In the very first episode of Paid Forward, our Founder and CEO Sean Begg Flint sat down with host Raman Verma to cut through the hype around GEO/AEO/LLMO – and reveal what actually moves the needle in this new era of AI search.
You’ll learn:
- Similarities and differences between GEO and SEO
- The traffic potential of generative AI engines
- Proven GEO tactics to rank in AI-generated answers
- New metrics for tracking AI and LLM visibility
And more.
Check out the full podcast here:
GEO, AEO, LLMO – Which One is Going to Stick?
There’s no shortage of abbreviations flying around the SEO community right now. You’ve probably heard them all:
- GEO — Generative Engine Optimization
- AEO — Answer Engine Optimization
- LLMO — Large Language Model Optimization
But which one is going to stick? According to Sean, the answer depends on who you’re talking to.
There’s been lots of discussion about this. But for our agency, it’s the case of what’s the easiest way to communicate it with our clients?
Most of them don’t know what generative engines mean, or what LLMs even stand for. But it’s easy to communicate AI search optimization, so that’s what we’ve been using internally with clients.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
On the other side, however, we’ve got the SEO community. What the SEO pros and experts are leaning towards?
What the community, the SEO pros refer to as, that’s a whole different thing. Of course it’s going to be a little bit more techie, a little bit more geeky. And what we’re seeing is GEO seems to be what’s kind of sticking.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
From a technical standpoint, Sean believes GEO has the most staying power.
I guess technically speaking, what we are optimizing for is generative engines – engines that can generate text basically. So, I’d say GEO is technically the right one.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
As with any emerging term, adoption by mainstream media could play a major role in solidifying what sticks.
There was an article in the New York Post that mentioned GEO. So I think that’s another kind of layer as well – what the media are going to go with?
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
At the moment, all signs seem to be pointing towards GEO. But as Sean notes, the industry is still evolving, so let’s see what the world settles on as the right abbreviation.
SEO vs GEO: Similarities and Differences
So, how does GEO differ from SEO, and how are they similar?
Here’s what Sean had to say about the debate.
Good Solid SEO is the Foundation of GEO
There’s a lot of hype surrounding AI search optimization, and plenty of people are saying that SEO is dead.
Sean doesn’t buy that. He believes that GEO is still part of SEO.
AEO, GEO, LLMO, whatever you want to call it is part of SEO. So it’s almost like another subsection of the whole SEO industry. A good example would be when mobile came about, we then had to start optimizing for mobile. It’s almost like that.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
This is because AI does something called “query fan-out,” where it separates a prompt into a bunch of smaller searches, finds as much information as it can about the topic, and then gives users a comprehensive answer.
SEO plays a huge part in that process, because AI does a lot of the searching on Google, Bing, and other search engines to access the world’s information.
Sean believes that good solid GEO is underpinned by good solid SEO.
If you’ve done good SEO – optimize your content for user intent, provide a good user experience, and keep your website technically sound – and you’re doing well in traditional search, then you’re probably going to do well in AI search too.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Brand Presence is the Key to AI Visibility
That being said, there are definitely some nuances as well that separate traditional SEO with GEO.
According to Sean, one of the biggest differentiators is brand presence.
What we’re seeing is having a really strong brand really helps with your GEO.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
But what does brand presence actually mean in this context?
By this, I mean having your brand name appear in many places across the web. Are you appearing well on YouTube? Are people talking about you in forums like Reddit and Quora? Do you have a presence in places like Trustpilot and relevant review sites in your niche?”
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
The more your brand shows up in credible, contextually relevant places, the more likely it is to be recognized, trusted, and surfaced in AI-generated results.
But it’s just about being mentioned by AI; it’s about being mentioned correctly.
The key to that? Building a consistent brand positioning both on your own website and external platforms.
You want to make sure that your website says the right thing about your brand. But you also want to make sure that your brand is also positioned in the way that is correct on other websites.”
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
That’s where brand visibility monitoring comes in.
We’re currently doing a lot of brand auditing stuff for our clients, where we look at how their brand is doing in AI search and whether these LLMs are saying the right things about them.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
If the messaging isn’t accurate, we can take a look at which citations have outdated or wrong information about our clients and tell those websites to fix them.
Brand reputation management is something most SEOs never had to worry about before. But now, it’s a crucial part of AI search optimization.
We never really cared so much about that stuff with SEO. So, it’s a very new thing for the industry and is the main difference (between SEO and GEO), I would say.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
The Overlap Between SEO Performance and AI Visibility
One of the biggest questions marketers are asking right now is whether AI visibility correlates with organic SEO rankings. According to Sean, the answer largely depends on the platform.
When it comes to Google’s AI Overviews, the overlap is clear.
AI Overviews are very much aligned with how you’d optimize for Google. Studies have shown that if you already rank in the top three for a given keyword, you’ll likely appear in the AI Overview as well.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
However, that correlation doesn’t necessarily hold true across every AI platform.
It’s different from ChatGPT, for instance. There’s less of a direct link between Google rankings and how content appears there.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Traffic Trends from Generative Engines
So, how big AI traffic currently is when compared to Google’s organic traffic?
Traffic from LLMs currently makes up, on average, between 5% and 10% of total traffic — but it’s growing fast.
If you look at the graph showing traffic from AI bots like Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and of course ChatGPT, our clients are seeing about 30% to 40% month-on-month growth since last year.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
While AI search is expanding, Google continues to dominate the search landscape.
AI traffic is growing exponentially, but it’s still relatively small compared to overall traffic. One recent study looked at the number of searches and found that Google still accounts for around 95%. That hasn’t really changed. People are still using Google just as much as before.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Users haven’t abandoned Google; they’ve simply added AI chatbots into their search habits.
What’s changing is that searches through AI chatbots like ChatGPT are increasing. So instead of users abandoning Google, the total number of searches overall is going up. People are just using both.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
For marketers, this is great news, because it means there are more opportunities than ever to get your brand in front of users across multiple search environments.
AI Search Optimization Strategy for 2025
Below, you’ll find golden nuggets of insight from Sean on how marketers can adapt their strategies for the AI-driven search era.
Prompt Research
When it comes to AI search optimization, one of the biggest challenges right now is figuring out which prompts to target, and how that differs from traditional keyword research.
As Sean explains, this is one of the most debated topics among SEO professionals today.
There’s a lot of discussion happening on LinkedIn right now because there are already tools that can track prompts, similar to how we’ve tracked keywords for years. These tools monitor how your brand appears for different prompts across LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude. But the real question is: which prompts do you track?
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Unlike keywords, prompts are far more complex.
The prompts we use are very nuanced and personal. Sometimes my prompts are a paragraph long and specific to who I am or what I’m looking for, whether that’s as an individual or as a business. So it’s very different from the short keywords we’ve traditionally tracked.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Prompt research tools are emerging quickly, but the challenge remains the same: prompts are highly specific, making them difficult to scale or standardize.
Prompt tracking is already starting to happen, there are tools that mine this kind of data. I’ve tried a few of them, and they’re interesting, but the challenge is that prompts are so specific. Finding ones that are both relevant to your business and worth optimizing for is almost impossible right now.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Because of that, Sean believes the best approach (at least for now) is to apply strategic guesses.
Let’s say you’re HubSpot, and you want to target the construction industry because it’s an underdeveloped market for CRMs.
You can imagine what a construction project manager might ask an AI: “I work for a mid-sized construction company and need a CRM that helps manage enterprise clients.”
Those are the kinds of prompts you’d want to start tracking for.
However, if you want more accurate data, you can also ask your customers directly.
It’s more time-consuming, but it’s one of the most effective ways to understand the exact language and context they use when prompting AI chatbots.
We’re recommending our clients to go to their customer service team and get as much real data as possible. Talk to them and ask what are the main questions that your customers are asking? What are the main problems that they have? That’s a treasure trove of content ideas.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Another valuable source of insights comes from user-generated content.
Another way is encouraging our clients to create a mini forum on their website, where their customers can post their own questions or compose their own problems. Of course, there’s work behind it. You have to moderate it and et cetera, but that’s also a great way to get that user generated content from the source as well.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
If that sounds too complicated or expensive to implement, you can go straight to public forums like Quora and Reddit.
Look for your customers there and find out what their pain points are and what solutions could be presented as well.
AI Content Optimization
Before AI was a thing, a classic SEO strategy used to involve mapping content to different stages of the marketing funnel: top, middle, and bottom.
Your upper funnel content would be informational led blog posts. Middle funnel content would be case studies or very specific content related to your product, where the buyer isn’t yet ready to buy, but they’re kind of comparing options. And then the bottom funnel content would be like your product pages, homepage, service pages, that kind of thing.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
But with the rise of LLMs and generative search, that upper-funnel content (informational blog posts) is increasingly being replaced by AI-generated answers.
A lot of upper-funnel content is basically being eaten up by these AI platforms. We’re seeing traffic fall for that kind of content. So now we’re telling clients not to invest as much in upper-funnel content unless they have something truly original — like new research or expert commentary that adds something fresh to the conversation.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
For example, if you run an e-commerce brand selling dementia products, writing a generic article about dementia symptoms won’t move the needle anymore.
Why compete in that space when LLMs can already give those answers instantly? Unless you’ve done a study on dementia symptoms and have real medical insights to share, there’s not much value in repeating what’s already out there.
Instead, Sean recommends shifting focus towards mid-funnel and bottom-funnel content.
We’re telling our clients to spend more time refining their About page, case studies, comparison articles, and product pages, making sure all these pages demonstrate their expertise and experience in their particular niche. So when someone asks an AI chatbot for recommendations, you’ve got that content to prove that you are exactly the right fit for that person.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Consistent Brand Messaging
Beyond your own website, you also need to ensure that your messaging and product information are accurate everywhere your brand appears online.
This includes directories, review platforms, partner listings, and any third-party sites that mention your brand.
Make sure all your content is accurate, not just on your website, but offsite as well. Audit as many pieces of content that you have out there, and check whether they’re up-do-date? Do we need to contact that website to tell them about our new product ranges, or the new target market that we’re targeting, or the pricing structure that we’ve got?
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Monitoring Your AI Visibility
After optimizing your website for AI engines, it’s important to regularly monitor how your brand is performing to gauge whether your efforts are paying off.
Key Metrics to Track
As AI search becomes a growing traffic source, it’s essential for marketers to actually add a layer of segmentation and tracking specific to LLM-driven traffic.
I would still look at clicks, impressions, and sessions, but I’d segment those metrics for the LLMs. So, have a report just like your Google Search report, where you can see conversions, sessions, and all your usual analytics data, but specifically for AI traffic.
Make sure your segmentation is set up correctly in Google Analytics so you can see traffic from AI separately, how well it’s converting, what the conversion rates are, and how it compares to other channels.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
This segmentation gives you visibility into how traffic from platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity performs compared to traditional sources.
Tracking conversions is also crucial, as LLM traffic currently converts better than traditional search traffic.
What we’re finding is that conversions through LLMs convert about five to ten times higher. So you definitely want to be tracking conversions carefully and making sure your analytics setup captures that properly.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Beyond standard SEO metrics, Sean also recommends expanding your tracking framework to include GEO-specific KPIs, such as brand visibility.
Where you’d normally have keyword rankings and tracking, now you want to add prompt tracking and brand tracking for all the top LLMs you care about, probably Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and maybe Claude. Have a list of prompts you think your target market will be searching for and track those just like you’d track keywords.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Another emerging GEO metric to pay attention to is citations – how often your content or website is referenced by AI systems as a source. That’s becoming a really important indicator of authority and visibility in AI ecosystems.
Finally, Sean points out that branded searches are an increasingly vital KPI in the AI search era. Because most AI chatbots don’t always include clickable links, users often switch to Google or Bing afterward to search for the recommended brands.
Let’s say you’re looking for a specific shoe cleaner. ChatGPT might tell you five products, but not give you the links. What happens next? You go to Google and search for those brands. That’s why tracking your brand searches over time is so important.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Even though it’s not yet possible to fully attribute those searches back to AI recommendations, tracking branded search growth gives you a good indication of whether your GEO strategy is working.
A lot of the AI optimization you’re doing will affect brand awareness and perception, even if it’s not always directly trackable. That’s why brand searches and visibility should now be treated as a core KPI for GEO.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Best AI Tracking Tools
Which tools should you use to monitor performance across generative and answer engines?
While the ecosystem is still developing, there are already several useful options, ranging from established SEO platforms to custom-built solutions.
Ahrefs is our all-in-one SEO tool stack. On the standard plan, you can now see how any given website is performing in AI Overviews. That gives you at least some visibility into which keywords generate citations for your brand or website.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Ahrefs also has a Brand Radar tool, which provides detailed insights into how your brand appears across LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
There’s also a dedicated brand tracking tool like Profound. It’s powerful but comes with a high price tag.
That said, there are plenty of more affordable alternatives available. If you search for ‘Profound alternatives’, you’ll find at least 15 or so similar tools that track your brand for any given prompt and they’re much cheaper.
For technically inclined teams, there’s also the option to build your own tracking system.
If you’re technical, you could use the ChatGPT API or OpenAI API to generate the answers to your chosen prompts and track them yourself. We’ve actually vibe-coded our own internal tracking tool using v0.dev, but you could also use platforms like Lovable or Cursor. If you want to experiment, it’s a great way to create a customized and free tracking solution.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
While the current landscape is still maturing, Sean describes it as an exciting time for marketers experimenting with AI visibility tracking.
It’s not exactly the wild west, but it’s close. There are a lot of tools out there right now that promise a lot of things. The key is to find what gives you real, actionable insights, whether that’s through a trusted platform or something you build yourself.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Setting Expectations for Results
You’ve optimized your content for LLMs, and you’ve built a strong brand presence across the web. How long will it take for you to start seeing results from GEO?
According to Sean, it depends on where you are in your SEO journey.
If we’re sticking to the idea that good GEO is underpinned by solid SEO, then we’d normally say that, depending on where you are, SEO can take anywhere from three to six months to show meaningful results. If you’re a completely new brand in a competitive market, it could take up to a year.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
However, there’s another factor at play: how frequently LLMs update their training data.
At the moment, most LLMs update their training data roughly every six months. So that’s another useful benchmark to keep in mind. If you’re optimizing your brand visibility now, you might not see the full impact until the next update cycle.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
That said, LLMs are becoming more dynamic, blending real-time search with their training data. This means that waiting periods are getting shorter.
A lot of LLMs now don’t just rely on their static training data. They’re also performing live searches across the web to decide on answers. That means the lag time could be reduced – and again, it brings things right back to the importance of SEO.
Sean Begg Flint, Founder and CEO at Position Digital
Final Advice for Marketers
When asked for his one piece of advice to marketing leaders looking to get ahead in GEO, Sean’s answer was clear: conduct a thorough AI brand audit.
He explains that if your SEO fundamentals are already strong, the next step is understanding how AI systems perceive and represent your brand.
Take the time to find out what large language models are saying about your business across different prompts, platforms, and contexts.
Is your messaging aligned with who you are and the audience you want to reach? Are the external mentions of your brand accurate, consistent, and up to date? If not, it’s time to reshape and reposition that narrative, both on your website and across the wider web.
At Position Digital, we help brands do exactly that: auditing, optimizing, and strengthening their presence for the age of AI search.
Our AI search optimization services include everything from AI brand audits and GEO strategy development to content optimization and digital PR.
Ready to make your mark in AI search results? Get in touch with our team today!
