The Evolving Role of SEOs in the Era of AEO and GEO

By Francis Waithaka

After more than a decade optimizing websites for search engines, I’ve witnessed seismic shifts in how search works. But nothing compares to what’s happening right now. The rise of AI-powered search experiences, from Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) to ChatGPT and Perplexity, is fundamentally changing our profession. We’re no longer just optimizing for search engine results pages (SERPs). We’re now navigating the worlds of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

Let me break down what this means and, more importantly, what you need to do about it.

Understanding AEO and GEO

Before diving into strategies, let’s clarify these emerging terms that are reshaping our industry.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) focuses on optimizing content to appear in direct answer formats. Think featured snippets, knowledge panels, and AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results. The goal is to have your content selected as the authoritative source that answers a user’s query without them needing to click through to a website.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) takes this further. It’s about optimizing your brand’s presence so that Large Language Models (LLMs), the AI systems powering tools like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity accurately represent your brand, products, and expertise when generating responses. Unlike traditional SEO where you optimize for rankings, GEO requires you to optimize for being cited, mentioned, and understood correctly by AI systems.

The fundamental shift? Search engines are no longer just matching keywords and ranking pages. They’re understanding entities (people, places, organizations, concepts) and synthesizing information from multiple sources to generate answers. Your website is just one piece of a much larger puzzle.

1: Master the Art of Brand Omnipresence

Here’s a truth that took me years to fully appreciate: your website alone won’t cut it anymore. Google and AI systems are looking at the bigger picture, how your brand exists across the entire web ecosystem.

The first actionable step is ensuring your brand maintains consistent, comprehensive profiles across high-authority platforms like Wikipedia, YouTube, Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn. These aren’t just “nice-to-have” social profiles anymore, they’re critical trust signals.

Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines explicitly emphasize the importance of off-site signals and authoritative mentions when assessing credibility. When Google’s quality raters evaluate websites, they’re instructed to look beyond the site itself and examine the brand’s reputation across the web. This is formalized in Google’s E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), which has become the cornerstone of quality assessment.

Think about it from an AI’s perspective. When ChatGPT or Google’s SGE needs to answer a question about your brand, where does it pull information from? Research from Search Engine Land shows that AI search assistants frequently source information from Reddit discussions, YouTube videos, and Wikipedia entries. If your brand isn’t actively represented on these platforms, or worse, if the information is outdated or incorrect, you’re allowing others to control your narrative.

I’ve seen this play out with clients. A B2B software company I worked with had an excellent website but virtually no presence on Wikipedia or active participation in relevant Reddit communities. When we audited AI-generated responses about their product category, they were rarely mentioned, while competitors with strong third-party presences dominated the conversation. Six months of strategic community participation and content creation changed that entirely.

2: Build Entity Strength Through Structured Data

Let me explain something technical that’s become crucial: entity-based search.

Modern search engines don’t just match keywords, they understand entities. An entity is a distinct, well-defined thing: a person, place, organization, product, or concept. Google builds what’s called a Knowledge Graph, a massive database of entities and their relationships, to understand context and meaning.

Your job as an SEO is to make sure Google understands your brand as a clear, authoritative entity. This is what experts call “entity strength,” and it’s built through three key elements:

First, implement comprehensive schema markup. Schema is structured data you add to your website that explicitly tells search engines what things are. For example, instead of Google guessing that “John Simiyu” on your About page is your CEO, schema markup declares it explicitly. Moz has published extensively on entity SEO and how schema markup strengthens Google’s understanding of your brand’s relationship to other entities.

Second, create or optimize your brand’s Wikidata entry. Wikidata is a free, collaborative database that serves as a backbone for knowledge across the web. Google explicitly uses Wikidata to power its Knowledge Graph. Having an accurate, well-referenced Wikidata entry gives AI systems an authoritative source for understanding your brand.

Third, maintain verified social profiles that link back to your main website. These create what SEOs call “entity associations”, connections that help Google confirm your brand’s legitimacy and map its relationships to other entities in your industry.

Google’s own documentation on structured data emphasizes that this markup helps them “understand the content on your site and create rich results.” But it goes deeper than that. For AI-generated answers, strong entity signals help ensure your brand is included in the knowledge base these systems draw from.

3: Participate in the Platforms That Feed AI Systems

Here’s where strategy gets hands-on and community-focused.

Studies analyzing AI search tools reveal a pattern: they disproportionately cite certain platforms. Reddit discussions, YouTube explainer videos, and Wikipedia entries appear far more frequently in AI-generated responses than individual blog posts or corporate websites.

This insight, highlighted by Search Engine Land in their coverage of Generative Engine Optimization, points to a clear strategy: meet AI systems where they’re already looking.

For Reddit, this means authentic participation in relevant subreddits. Not promotional spam. Reddit communities will reject that instantly, but genuine contributions that demonstrate expertise. When people discuss problems your product solves, being present in those conversations with helpful insights builds your brand’s association with those topics in the collective intelligence AI systems learn from.

For YouTube, it means creating high-quality explainer content. AI systems are increasingly capable of understanding video content, and YouTube’s authority means these videos carry significant weight. Google announced at I/O 2024 that its AI systems are better at understanding and citing video content than ever before.

For Wikipedia, contribute to or create entries relevant to your industry, following Wikipedia’s strict notability and sourcing guidelines. While not every brand qualifies for its own Wikipedia page, contributing accurate information to industry-related articles establishes topical authority.

I worked with a cybersecurity firm that started publishing detailed technical explanations on relevant subreddits and creating in-depth YouTube tutorials. Within months, when AI systems were asked about specific security threats, our client’s content was being referenced alongside established authorities, something that would have taken years through traditional SEO alone.

Demonstrate E-E-A-T in Everything You Publish

E-E-A-T—Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness isn’t new to SEO veterans, but its importance has intensified dramatically. Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines place E-E-A-T at the center of quality assessment, and AI systems are learning to prioritize similar signals.

The “Experience” component, added in 2022, is particularly significant. Google now explicitly values first-hand experience. If you’re writing about running marathons, have you actually run marathons? If you’re reviewing software, have you used it extensively? This real-world experience must be demonstrated clearly.

Practical implementation means several things:

Use detailed author bios that establish credentials and expertise. Don’t just say “John is a marketing expert”—specify that “John has managed SEO for over 500 companies for 15 years and holds certifications in advanced analytics.”

Incorporate first-hand accounts and specific examples. Instead of writing “Email marketing generates ROI,” write “In our Q3 campaign, we saw email marketing generate a 400% ROI across 50,000 subscribers.”

Earn and showcase mentions from trusted sources. When reputable publications cite your work or expert quotes appear in industry publications, that builds authoritativeness that both Google and AI systems recognize.

Search Engine Journal has published extensively on E-E-A-T implementation, emphasizing that it’s not about gaming signals but genuinely building expertise and trust. AI systems, trained on the sum of human knowledge, naturally gravitate toward sources that demonstrate these qualities consistently.

Own Your Brand Narrative Through Proactive Reputation Management

Modern online reputation management (ORM) has evolved beyond damage control. It’s now a proactive SEO discipline essential for both traditional rankings and AI representation.

Google’s own guidance in Search Central explicitly addresses reputation management, acknowledging that your brand’s representation across the web influences how you appear in search results. But for AI systems, the stakes are even higher. When a large language model generates text about your brand, it’s synthesizing information from potentially hundreds of sources. If negative, outdated, or incorrect information dominates those sources, that’s what the AI will reproduce.

The strategy requires both monitoring and engagement. Use social listening tools to track how your brand is discussed across platforms. Set up Google Alerts, monitor Reddit mentions, track YouTube comments, and regularly query AI systems about your brand to see what they’re saying.

Then engage directly. Join discussions where your brand is mentioned, correct misinformation with factual, well-sourced responses, and seed accurate information proactively. This isn’t about being defensive—it’s about ensuring the collective intelligence that AI systems learn from is accurate.

Search Engine Land’s coverage of reputation management in the AI age emphasizes that brands need to think like publishers, consistently producing and distributing accurate, helpful content that naturally becomes the dominant source for information about your brand.

6. Amplify Authentic User Voices

Google’s March 2024 Helpful Content System update made something explicit that many of us had suspected: authentic user perspectives are now weighted heavily as ranking signals and as sources for AI systems.

This means reviews, forum discussions, social media conversations, and user-generated content on platforms like Reddit and YouTube carry significant weight. But here’s the catch, it must be authentic. Google has gotten remarkably sophisticated at detecting fake reviews and manufactured enthusiasm.

The strategy is to create environments where genuine user discussion naturally happens. Build communities around your product or service. Encourage customers to share their experiences on platforms where those discussions organically occur. Make it easy for satisfied users to leave reviews on trusted third-party sites.

Moz has documented how user signals influence rankings, and the mechanism is straightforward: Google uses behavioral data, engagement metrics, and sentiment analysis to gauge genuine satisfaction. When real users consistently describe your product positively across multiple platforms, that creates a powerful signal that both traditional algorithms and AI systems recognize.

I’ve watched this transform outcomes for clients. A SaaS company I advised shifted from gated content and aggressive lead generation to building an open community forum where users helped each other. The authentic discussions that emerged became a goldmine of long-tail keywords, social proof, and AI-citable content—all generated naturally by satisfied users.

The Bigger Picture is that SEO Is Becoming Brand Engineering

Looking across these strategies, a pattern emerges. We’re no longer just optimizing web pages, we’re engineering how brands exist and are perceived across the entire digital ecosystem.

Traditional SEO focused on your owned properties: your website, your content, your backlinks. The new reality requires equal attention to earned presence, how you’re discussed, cited, and represented everywhere else.

This is both more challenging and more interesting. It requires skills beyond technical SEO: community management, content strategy, brand building, and reputation management. It demands authentic expertise that can’t be faked because AI systems, trained on humanity’s collective knowledge, naturally recognize and elevate genuine authority.

But for those willing to adapt, the opportunity is unprecedented. Brands that master entity-building, establish presence on high-authority platforms, demonstrate genuine E-E-A-T, and cultivate authentic user communities won’t just rank well in traditional search, they’ll dominate the AI-generated answers that increasingly mediate between users and information.

The evolution from SEO to AEO to GEO isn’t about abandoning what worked. It’s about recognizing that search has become bigger than search engines. It’s about ensuring that when AI systems, whether Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT, or whatever comes next, need to understand your brand, industry, or expertise, they find accurate, authoritative, and comprehensive information wherever they look.

That’s the work ahead of us. That’s the future of our profession.