As GEO Evolves, Will Your Revenue From SEO Get Left Behind?

In my 10-plus years creating campaign strategies for clients at DOM, the SEO “noise” has always caused friction for me. 

We’ve all experienced the obsession our leadership has for high-volume, low-intent keywords. For most healthcare providers, B2B companies, and service providers, focusing on these broad short-tail terms feels pointless. It can seem like you are just trying to look busy. 

Sure, those rankings and screenshots may look impressive in boardroom slides. But traffic from that “up and to the right” chart rarely becomes leads at a high conversion rate.

It also rarely turns into revenue your business can actually realize. 

Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a search revolution. One where the old school keyword rankings still matter, but brands are now also fighting to be the recommended result.

Yes, SEO still matters. But so does GEO. And nearly every client I advise throughout the week (active or prospective) is asking the same million-dollar question… 

“How is GEO different from SEO?”

The answer? The difference is between being “in a list” and being “the answer.”

The Reframe of SEO vs. GEO: Discovery vs. Decision-Making

Traditional SEO has – and always will – focus on discovery, which captures the “what” at the top of the funnel. 

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the new bottom-of-funnel. It focuses on decision-making. Think of it this way. SEO gets the prospect to the party, but GEO gets them to ask you for a dance.

If a prospect asks an AI for a recommendation and your brand isn’t the answer, you didn’t just lose a click. You lost the trust of a self-qualified lead actively looking for your products and services.

A Note On Terminology: Why We Are “Team GEO” at DOM

You’ll see some charts—like the Semrush graphic below—use the term “AEO” (Answer Engine Optimization). 

At DOM, we prefer GEO. Here’s why. An “Answer” engine provides a fact, while a “Generative” engine provides a synthesized recommendation. I’m here to educate, y’all, not playa hate 😎. But in order to win, you have to move from being a mere “entity” to being the recommended entity.

Mapping the Landscape

Based on who you are in your organization, your reaction to this chart probably differs.

• Executive: “Which of these lines moves the revenue needle fastest?”
• Marketer: “Crap, do I have to rewrite every blog post we’ve ever published?”
• Developer: “I know how to add schema, but how do I ‘optimize for fluency’?”

Let’s simplify the “noise” into truth that works.

Offensive and Defensive GEO with Technical Optimizations

To help people find your content in AI search, you need a few technical updates on your site. The Semrush data above supports a “Dual-Loop” strategy we’ve used for our clients over the past nine months.

The Offensive Move: Enhance Your Content For A 40% Citation Lift

Research from Semrush shows that adding citations, quotes, and stats can improve visibility in AI results by 40%. 

See what I just did there? There’s a reason for it  – because it works.

Based on who you are in your organization, here’s what you need to do next in response to this revelation.  

What This Means For An Executive 

Focus your team’s time, effort, and content creation budgets here first. Broad, high-volume keywords produce cluttered results and attract researchers, not buyers. “Vanity victories” may look good to the board, but your data will likely show a different story. High-intent terms often drive revenue. For example, Zendesk chatbot integration is likely to outperform AI customer service in the lead generation department, even though it is searched for less often.

Shift to those specific terms, and results should be on the way. A few years ago, we made a similar strategic pivot for a client in the SaaS niche. That client became the top organic search result not hosted by Zendesk itself. 

Organic search became our client’s top source of MQLs. Most of their clients adopted the solution because they already used Zendesk.

Visibility on a broad term in organic search is useless if it doesn’t convert into a qualified lead. The same is true in AI search. Apply this strategy to the right pages, and revenue should start to flow from the work.

Your site content will create a series of clear, verifiable “facts” that AI engines can trust.

Then they will be more likely to recommend your site.

What This Means For A Marketer 

You don’t have to rewrite everything on your site! Instead, just start by auditing your top 10 lead-generating pages. If you have a high-intent page, it needs at least one direct answer to a relevant prompt. 

We recently worked with a healthcare software company that had great organic rankings, but zero visibility in AI searches. Their competitors were getting all the citations. 

We fixed this by rebuilding their product pages. We used clear question-and-answer formatting that AI could easily find and reuse.

Bonus points to you if you can deliver this content in a declarative, data-backed summary statement within the first 200 words on your top pages.

The Defensive Move: Keep Your Pages So Fresh, So Clean

The most self-gratifying statistic from Semrush’s analysis? 95% of ChatGPT citations come from content updated in the last 10 months. 

Be warned. If you are “historically unoptimized,” you are invisible. This is where many B2B companies get left behind.

What This Means For A Developer

“Optimizing for fluency” means removing code bloat that confuses LLMs. Use clean, semantic HTML and ensure your structured data explicitly defines the relationships between your statistics and your brand. 

Traditional SEO treated Google like a librarian who shows you a shelf of books. GEO is successful when you provide your content to AI so that it can read your books for you.

Remember that healthcare software company I mentioned earlier? For them, we optimized their content to be highly readable by AI crawlers. 

What does that mean?

• Refreshing core service pages at regular intervals. This means more than just changing a date. Update the “conversational Q&A” format to match how LLMs process intent. This keeps your brand at the top of the “oracle’s” mind.
• Phrasing claims in natural language. In reality, developer, your marketer can probably help with this. Get them involved especially if the natural language matches common prompts and queries in the AI engines. 
• Replicating that data on other platforms off-site. If your brand owns microsites or you manage other web platforms, present your content in a consistent way. Use the same approach across all your digital properties.

These three steps, plus press releases and targeted mentions, helped the healthcare software company. They secured the top ChatGPT result for 14 core product keywords in two weeks because content off of the website confirmed exactly what the main website said.

If it worked so well for them, it can be definitely work for you.

Winning the Recommendation Race

Winning today in AI search needs a Dual-Loop Strategy. On-page SEO and offsite reputation management should work together. AI search engines look at what the rest of the internet says about you to verify your claims.

If your off-site signals don’t match your on-site content, the AI won’t cite you. And AI search rewards authority and consistency.

We want you to signal E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) not just for a bot, but because we take how people get their information from AI tools seriously. We recommend you publish content to pages multiple times in a single day (in some niches) to stay ahead of the curve. We work with you and the LLM to process your unique value proposition with zero friction.

GEO isn’t about ranking to drive superficial visits. It is about becoming the recommended result when motivated buyers ask questions late in the decision-making journey.

Action Items In The Next 24 Hours To Protect Your Revenue

You’ve heard about the benefits of “AI-readiness” from more marketing professionals than you’d like to admit. But in the always-on game of B2B marketing, effort that doesn’t compound is nothing more than wasted energy.

So what are the biggest risks you take by doing nothing?

1. Having AI search results shape your buyer’s perception before they ever visit your website. 
2. Missing out on providing high-value interactions for your sales teams. 
3. Losing ground to your competitors who already understand how buyer behavior has changed.

If your business can still thrive while living with those risks… great! 

But just in case it can’t. DON’T JUST READ THIS. 

Instead, audit your top-performing pages today. If they don’t have a direct, declarative answer to a primary question, statistics to back up the need for your products and services, or a “updated on” date near the top, you are losing ground to the engines that matter.

After all, advice is always free. Execution is where the advice comes into contact with your reality (and thrives).

Want to dive deeper into GEO? We have a bunch of resources to get you started. Check out our CMO’s Guide to GEO if you need help getting buy-in from your leadership on this as a strategy.

Want to have your GEO positioning reviewed by our strategists? Reach out for a no-obligation audit. Contact us here.