An Insider’s Take on Why Generative AI isn’t Killing SEO – It’s Just Raising the Standards.

If you’re in marketing, you’ve heard the whispers (and the shouts) from your clients. “What’s our GEO strategy?” “How are we optimising for AEO?” “What about zero-click content?” 

As an SEO professional, I frequently encounter this question. The panic is real. Clients see AI everywhere, in images, videos, and now dominating their search results, and they’re worried. They see a future where Google becomes a walled garden, answering every question without ever sending a single click to their website. 

They see the “AI Overview” as the next “new thing” to rank for, and they want to jump on the trend, often without understanding what’s under the hood. 

Let’s all take a collective breath.

My professional opinion? There is no magical, “gold standard” tactic for Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) or Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO). 

These new acronyms are causing considerable concern, but they are essentially just a rebranding of the strategic priorities we’ve been advocating for years. The “new” tactics being suggested are simply best practices with a new coat of paint.

What Does This Mean For SEO?

Think about the advice being given for “AI optimisation”:

• “You need to provide clear, concise answers to user questions.” This sounds familiar. This has been the best practice for writing FAQ content and securing featured snippets for nearly a decade. We’ve always known that clear, direct answers, marked up correctly, perform well. The AI is just another user (a very fast one) that appreciates this clarity.
• “You must demonstrate experience and authority (E-E-A-T).” Again, this isn’t a new strategy for AI. This is Google’s core strategy for ranking content made for humans. We’ve been telling clients to move away from generic, soulless content and focus on first-hand experience and demonstrable expertise for years. It so happens that LLMs (Large Language Models), which are trained to identify helpful patterns, also tend to prefer content that real people find meaningful.

This isn’t a new task list. It’s a strategic shift in priorities. The days of “good enough” content are over. The work we’ve been pushing for, deep, helpful content, excellent technical structure, and high authority, is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s the cost of entry. So here’s how to ensure your content is optimised…

Architecting Content for Machine Understanding

While E-E-A-T and clarity are the foundation, the biggest change for writers is how content needs to be structured for optimal machine consumption. An LLM doesn’t read a blog post; it retrieves and reasons over small, independent passages. A new focus on reviewing content for extractability.

Design for Atomic Passages

The content should be broken into discrete, self-contained segments – or “semantic units.” LLMs retrieve and reason over these small “chunks” of text. Large, undifferentiated text blocks confuse chunking algorithms and can lead to retrieval failures. This means every paragraph should be designed to stand on its own without losing meaning.

Precision in Language and Data

LLMs are looking for facts stated in a clear Subject–Predicate–Object pattern. Vague, context-dependent phrasing (like using “this” or “it”) is out. Content that explicitly embeds verifiable, quantifiable data-specific statistics, full dates, and clear facts is more likely to be selected and cited due to its strong evidence density.

Align with Entity Space

Modern AI retrieval is based on understanding meaning, not just keywords. Your content must be rich in defined Named Entities (people, products, concepts). By consistently using specific terminology and reinforcing your topical authority through interconnected, relevant content, you are essentially optimising your domain’s embedding to occupy the correct space for your expertise in the AI’s semantic map.

Cover the Full Intent Space (Query Fan-Out)

LLMs don’t match answers to a single keyword – it fans the initial query out into dozens of related sub-intents. To win, your content must speak to these adjacent, latent needs. This means offering information in multiple modalities (text, lists, tables, visuals with captions) and ensuring your content ecosystem covers the wider conceptual territory around your core topic. Visibility now depends on whether your content satisfies not only the user’s obvious question but also the hidden questions an LLM expands that query into. 

This means we treat the content body itself as a technical structure, not just a stream of prose.

Google Says, “Don’t Worry.” Here’s What We’re Doing Anyway

Google’s official stance has been that you don’t need to take any special action for AEO or GEO. In a recent podcast, Google’s VP of Search, Robby Stein, confirmed what many of us suspected: the new AI-powered experiences are built on the same foundations as traditional SEO. 

This doesn’t mean we invent new, flashy “AI-ranking” services. Instead, it means we must be more rigorous about our entire core SEO, viewing it as a single, holistic system. The panic over AI gives us, as Search Engine Optimisers, the leverage to finally get the full buy-in for the deep, foundational work we’ve been championing for years. 

“Optimising for AI” is our new mandate to be relentless in our pursuit of E-E-A-T, moving clients from generic blog posts to content-rich, first-hand experiences. It means we’re reinforcing our technical foundations, treating Schema Markup not as a “task” but as the literal language AI uses to understand context. And yes, it includes running new, simple checks, such as ensuring a `robots.txt` file isn’t blocking the very crawl agents we want to be cited by. 

We’re not building a new “AEO” strategy; we’re finally executing our complete SEO strategy with the precision and priority it has always deserved.

How Do We Measure Success in a “Zero-Click” World?

This is the real question. If clicks are on the decline, what’s the new benchmark for success? 

The honest answer: It depends on your goals. 

For many clients, we’re shifting the focus from pure top-of-funnel traffic to influence and authority. The new KPIs are starting to look like: 

• AI Citations: Are our brand and our experts being “mentioned” as a source in AI Overviews? We’ve already seen sales come through from clients being cited in ChatGPT. 

• Brand Search Volume: Is our authority growing, leading more users to search for us directly? 

• Conversion Rate of Remaining Clicks: The clicks we do get will be from users with higher intent. Is our site optimised to convert them? 

The fundamental challenge hasn’t changed. Your goal is to be the most authoritative, helpful, and technically sound source of information in your industry. 

That’s how you won at SEO yesterday, and it’s exactly how you’ll win in the new age of AI.

At Infinity Nation, we integrate AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and GEO (Google Experience Optimisation) into our SEO strategies, enhancing AI-driven search visibility and user experience. Find out more here.