In 2024, 17% of U.S. respondents reported preferring chatbot-style AI answers over traditional Search engines for faster and more precise results. (Statista) Adoption is expanding rapidly every single day.
As user expectations are shifting and we are collectively learning a new way of searching and curating information, B2B marketers need to adjust their strategy to thrive in the new world of Search.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the new SEO. It is the strategy and approach to appearing in LLMs and AI-powered Search.
Table of Contents
What has happened so far?
These are the recent top trends that I want you to be aware of:
- Google’s AI Overview launched in May 2024.
- Since October 2024, it’s available in more than 100 countries. Largely the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Africa, incl. USA, Australia, New Zealand.
- As of late March 2025, it has also rolled out to the European countries.
- Google is introducing “AI Mode” in March 2025.
- ChatGPT Search launched in October 2024.
- Now available to free users and with the option to make it your default search engine.
- Claude can search the website since March 2025.
- 2025 is all about AI agents: Agents extend the capabilities of language models by allowing them to interact with the outside world and complete goals.
- Googled released their white paper on AI agents in late 2024.
- ChatGPT Operator was launched in January 2025. Project Mariner is Google’s equivalent.
Sounds like a lot to handle? We’ve got you! Here at Flow, we specialize in effective B2B SEO strategies tailored for the age of AI.
See how our LLM optimization services can support your team.
Classic SEO vs GEO
Understand the difference between Classic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization):
Our ability to influence AI models depends on their knowledge sources: Do they feed off training data or Search?
- If they feed off Search, we can influence their results more easily and faster with content, earned media, mentions and features.
- If they feed off training data, the same principles apply but we need to wait for an update of the training data to make progress with our visibility.
Today: Less than 1% of traffic compared to classic Search.
In our analysis of 26 B2B SaaS, we learnt: Referral traffic from LLMs and AI-powered Search has only really taken off in the last 6 months. “Taking off” currently means less than 1% of traffic compared to classic Search.
Ahrefs’ analysis of 3.000 websites in January 2025 had similar results: 63% of websites receive AI traffic. 0.17% of the average website’s traffic comes from AI. 98% of AI traffic is sent by three chatbots. ChatGPT is the biggest referrer, accounting for 50% of AI traffic. That means, if AI traffic is low for you today, you are not alone.
You can benchmark your own performance using this free dashboard (no-sign up required!).
Open it with your Google account connected to GA4, then pick the right GA4 property from the drop-down.
Less than 1% of Search traffic is not a lot – so far!
The trend is accelerating since late 2024. Likely due to the launch of ChatGPT Search and their push towards becoming the default search engine.
Major trends emerge already:
- Rise of zero click searches
- Referral traffic from AI is highly relevant and targeted
- AI usage is accelerating
Trend 1: Rise of zero click searches
For Google Search and its new AI Overview, things are quite straight forward: I expect a decrease in organic click-through rate – even if your ranking position remains the same!
AI Overview is taking up a lot of real estate above the fold. Google says that people are more likely to click links in the AI Overview but that seems counterintuitive. At my agency, we are expecting more zero-click Searches on Google, especially for top-of-funnel terms.
Now, for LLMs and AI-powered Search, we are forecasting a similar trend. Due to the conversational nature and the detailed responses, there is a lot less of a need to click through to a website. We expect certain types of searches (e.g. how-tos, guides, detailed walkthroughs) to migrate from Google to ChatGPT and alike – where they can be answered without ever needing a click – until…
Trend 2: Highly relevant traffic
Referrals from LLMs do convert at 0.7% on average for Flow Agency clients and 2.3% at the peak. The people who come to your website through LLMs and AI-powered Search are highly engaged and committed.
That is because they completed most of their research and decision making before they end up on your website.
We see demos and meetings booked, trials started – when it’s time to take action at the very bottom of the funnel, people visit your website and convert.
Trend 3: AI usage is accelerating
SEMrush and Statista found: The number of US AI tool users is expected to grow from 92 million users in 2023 to 181 million in 2027.
At the same time, 13 million US adults used generative AI for online Search in 2023. This is expected to grow to 90 million by 2027.
According to the same SEMrush/ Statista study on traffic data from the main AI tool domains, ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are the leaders in global AI-powered search models.
As of July 2024, the two chatbots collectively controlled over 78 percent of the market. Perplexity
ranked third, accounting for nearly 13 percent of the traffic to these AI models, while Microsoft Bing held the fourth position with just over 3.3 percent.
So, there is a lot of doomsday talk about how SEO and Search are dead. I like to think: Search is diversifying. And this is an exciting time for users and B2B marketers alike!
For decades, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Booking or Amazon have trained us on a list of prioritized items as the best answer to our search queries.
It was on us to comb through the results, find the relevant sections within the content and piece together the answer that we needed. The model of the search results page has been completely disrupted by hyper-specific, targeted and tailored AI answers.
But here is the thing, if your B2B SaaS is not part of these AI answers, you are not part of your audience’s buying journey.
So, let’s discuss how you can strengthen your visibility in the new world of Search.
GEO in the B2B buying journey
According to Wynter, building the consideration set starts with (Google) Searches, review sites, and asking peers.
In 2024, 54% of buyers begin with a category search to identify possible vendors, 97% will check out the vendor’s website and 82% use interactive demos or other virtual ways of checking out the tool (sandbox, trial).
Appearing in Search might mean appearing in Google’s AI Overview, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. You can capture existing demand as well generate touchpoints and enable future sales.
So, here is your guide to successful GEO in 2025:
Do organic rankings help?
Strong rankings in classic Search seem to help with appearing in Google’s AI Overview… Sort of. Kevin Indig released a meta study of 19 research studies on Google’s AI Overview and found that “Today, AI Overviews cite more pages in the top 10 ranking positions than when they initially launched.”
The below table shows that percentage chance (column percentage) that the AI Overview includes a top organic result (column organic positions).
A similar logic seems to apply for Bing for ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude 3 for Perplexity.
What stayed the same?
Classic SEO relied on three main pillars to optimize ranking factors and win top positions. Technical infrastructure. Relevant content. Meaningful backlinks.
These pillars remain useful for GEO as well:
Technical: Enable AI crawlers.
There are many copyright considerations when allowing these tools to crawl and use your website content (often without or incomplete citation). But if their crawlers are blocked, you can not appear in their results. This might also mean ungating content, especially if its bottom of funnel like buying guides or case studies.
Additionally, a study by Vercel showed that none of the crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, ByteDance or Perplexity execute javascript. However, Gemini and AppleBot do.
Content: Less importance on top of funnel content.
Content is still foundational. But top of funnel, informational topics are most likely to lead to zero click searches and traffic losses.
Backlinks: Not just about anchor texts and domain rating.
They are all about context and placement. AI answers are usually generated from a variety of sources (not just your own website). To be present in AI Search (and to be represented correctly) means you need to appear in the right places, in the right way.
An example: In 2021, our client Betterworks transitioned from agile goal-setting software to offering a broader suite performance management solution to HR professionals. This shift required a complete overhaul of their keywords, content, and marketing campaigns. Their website and all owned social channels were relaunched, and marketing materials updated accordingly. Despite these changes, Google continued to describe Betterworks as a human capital management software emphasizing OKR features.
By updating the underlying sources, incl. third-party websites, AI Overview now describes them as intended:
What is new?
Keywords vs questions.
Keywords are finally dead – for real. And to be honest, they have been dead for years. A well optimized page can rank for hundreds of keywords in Google. And except for a handful of key, bottom of funnel keywords, there wasn’t a good reason to hyper-fixate on specific keywords for years.
What you now want to focus on are topics, context and hyper-specific questions.
Specificity.
It is easy to want to lean into AI tools to generate content, drive costs down and increase efficiency. But keep in mind that this is very much the old SEO playbook where more pages meant more keywords, more traffic and maybe, just maybe, more leads.
In March 2024, even Google started talking about originality. But did we really need Google to tell us that? The goal of your content is not to rank through SEO or GEO.
The goal of your content is to be remembered – and enable future sales. According to Wynter, 42% of B2B buyers start by looking into specific vendors from the get-go. 91% of buyers coming to a sales meeting will already be familiar with the brand – only 8% will have minimal familiarity.
To reach that kind of mind share, you need to be really clear what you do – for whom.
This is not specific:
- Project management tool.
- SEO services.
This is specific:
- Employee app and workflow management tool for frontline workers in retail and hospitality.
- SEO and GEO for sales-led B2B SaaS in WorkTech and HRTech.
1.5 years ago Ryan Law from Animalz, THE agency known for their thought leadership strategy joined SEO tool Ahrefs as Director of Content Marketing. Everyone of us should learn from the thoughtful, research-backed, in-depth articles that Ahrefs has produced since.
Rule of thumb: If your content is easy to replicate (with AI), it’s probably neither original nor specific. If it is easy to do, it will soon be done by everyone and considered tablestakes.
GEO-driven content marketing means doing the hard thing: Industry research, white papers, case studies, opinion pieces, subject matter expert interviews. Ask yourself: Would you share this content piece proudly from your personal Linkedin? Again, if it is not original or unique, the answer is probably no – and there is no good reason to even write it.
I believe the future of SEO/GEO content is:
- Integrated into your overall marketing and GTM strategy.
- Human and focused on uniqueness, expertise and story.
- Experience-driven and high-quality content in all formats.
Mentions and features.
Imagine that you are MailChimp: You want to be featured in every discussion, every listicle, and every blog post about email marketing tools. It’s about creating a brand presence that’s impossible to ignore – for potential buyers and the AI answers.
We like to break down your profile of mentions by the degree to which you control them. This also provides a prioritized roadmap to align and optimize them:
- Web properties that you can completely control such as your website. Prune your old, thin and out-dated content, especially with old messaging and value propositions. Optimize your key pages (homepage, features, solutions) and make sure they are up to date.
- Social properties that you can update such as your LinkedIn company page, Crunchbase profile or Youtube channel. Use aligned description to describe your category and offering.
- Third-party review sites where you can control the description and category (not necessarily the user-generated content of the actual reviews).
- Digital PR and media appearances to make sure you are part of the conversation where it happens, including media and news. Collaborate with your PR team for one cohesive tagline used across these powerful platforms.
- Forums and user-generated content. Reddit now has partnerships with Google and OpenAI to train their models on Reddit content. A Slack alert can ensure that you capture brand mentions and are able to respond to them.
An example: Our client Enboarder likely gets featured for “best employee onboarding software” due to its optimized feature page and presence in cited listicles from People Managing People, Zapier as well as Capterra.
Should I still optimize with classic SEO?
Today, Google is still a major traffic-driver for most websites. But that can change dramatically over the next 12-24 months. If Google is part of your marketing priorities, make sure to re-focus: Instead of optimizing towards that one organic blue link, you now want to optimize for all Search features. This includes ads, videos, user-generated content and listicles.
Who owns and tracks GEO?
I might be biased, but I would think that whoever owns your SEO today, is very skilled and capable of owning your GEO strategy in the future.
SEO/ GEO performance tracking needs an overhaul though.
For website referrals and conversions, you can benchmark your own performance using our FREE LLM dashboard.
But tracking visibility inside LLMs and AI is still hard and incomplete. There is no “Search Console” for ChatGPT (yet). With new tools emerging daily, we will probably have a solution soon. We are currently playing with Peec.AI to track brand mentions.
Secondly, classic SEO has had a huge bias towards traffic as a success metric. The more content we created, the more keywords indexed, the more clicks and traffic – and so the assumption: the more leads. This mental model does not properly reflect the new world of Search and zero click marketing. You will need to align your GEO strategy and success metrics to your business goals. Organic click-through-rate will likely decrease as will traffic. But high conversion rates, qualified leads and meaningful opportunities will be the reward for answering very specific questions for your audience.
