How to get your website found in 2026 using SEO & GEO

The way people access online information has changed, with LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude creating an entirely new environment for search. If your content hasn’t been refreshed since before the AI search era kicked in, it’s likely to be underperforming. That’s because the benchmark for what gets surfaced – by Google or any AI system – has risen considerably. Stale, thin, or generic content that might have just about worked in 2022 is now much less likely to cut it. The good news is that the fundamentals of good content haven’t changed; they’ve just become more important than ever.

Built around ranking in Google results pages, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been the dominant framework of online discoverability and traffic acquisition for decades. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is its emerging counterpart, focused on getting your content used by AI-powered answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, and so on. There are many other names for GEO, including Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), Artificial Intelligence Optimisation (AIO), Large Language Model Optimisation (LLMO), AI Search Optimisation, AI visibility, and even Hybrid Search Optimisation (HSO). Whatever the name, we’re talking about the same thing.

High-quality content is still the answer

SEO and GEO are not mutually exclusive. The same content signals that make a page rank well in traditional search – clear authority, genuine depth, well-structured writing, and demonstrable expertise – also make content more likely to be pulled into AI-generated answers. The underlying question is the same in both cases: does this content answer the user’s question better than anything else?

So what does good content look like when it has to satisfy both a traditional crawler and an LLM simultaneously? Google’s advice is still to focus on SEO (and in the SEO world, their advice has long been to focus on humans) in order to rank in AI search. Traffic from LLMs is growing, but organic and direct traffic is still the biggest source of traffic for websites across the board.

Although there are plenty of ‘hacks’ promoted by AI gurus on platforms like LinkedIn, be aware that you could put a lot of effort into these gimmicks only to find that an algorithm or setting change kills them off overnight. Worse, it’s possible that platforms will actually penalise these behaviours as soon as they start getting traction. And while you can manipulate an LLM with hacks in the short term, they won’t help you build trust with actual paying customers.

Instead of chasing the latest hack, the brands that keep dominating in search (wherever that takes place) are those that demonstrate they are reliable, build topical authority, understand their audience, create ORIGINAL content, and remember their messaging and positioning.

What content should businesses focus on?

When it comes to AI answers, articles still get cited more than other text-based sources, and by a long way. Second to that are a website’s core pages, and then other media and formats follow, but at much smaller volumes. What’s interesting is that when core pages are cited, they may well be pages that don’t rank particularly well and are therefore not showing up in search engine results pages (SERPs). It seems that Domain Ranking (DR) is a more powerful indicator of whether a core page will be cited by an LLM.

Videos are also good content, as LLMs are trained on transcripts. YouTube descriptions, titles, tags, and comments are also crawlable texts that contribute to how a brand or topic is indexed and understood. Brand mentions on YouTube directly feed into Google’s broader understanding of entities, which surfaces in AI Overviews and AI Mode. When AI systems can’t answer something with text alone (for example, a product demonstration, a how-to, or a review), they could surface a video rather than a written source. Being present on YouTube means you’re in the running for those responses.

Top tips to be discoverable in search

1. Get your technical SEO foundations right

If your site is slow, difficult to crawl, or poorly built, you are at a disadvantage before you even start. Search engines and AI systems alike need to be able to access and parse your content cleanly. SEO basics like page speed, mobile performance, proper indexation, good internal links, sitemaps, robots.txt, and schema markup are some of the unglamorous but vital foundations everything else sits on. At the time of writing, client-side rendered content (where the browser assembles the page before anyone can read it) is at best inconsistently accessible to AI crawlers, and at worst completely invisible to them.

2. Demonstrate verifiable expertise in your field

Named authors with verifiable credentials, first-hand experience, and real opinions signal to both search engines and AI systems that there’s an actual human authority behind the content. Vague or generic committee-written texts that could have come from anywhere are easy to spot and increasingly overlooked as people search for genuine and specific expertise.

3. Write for depth, not volume

One thorough, well-researched piece that properly covers a topic will consistently outperform ten shallow ones. The temptation to churn out content for its own sake is one of the things that has quietly undermined a lot of websites over the years. Publish original data like research and statistics, research thoroughly to find which questions to answer, talk to and quote experts, and define technical terms. To really take things to the next level, establish content ‘hubs’ around core themes and queries (a main ‘pillar’ page that covers the topic broadly, supported by more focused pieces that go deeper on specific aspects).

4. Answer questions directly and early

Blogs often used to make readers scroll all the way to the end to get the answers they needed, the idea being that improving dwell time was an engagement signal for Google. But we’re all too busy and have seen too much clickbait content for this to still work in 2026. Instead, respect the reader’s time and get to the point as fast as the content naturally allows. AI systems in particular pull discrete, self-contained answers from content, so if yours requires digging to find, it may not get found at all.

5. Structure your content so it’s easy to scan and extract

Good SEOs who really understand content have been talking about structure for a long, long time. Luckily, LLMs also love clarity and structure, so this tactic keeps you on top of GEO too. Readers – humans or AIs – scan pages to find the key details that are most relevant to them and their unique situation; good structure allows them to do this quickly and effectively. Clear headings, logical flow, and digestible sections are just the start. In addition, you should look at elements like publication dates, author bios, metadata, alt text, schema, and internal links. A really good editor will be able to tweak every part of an article so that it makes sense even when pulled out of context.

6. Back up your claims with facts and sources

Specific, verifiable claims with attributed sources carry considerably more weight than generalisations. Content with genuine fact density – real statistics, named studies, concrete examples – is more likely to be treated as a citable source. If you’ve conducted your own survey, study, or analysis, that’s inherently citable in a way that third-party statistics aren’t. But even if you use other people’s research, outbound links to credible references signal that your content exists within a broader ecosystem of legitimate knowledge.

7. Keep content fresh

Industry experts and academics have found freshness of content is crucial for search and AI citing. But don’t throw away what you’ve already built, instead audit your site for all the pieces of content that are worth updating (and, yes, those that can never be resuscitated should be removed). Look for topic or expertise gaps, changes in language or search intent, and opportunities to add more value. As you edit, keep an eye out for old statistics, obsolete references, broken links, cannibalisation, and advice that no longer reflects reality, as these all erode credibility. When choosing what to refresh, you’re looking for increased search visibility but also business results (a lift in sales or customer engagement). Whatever you do, don’t just change the publication date and walk away, as this could backfire!

8. Build brand mentions off your own site

Your website alone isn’t enough to build trust with potential customers. Branded mentions on third-party sites, publications, and forums contribute meaningfully to how authoritative both search engines and AI systems consider you to be. Guest articles, media coverage, and active participation in relevant online communities all feed this. Social proof has always been a significant factor in how people make decisions, so what was previously good practice for conversion is now also good practice for discoverability!

9. Be present where LLMs learn

LLMs draw heavily on specific corners of the web when forming responses. Reddit consistently ranks among the most-cited domains across major AI platforms, largely because it contains genuine human experience, opinion, and debate at scale (third-party validation has always carried more weight than a brand saying good things about itself). Niche industry forums and communities can carry similar weight for more specialised topics. If your brand, product, or area of expertise is being discussed in these places, it feeds into how AI systems understand and represent you. A credible, consistent presence in these places helps build distributed authority.

10. Build a YouTube presence

Research from Ahrefs (a leading SEO research and analytics platform) across 75,000 brands found that YouTube mentions show the strongest correlation with AI visibility of any factor studied – outperforming even branded web mentions. Whether you create your own channel or work to get your brand mentioned in other creators’ content, YouTube reach feeds AI discoverability in a way that purely text-based efforts currently don’t match.

Stay consistent and keep showing up!

The arrival of LLMs added yet another thing to think about when developing your company’s marketing strategy. The good news is that good GEO is rooted in good SEO: create content that demonstrates genuine expertise, answers questions clearly, and is kept up-to-date, then build a presence beyond your own site through third-party mentions, community participation, and platforms like YouTube. The terminology has changed, the channels have multiplied, but the underlying principle hasn’t: content that genuinely serves the reader is content that gets found.

If you want help creating the kind of content that gets found regardless of the channel, talk to us today about our content creation and SEO/GEO services.

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