Technology keeps changing, and the way to capture attention has shifted from search engines to generative AI. But how do you increase your visibility with your content?
While it’s a different space, there are so many ways that GEO ranking and SEO overlap. But any changes made should avoid negatively affecting your search rankings. So, in theory, it shouldn’t be too big of a stretch to double-down on the good habits you already have for producing content.
But instead of theory, let’s take a look at the best low-hanging fruit in regards to content writing for GEO.
Here are four steps you can take right now to improve your content’s visibility for AI:
#1 Focus on Topics Over Exact Match
Content is King no more; make way for: Context is King. AI platform engines now use contextual matching software, and are better at understanding semantics and meanings of phrases. It’s no longer necessary to exactly match searchers’ queries word-for-word. This method actually works for both SEO and GEO ranking now.
Keywords are important. But they’re not all there is. Content writing for AI can now focus less on exact match and more on the topic around the term you’re hoping to rank for.
What you can do: Start building out the topics that are most important to your brand. You no longer have to force a square peg into a round hole, cramming keywords into blogs or saying things awkwardly in the blog title.
Take a hub-and-spoke approach for the topic: Use an article for the primary keyword, then create related resources around it to dig deeper. By using inexact keywords and phrases, the content is more engaging and different. (Ironically, if you want to show up in AI, you have to use humans to write the content.)
Keep in mind: Even though AI is used to parse blogs, content writing for GEO must have a human aspect to be the most successful—write in a style that engages humans first and foremost.
#2 Chunking Content for AI Bots
Remember the days when the longer the blog, the more successful it would be for SEO (supposedly)? Long articles used to be the thing—1000, even 5,000 words to fully cover a topic? But now, AI is pulling out pieces of articles rather than the whole thing, so those 5,000 words aren’t really necessary for better GEO visibility.
What this means: Chunking is just breaking up the content in a way so each section can stand alone. A “chunk” is a short passage AI “reads”. It’s usually a paragraph of a few sentences, totaling 150-300 words that AI converts into a mathematical format called embedding, so it can determine meaning and compare it with other chunks.
What you can do: Write content for AI that’s focused in small chunks. Think:
- Short intros
- Short (bulleted or numbered) lists
- FAQs and How-To type content
- Definitions and descriptions
- Callouts
- Short paragraphs
Note: If your content is highly technical or esoteric, this may not work, and it certainly doeson’t work for many resources. But, where it makes sense, if each paragraph or section you write can help answer a singular question, that’s a chunk AI can draw from.
#3 Highlight Authors
Giving credit where credit is due, but also aligning author expertise to topics will help your GEO. The author of the content you publish should be someone at the company with expertise in the topic. Don’t be generic about it.
For example, on our own website, an author bio goes to an author page about him or her. Head to the page source, and you can see the schema markup, which shows the topics he’s an expert in, along with: Where he went to school, what he studied, what his role is, and more.
This tells the AI bots that the author is an actual human. Then, every time that person publishes something, that content, person, and website become more trusted. Again, AI wants human-written content. (Yes, it’s ok to groan.)
What you can do: Line up your content topics with the roles and expertise people have at the company. Start with the CEO or product manager, and build up their author pages. Ensure they have author schema on the page so AI can determine who wrote it.
#4 Get Citations in AI Results
When AI uses content, it provides citations. That’s the goal: You want your website to be cited in their results.
Similar to the old backlinking method, work on mentions. It doesn’t require begging for a link (or doing the old “I’ll put in a link for you if you put in a link for me”). It simply means you need to appear on lists outside of your own site—like giving social proof apart from your own sourced testimonials.
What you can do: Shake up your content strategy. Write pieces of content that will appear outside of your site, and have your brand name show up somewhere else. Think: A guest blog. A podcast appearance. Co-brand things that sit on a partner’s website. Similar to the author schema, this signals validity (and visibility) to AI for your company and its products/offerings.
In Conclusion
Even as I write this, AI is changing. In a few months, we’ll probably need to update this post (and maybe this post for better AI visibility for B2B SaaS website managers)—but these are steps that we’ve seen work firsthand for us and for our clients. Make a few small shifts to your content strategy, keep your SEO strong, and maintain your focus on humans, who make the final decision on engaging your services.
