Rekha Thomas, Principal at Path Forward Marketing, advises high-growth companies on GTM strategy and provides fractional CMO services.
As AI-powered conversation engines like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini rapidly change how audiences discover and consume information, organizations must adapt their content strategies to keep up. Adopting a Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)-first approach means creating content optimized not only for human readers and search engines, but also for AI discovery systems that synthesize large volumes of information and generate instant answers and recommendations.
To help leaders make their content more likely to be surfaced by generative models, I asked members of the Content Marketing Group, a community that I lead through Forbes Communications Council, how they strengthen their brands’ visibility, credibility and influence online.
1. Keep Answers Direct, Modular And Easy To Parse
Generative engines reward clarity and structure, not keyword stuffing. SEO leaders must leverage content gap analysis to identify intent-rich phrases and reshape assets into atomized FAQs. Bite-sized clarity ensures LLMs favor your answers. Keep answers direct, modular and easy to parse. The strategic team needs to be a cross-functional squad spanning SEO, content, product marketing and even paid or performance media. AI is already curating brand visibility, and content volume determines reach. – Evan Reiss, Foxit
2. Have A Dedicated Site Map
Make sure to create a dedicated site map that is optimized for GEO and indexed and listed in LLMs like ChatGPT. Popular WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO provide some out-of-the-box solutions to get started, but you can take it further (Hint: with the help of AI) to build out a more detailed and robust llm.txt file. And make sure to add it to your robots.txt file to help crawlers discover it. – Chad Sands, CloudLex
3. Invest In Cultivating Content And Community
The brands that are already doing well with GEO are those that have invested in cultivating content and community conversation, both on their own website and across other platforms. They do so by collaborating with their thought leaders and customers around real-life topics, often in a very human, Q&A style. For some, this will require a shift in content strategy entirely, and to do it well requires broad organizational alignment, going beyond just the marketing team. – Kelsey Flittner
4. Embrace The Opportunity To Iterate Along The Way
Jump on the train before it leaves the station and clarify your destination as you embark on the journey. Ensure you have a cross-functional team on board to bring diverse perspectives. Establish clarity and structure in your approach, creating a solid framework for the ride ahead. And, don’t strive for perfection; instead, embrace the opportunity to learn and iterate together during the journey, and drive meaningful conversations at every stop along the way. – Diana Scholz, Bayer AG
5. Write For Systems That Explain And Recommend
It’s a new game, as GEO is not just an add-on to SEO. We can no longer write for search engines that record keywords. Instead, we write for systems that explain and recommend. The brands that win will be the ones that are credible and trusted. So, it is less about chasing SEO rankings and more about becoming the source that gets quoted. – Rich Bornstein, Bornstein Media
6. Take A Cross-Functional Approach
Where prospects discover your brand has primarily been through Google searches that lead to your website. Now, it’s increasingly becoming available through AI engines and social media, which is where Gen Z is starting their discovery. This is about strengthening existing strategies, not scrapping them. Marketing teams need to take a cross-functional approach so brands show up wherever audiences are searching. – Scott Morris, Sprout Social
7. Work With SEO Specialists, Product Marketing And Analytics
Brands need to be wiser with GEO as they adapt to its nuances for content and design. Your content marketing team should lead, since they shape narratives and authority. However, they must work hand-in-hand with SEO specialists (eg, structured markup and knowledge graphs), product marketing (ie, messaging accuracy) and data/analytics (ie, tracking where content shows up in AI answers). – Namita Tiwari, Persistent
8. Establish Brand And Reputation Governance
GEO isn’t an upgrade to SEO. It’s a different game altogether as AI doesn’t just find your brand but defines it. Once an LLM trains on your website, narrative and earned media presence, its definition of your brand and the AI’s judgment that follows get locked in. If you don’t train it right the first time, negative perception could take years to change depending on LLM new model releases. Brand and communications should co-lead. This is brand and reputation governance in the age of AI. – Toby Wong, Toby Wong Consulting
9. Ensure You Are Referenced By Trusted Online Sources
GEO is a game-changer but that does not mean we drop the ball on SEO. It means we need to show up for humans as well as models. We need our marketing strategies to ensure we are referenced by trusted sources online — those that feed the models. Re-evaluate content strategy, new reporting and increased focus on AR/PR efforts. We placed GEO accountability with the digital team, but it is a cross-functional effort that the CMO needs to drive and support. – Jennifer Jackson, Actian
10. Develop Initiatives With Content Creators
GEO brings a new need to a traditional strategy: placement. With metrics like recency, consistency and source playing an increasingly important role to ensuring AI visibility, content creators and communicators are in the best position to drive and develop initiatives in tandem with with executive leaders, sales and product teams, legal, etc. as per usual. – Sheryl Seitz, C4 Ventures
11. Develop Long-Form, Rich Content
A GEO strategy is still a content strategy, but there’s an important mindset shift marketing teams need to make. Unlike humans, generative AI engines don’t care if your content is visual and concise. Unlike SEO, they don’t care about certain keywords either. If your goal is to increase AI visibility with GEO, those having success are testing prompts and developing long-form, rich content to answer those prompts, leveraging A/B testing to learn as they go. – Melanie Draheim, Fox Communities Credit Union
Forbes Communications Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?