decision-makers, a strategic evaluation of digital marketing investments and a deeper understanding of how AI influences customer discovery and engagement could be a real driver for growth. Whether large or small, established player or scale-up, the current disruption is ripe for exploitation.
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