Agency Launches 'GEO' for AI Search
Digital marketing agency SEOValley has launched a Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) service. The new offering is designed to help businesses gain authority and citations across generative AI platforms as search engines increasingly incorporate AI-driven answers.
- The push for GEO is a response to research predicting a significant shift in user behavior; Gartner, for instance, forecasts that traditional search engine volume will decrease by 25% by 2026 due to the rise of AI chatbots and virtual agents. - SEOValley, founded in 2000 by Shabir MS and Zarina Shabir, is a long-standing player in the search marketing industry, evolving from a focus on early search engines like Yahoo and Ask Jeeves to now concentrating on AI-driven platforms. - The core of this new service involves optimizing for "entity credibility" and "contextual authority," which means focusing on how AI models recognize and trust a brand's information, rather than just where a website ranks in a list of links. - Key components of SEOValley's GEO framework include Entity & Knowledge Graph Optimization, which aims to strengthen how a brand is recognized across different digital platforms. - This service also focuses on making a brand's content more "AI-readable" by reorganizing headings, embedding structured data (schema markup), and standardizing formatting so that platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity can easily process and cite the information. - The introduction of GEO services is not unique to SEOValley; other digital marketing agencies like WebFX, Ignite Visibility, and First Page Sage are also launching similar offerings, indicating a broader industry trend. - The technical adjustments for GEO go beyond traditional SEO, aiming to make content and brand mentions part of the trusted data sources that Large Language Models (LLMs) use to generate their answers. - This shift is driven by the evolution of search engine technology, particularly since Google's BERT update in 2019, which significantly improved search engines' ability to understand the context and nuances of language.
