Generative Engine Optimization: Get Your Web Content Ready for Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Is your website ready for AI? Whether your university site provides information to students, faculty, or staff, site managers and content creators need to make sure that information is accurate, accessible, and optimized for AI to provide the best user experience and the most relevant answers.  AI thrives on good content, meaning that AI tools will generate answers as good as your web content. 

What is Generative Engine Optimization & why is it important?

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is preparing your digital content for better performance for AI tools. GEO focuses on genAI engines (like ChatGPT) to:

• Interpret a user’s query (while leveraging any personal data it may have on the user like preferences or conversation history).
• Search to find relevant answers to the query.
• Synthesize information to deliver a summarized response.

The GEO process may include:

• Keyword optimization: Ensuring relevant keywords are used appropriately.
• Readability improvement: Adjusting tone, style, and structure for target audiences.
• Content gap analysis: Identifying missing topics or opportunities.
• SEO enhancements: Suggesting meta tags, headers, and internal/external linking strategies.
• A/B testing support: Predicting which content versions will perform better. 

What do content managers need to know about genAI tools that crawl websites?

Search engines return a list of search results based on existing published webpages. GenAI tools generate new, unique responses to a prompt based on patterns learned from a vast, public dataset, including websites. GenAI tools make predictions about how words are connected to each other, and it is through these learned patterns and similarities that new content is generated. 

Content Optimization Resources