Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for about 7 decades, constantly sprouting advanced concepts like machine learning (ML), robotics, natural language learning (NLP), computer vision, deep learning, and sentiment analysis, among others, over time.

All these powerful AI technologies have helped businesses dive into market trends and peek into customers’ brains to make accurate, mission-critical decisions.

Cut to November 2022, generative AI (GenAI) stormed onto the scene. It’s been just about 2 years, and answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity have already become central to boardroom discussions and everyday workflows.

Read the latest tech news, and you’ll find GenAI hogging more than half of them. 

Of course, GenAI has been a welcome addition to the business ecosystem. You use it to brainstorm specific topics and ideas, conduct quick research, generate stunning images, and convert lengthy content into easy-to-understand summaries.

But, there’s one area where GenAI has truly shone for businesses, where traditional AI technologies have somewhat struggled: Making sense of the unstructured data.

Buried Insights: The Massive Challenge of Unstructured Data

Every organization produces tons of unstructured data—say, meeting notes, emails, chat logs, customer-facing calls, PDFs, customer reviews, and product roadmaps. Unlike structured data, these insights don’t fit nicely into rows and columns, making them difficult to store, search, and analyze.

For years, businesses have turned to traditional AI solutions to house customer and industry-related information. While many captured it, few managed it well or made sense of it. That said, employees have had to dig for relevance and meaning from unstructured data and consistently update the systems. That was not only cumbersome but also created minimal value.

Imagine this: Valuable insights from team meetings scattered in meeting docs, emails, or even personal notebooks. Key conversations are siloed in call recordings, proposals, presentations, or support logs because employees can’t understand the key concepts well. All this crucial data remains buried in systems and documents that could illuminate strategic business needs.

So, what’s so big deal about it?

Here’s a quick reality check: In 2022, unstructured data made up a whopping 90% of the overall organizational data—only 10% was structured.

And get this: the world will store a staggering 200 zettabytes (ZB) of data by 2025.

This screams a massive gap in how businesses use data, leading to missed opportunities, frustrated customers, and business strategies that simply fall flat. 

Generative AI To The Rescue!

Organizations are swimming in data. While this “messy” data hides incredible insights, unlocking its real value is no cup of tea.

Fortunately, generative AI (GenAI) has changed all of that. Now, businesses can use unstructured data in countless ways, inventing new use cases every single day.

So, How Exactly Does Generative AI Help Here?

GenAI feeds on a huge corpus of data to learn and interpret how we humans communicate. Thanks to this immense training, coupled with its existing capabilities, it analyzes the context—tone, meaning, and intent—within the data. And that too within a few minutes.

This cutting-edge capability opens a plethora of use cases for your business:

• Quick Summaries: Get crisp, clear takeaways from lengthy reports, meetings, audios/videos, or feedback.
• Key Insights: Easily pull out important terms, keywords, topics, and subtopics from large bodies of text like news articles and research papers.
• Smart Organization: Automatically sort transcripts, reviews, or responses into predefined categories based on sentiment and intent.
• Spotting Trends: Analyze customer-facing conversations to find gaps in your processes, predict what they’ll need, and explore growth avenues. 
• Understanding Emotions: Find out how customers actually feel from their feedback—rant or compliment—across social media and news aggregator platforms.
• Personalized Experiences: Use captured insights to deliver at-scale personalized experiences to customers. 
• Creating Drafts: Turn raw notes from docs, meetings, and even handwritten scribbles into polished drafts.
• Breaking Down Silos: Organize scattered inputs from multiple teams into actionable outputs, keeping everyone on the same page.

Here are some examples:

Content Writing

• Unstructured data: Jotted-down notes and rough ideas.
• GenAI Output: Polished blog drafts, clear content outlines, and ready-to-publish social media posts.
• Example: You’re brainstorming with Gemini on a topic. You share your thoughts, notes, and ideas, and instruct Gemini to create a structured outline for a 1000-word article.

Digital Marketing

• Unstructured Data: Raw survey results, customer reviews, and campaign feedback.
• GenAI Output: Deeper insights, common customer questions (FAQ), and refined branding strategies.
• Example: You instruct ChatGPT to find out why people love your customer service software based on the reviews (squeezed out from a PDF file).

The Catch: Where Generative AI Still Needs Work

It’s not all that rosy with GenAI. Here’s why:

The “Messiness” Makes Mapping Difficult

Unstructured data has unlimited variants due to its non-formatted nature. Take invoices, for example. You think an invoice is just a list of items and prices, right? Ummm…No. That’s not how GenAI sees it.

If you get 50 invoices from your vendors, no two might look the same. They’ll have their own schemas. What’s more, every invoice has various types of discounts. Some are for buying a specific quantity, others for being a long-time customer, or even special deals for specific products.

These aren’t just a simple “Discount: 10%.” The generative engine needs to understand why there’s a discount and how the vendor has calculated it. This often involves reading the surrounding text and understanding the context.

So, automatically pulling out these insights becomes one hell of a task than just looking for a simple “total.”

You’ll need to consistently and accurately map them to a common schema (most notably JSON schema) every single time. In other words, you have to enter very detailed instructions—sometimes hundreds of lines long.

That’s a lot of business logic and human expertise.

Still In Its Early Days

GenAI bridges the gap between messy data and the neat, structured systems businesses use. But let’s not double down on it. Right now, it’s still slow, not worth the money, and only handles small data chunks at a time. This is a challenge, even for small businesses, which generate data in terabytes (TB).

Plus, GenAI has much smaller context windows than the enormous volumes organizations need to sift through regularly.

Time to Dig Into The Underutilized Asset

Data is the fuel that drives AI engines. But that tank has mostly been empty because an enormous portion of enterprise data is unstructured—and for too long, it has sat largely untapped. Most businesses couldn’t figure out how to “fill the tank.”

Thanks to GenAI, an unexploited treasure trove is now up for grabs, with more and more organizations making it a crucial component of innovative and analytical enterprise applications. Tap into this incredible opportunity before that ship sails!

That said, unstructured data boasts varied complexity—a wide-ranging spectrum. At its lower end, traditional AI solutions work pretty accurately and without hurting the bank balance. GenAI is yet to tick that checkbox.

But, for workflows that demand human expertise due to the complexity and the unlimited data variance, GenAI is a promising technology to automate such agentic systems and free humans.

So, the question is: are you ready to harness more of your enterprise data, and especially that rich human-generated unstructured goldmine, as you implement AI-enabled systems? The answer should be a big fat “Yes.”

SEO has done a full 180!

Almost a year ago, people focused solely on improving their brand’s SEO, looking for “7 Organic Strategies to Boost Site Rankings.”

But now? My LinkedIn and Instagram feeds are brimming with posts like “How to Get Your Brand Into Gen AI Responses” and “How Zero-Click Searches Are Changing SEO.”

SEO isn’t just about dropping well-placed keywords/phrases, evenly sprinkling hyperlinks/backlinks throughout an article, or updating the content with recent statistics and better examples.

It’s also about ensuring that generative AI platforms—large language models (LLM)—like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini understand and recommend your brand in their answers. Otherwise called generative engine optimization (GEO) or LLMO.

The question is, how to improve your brand’s GEO? I’m about to show you how with these five simple strategies. Use them to rewrite your SEO playbook, and your traffic metrics will thank you.

Stamp Your Authority

Authority matters more than ever in Gen AI platforms. You need to prove you know your stuff to pop up in AI-generated responses. Authoritative elements boost the odds of a content getting pulled into AI-powered search tools by 30-40%.

How to make your content a trustworthy information source?

• Add a fact or quote from a reliable source. For instance, in pieces associated with history, culture, society, and people.
• Drop in relevant stats to strengthen your arguments, for example, when writing on law and government or expressing opinions that might spark a controversy.
• Share valuable industry insights through your own research-heavy thought leadership content pieces or personal experiences.
• Include subject matter experts (SME) within your business in the writing process. Ask them for fresh insights and quotes, or maybe numbers to make your article stand out. Have them review your article. They’re the ones who’ll walk you through the ground reality of the topic you’re writing on.

Remember, always ensure the statistics you add are up-to-the-minute. I’m talking about the primary sources of the statistics here, not those hyperlinks that trap you into a loop of clicks and redirecting, only to find out that the numbers are years old. I prefer adding data that’s at max a year old or maybe two. Not before that.

Also, take stats from high domain-authority (DA) websites, think Forbes, IDC, McKinsey, Deloitte, and Wall Street Journal, to name a few.

In a nutshell, a nuanced understanding, a thunderbolt insight, a personal experience, and a playful choice of words—these elements uplift a content piece from mind-numbing to mind-blowing.

Write For Humans (Too)

Gen AI platforms run on natural language processing (NLP) to provide information summarized into easy-to-understand responses. That means your content should feel like a chat with a friend not a boring lecture.

Now don’t start writing “F-laced” content pieces or add dozens of “uhhh” and “ummm” to make them human-like. Don’t channel your inner “Sam Jackson” into writing content pieces. Absolutely not!

Your content’s tone and style should mimic how we humans speak and how we enter voice/text queries. If needed, break the rules of grammar and convention to change the content rhythm to avoid readers dozing off. (Don’t worship Grammarly like a God)

• Pose titles/headers/sub-headers as questions.
• Turn cliches into puns or humor.
• Use first- or second-person voice to strengthen your brand narrative.
• Pay special attention to intros and outros, where robotic and obvious statements could get skipped over by LLMs. Make the intros, in particular, engaging and thought-provoking that make the readers scroll down in interest.
• Include long-tail keywords as they are less competitive and satisfy user intent more specifically. For instance, for a generic keyword “Weight Loss,” you can add long-tail keywords like “How to lose weight fast for women over 40.”

Create Content That’s Easy to Skim

Keep your content simple and easy to read. People can’t follow information presented in an overly complex manner, nor do AI-enabled search platforms. They don’t read like us—they scan patterns and key points to interpret your message accurately.

Of course, many will still read an entire article, but when writing online, you want to hook readers and draw their interest to the sections they most want to read.

Here’s how you can organize your articles:

• Logical heading hierarchy from H1 through H4 to help readers skim and bots understand context.
• Bullet points and tables to summarize data at the end (key takeaways) or when explaining benefits, features, or how-tos in crisp sentences.
• Short sentences and paragraphs wherever possible for more clarity. I know it’s jarring, especially for those writers (including me) who enjoy a good, long, meandering sentence. But let’s not deny that trimming your texts helps both humans and LLMs follow your train of thought without derailing.
• A series of high-quality images with descriptive captions and alt texts in between sections helps readers digest your article quickly.
• Make your content visually appealing with infographics, graphs, and videos. The more media readers can gather information from, the better (within reason!).
• Add a dedicated FAQ section to get your content featured in the “People Also Ask.”

Don’t Underestimate UGC Platforms

People want to know what others are talking about your brand or offerings that they are interested in online. Community-based platforms, most notably Reddit and Quora, best serve the purpose. Reddit, for instance, hosted 108.1 million daily active users (DAU) during Q1 2025.

“Our content is particularly important for artificial intelligence (“AI”) – it is a foundational part of how many of the leading large language models (“LLMs”) have been trained.” – Reddit, S-1 filing with the SEC.

In fact, Reddit is one of the primary sources of user-generated content (UGC)—Google even tied up with the platform in early 2024 to use its answers to train its LLMs.

Multiple leading LLMs are already tapping into public web data when giving responses. And why not? Such online forums and news aggregators are a UGC goldmine. So, strengthen your brand footprint in these platforms by:

• Building a community of people who love your product/services
• Hosting transparent “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) regularly
• Partnering with niche influencers
• Publishing in-depth technical analysis of industry trends, challenges and opportunities
• Showcasing expertise in relevant industry discussions

These tactics work wonders only if you engage with users without any salesy ick. Remember, users quickly identify and reject it promotional content (like spamming subreddits with links to your website), but welcome valuable insights.

Don’t Ditch Traditional SEO (Please!)

Different Gen AI tools pull data from different search engines. For instance, ChatGPT banks on Bing search results, while Gemini and Perplexity use Google search data. So, don’t think that traditional SEO is dead or about to fade out soon, ever.

Still don’t believe me?

A 2025 study analyzed 10,000 high-search-volume, purchase-intent queries and found a strong correlation (~0.65) between organic rankings and LLM brand mentions. This correlation strengthened when filtering out forums, aggregators, and social media, focusing on solution-focused content.

Moral of the story? GEO builds on the core SEO principles.

Innovate, Adapt, and Lead The Traffic War

While the playbook to sneak into AI-generated responses is still being written, one thing is crystal clear: you need to plug into LLMs to make your brand visible.

Context is the real gold; it’s time to mine it.

When you create conversational, structured, and authoritative content and combine these efforts with solid technical optimizations, you’ll see your content popping up in both traditional search engine results and LLM-generated responses.

Mastering this shift isn’t just an upgrade—it’s the key to staying ahead in the race for relevance. 

(A short prologue)

Do you know how people (including you, of course) buy products from a store or why they simply window-shop and move past?

I mean the psychology: What goes on in people’s minds when they see an electronic item, for instance? How do they decide whether to buy it or explore further?

Let’s break down what they call the “buyer psychology.”

What Is The Buyer Psychology?

First: You (the buyer) visit a multi-brand electronic store to purchase a smartphone. You glance through multiple smartphone models and stop at one. A salesperson attends to you who provides the general deets of the electronic product.

Second: If that raises your eyebrows, you both hash over other smartphone brands and models (just for an idea). You then determine which among them meets most (if not all) of your expectations—RAM/ROM, battery, camera quality, and most importantly, value for money.

Third: After minutes of exploration, phone by phone, you realize that some other smartphone brand ticks more checkboxes, especially the last one, than the one you first stumbled upon. You inquire about that smartphone to the salesperson and weigh the pros and cons.

Fourth: You’re done with your brief investigation. The salesperson gave you a “double thumbs up” for your choice. You’re now super-sure that you’ll go with the smartphone—and you purchase it. Congratulations!

(It’s showtime now!)

The big question is: how should your brand—whether you’re flying solo or running a company—use this analogy to boost your sales or, at least, multiply your growth in the digital ecosystem? Especially in times when people demand authenticity and connection with brands?

You’re in luck! I’ve reframed it into 4 key, distinct stages of the customer buying journey. Let’s dive in.

Inform

This is the initial stage where your content acts as an educator or a resource. You address the audience’s pain points, answer their questions, or introduce them to a solution (s) they might not even know they need. In other words, the “what,” “who,” “where,” and “how” at a foundational level.

How to do it?

Publish blog posts, articles, whitepapers, how-to guides, and explainer videos that cover common customer questions, define industry terms, or present factual data. Simply put, surface-level information.

For instance, if you’re a SaaS company, you can publish an “Ultimate Guide to Cloud Security Best Practices.” Or if you’re a financial institution, create an article on “Understanding Different Types of Investments for Beginners.”

With these content pieces, you become a reliable information source in your audience’s minds. You aren’t selling yet, but laying the groundwork.

Infer

Once you inform your audience, you act as a guide, proactively helping them infer. This means presenting information supported by relevant and accurate statistics, proofs, and real-time scenarios.

That way, your audience can draw their own conclusions based on their pain points or needs or somehow understand that solutions (like yours) would be an antidote to their specific problem.

Other words, it addresses the “why” and “so what” beyond the surface facts.

How to do it?

• Case studies that showcase how a solution similar to yours has solved a specific customer problem.
• Industry trends report that present complex data in easily digestible formats (think infographics and charts) to highlight evolving trends.
• Comparison articles that let readers weigh the pros and cons of different solutions and decide the most suitable one for them.

For instance,

• A digital marketing agency publishing a case study showing “How Our Client Increased Leads by 300% Using Automated Funnels.” (readers understanding the power of automation and how the agency’s offering works for similar situations).
• A cybersecurity firm presenting statistics on the rising costs of data breaches, highlighting the urgent need for organizations to turn to robust security solutions.
• A fitness brand laying out pros and cons of different types of gym workouts, letting readers decide which suits them better (and aligns with the brand’s offering)

Think of it this way: A lawyer presenting pieces of evidence to support his/her claims that, once put together by the judge (the audience), showcase a crystal-clear picture.

Interest

In this penultimate phase, you spark the person’s interest in your specific offerings such that they don’t feel like browsing someplace else. Here, you focus on making your products/services undeniably irresistible by highlighting what makes you stand a yard apart from your market rivals through gripping messaging.

How to do it?

• High-quality product pages, featuring stunning visuals, to-the-point benefits and functionalities, and captivating copywriting.
• Testimonials and success stories to showcase how your solution has genuinely helped existing or previous clients.
• Behind-the-scenes (BTS) content (videos or carousels) to demo the hard work and good intentions behind your brand.
• Storytelling videos to walk people through your brand’s vision, mission, or origin.
• Interactive demos, like AR virtual try-ons, to let users try on the product before making the final decision. You can embed such tools into your website, social media handle, and mobile app.
• Comparison pages that convince people of why your product beats your competitors’. Boast features or offers you believe are “error 404” in your competitors.
• Listicles like “10 Best XYZ Platforms.” Here, you talk about the pros and cons of 9 other companies and describe your brand’s offerings. Ideally, you should start or end listicles with your brand. I prefer the latter. Because your brand pops up in the end, right when readers get stuck at the crossroads deciding which platform suits them better. Then, you lay bare your product’s unique value propositions (UVP) and how they best serve your audience versus others. Don’t exaggerate, just say the truth with subtle sugarcoating.

For instance, an interior designer uploads an Instagram reel where he/she visits a client’s site to explain different types of materials used to make the home’s interior aesthetically and functionally sound.

Such informative content gets you bookmarked in the viewers’ brains. So, if one of your prospects is in dire need of a solution, they’ll simply turn to you.

Interact

Finally, you drive your now interested audience to interact. This is the stage where you stave off any friction and offer prospects clear pathways to purchase your offering—a conversion point or a sales opportunity.

How to do it?

• Persuasive and wisely placed CTAs (calls to action) throughout your content and across your website, including the home page, the products/services pages, and the “contact us” page. Examples include “Get a Quote,” “Sign Up for Free Trial,” “Download E-book,” and “Buy Now.”
• Customer support and live chat to clear any prospect’s query that might pop into their minds while making the purchase.
• Reminder email sequences or retargeting ads to follow up with leads as a gentle nudge.
• Minimal steps to complete a purchase.
• Social media posts with direct links to product pages or special offers.

For instance, a SaaS provider placing a “Start Your Free Trial” option at the bottom of its website’s service pages. Or a freelancer having a prominent “Request a Custom Quote” button on his/her website’s home page and contact us. You are offering customers a direct, actionable step to get done with the purchase.

Make Your Content Count

So, there you have it: the 4Is in action! By carefully weaving Inform, Infer, Interest, and Interact into every piece of digital content, you can do more than just publish—you can truly connect, persuade, and convert. It’s about building a genuine journey for your audience, guiding them step-by-step from curious visitor to loyal customer.

Put your 4Is (eyes or perceptions) to work and watch your brand thrive!

The laws of influence have shifted from “what you know” to “who knows you.”

Our social media feed is filled with noise—ads, pop-ups, sponsored posts, and DMs from people who we don’t from Adam want to “have a brief discussion.”

It keeps happening. And people have gotten frustrated spitting out with words like “oh no! not again…,” and “ugh,” from their mouths complemented with the precious 4-letter word (IYKYK).

Some experts in writing and marketing blame data or content overload.

I tend to disagree.

After working with multiple companies over my 6-year-long journey as a freelance content writer, I’ve come to see it differently.

It’s not only the content overload—it’s the lack of trust.

When every post or message feels like a salesy ick, people gradually cut you off, whether you’re a newly launched brand or leaders who once earned respect.

Trust is No Longer Institutional, It’s Personal

People don’t want another brand spluttering some soulless string of words at them. They want a real brand face who shows up consistently, has clarity in their minds, and shares valuable insights.

Let me put it this way. People used to trust big names more easily, think established companies, governments, or traditional media. They’d just assume they were trustworthy because of who they were.

But now, that’s changed. People will more likely follow individuals who share information backed by concrete pieces of evidence instead of hearsay. Or those who mean what they say instead of faking it out (they sense it easily). These are the individuals with whom people feel a connection.

A study has revealed that 75% of people trust their employers more than the media, government, or nonprofits. In other words, strong relationships and mutual values carry more weight than just a fancy name or a legacy institution.

That’s Your Opportunity To Grab

If you want to stamp your authority, you have to earn trust. No worries, here are 3 ways to grab that opportunity.

Uplift Your “Storefront”

If your LI profile, for instance, still boasts outdated bios, intros, and other details or is unorganized, you’ve got work to do.

Your digital presence is your first impression—your storefront. When prospects vet your profile, they don’t mean your CV/resume. They’re picking the bones out of your profile.

So, for starters, refine your LI profile. Think like a leader, not a job seeker.

Build a website that echoes who you are, what you do for your clients, and what industries/niches you specialize in.

Still, the question hangs like a sword: Why should people trust you?

Craft thought leadership content. Publish articles, conduct interviews and podcasts, through which you can showcase your ideas and thought process. Even better, convert that content into byte-sized, digestible LI posts, Instagram carousels, and Twitter threads.

Earn A Good Name

Credibility precedes opportunity.

The Internet is laced with “In my opinion.” What cuts through such noise is solid proof.

Your credibility is defined by how you cement it: client testimonials, bylines, media features, and perhaps a book. They are strong trust signals. They tell readers: “This person isn’t sh**ting around. He/she means serious business.”

Start small. Publish content in your preferred niches/industries. Read more about what’s going on in these fields. For instance, this LI post where the author, Asif Ali, dives into freelancing and its hidden economics.

If someone within your circle works in that industry, interact with them. That’s a huge plus. They walk you through the ground reality and offer you raw insights about a particular concept or trend or technology.

Last (but not least), share a client win. In your manner. You can follow the case study format, but keep it conversational and humorous.

Interact Like A Human

I know it’s pretty well-documented, but I’ll still underline it.

It’s not just about what you say—it’s also about how you engage with readers through your content.

You might have a well-functioning website, a sharply polished LI profile. Great! But if you write snooze-worthy content that looks robotic or a corporate filler, people will scoff at your content and scroll down.

No need to spill out your private life, but you do need to sound as if a human is talking to another human. Tell about your career path in multiple stories. Share your ups and downs, tips and tricks. Don’t overshare, but keep it concise yet insightful.

Speak plainly.

I once shared about how I have been dealing with writer’s block (whenever I face it), without getting bothered if people will understand. While it didn’t get much engagement (My workload doesn’t leave me with energy to post on LI), it got support with a few likes.

You can build more trust with vulnerability than any slick presentation.

Do you know that the global market of virtual try-on solutions—powered by augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI)—is poised to snowball 4X from 2024 through the end of this decade?

These leading-edge technologies have brought a new dimension to e-Commerce by helping brands offer customers hyper-engaging and -personalized shopping experiences. Early adopters have already added them to their online shopping toolkit for long-term customer stickiness.

Realizing the trend shift, one Bengaluru-based, forward-thinking B2B tech company pounced on the opportunity. It started building virtual try-on platforms primarily for jewelry brands (like Tanishq, Kalyan Jewelers, and Forevermark) that are compatible across websites, socials, and physical stores. The tech provider then expanded its portfolio across the beauty, skincare, and fashion industries.

So, What Was the Problem?

While the end client was winning its customers’ hearts with incredible virtual try-on tools, it wasn’t able to spread the word about the technology to its B2B audience online. Given their complex suite of AR-enabled products, their key challenge was to convey the importance, benefits, and potential trends of these innovations to B2B companies—many of whom were unaware of AR’s strategic potential.

So, the end client needed website content that helped accomplish this seemingly tough mission in a clear, compelling way. And by doing so, they wanted to stamp their authority in the “AR+AI” retail space.

On top of that, they wanted their landing pages to highlight their offerings’ unique selling propositions (USP). Simply put, the entire idea was that when a B2B customer lands on one of the web pages, they’d instantly get what the client offers, how it works, and what perks it brings to their own customers.

What Did I Have to Do?

As a freelance content writer working with the Indian arm of a globally recognized digital marketing agency, I (gladly) took up the project—complete content creation for the end client.

The agency’s content team sent me the briefs, SEO requirements, and editorial guidelines. My job was to break down the hard-to-understand concepts into compelling, on-brand content while ticking those checkboxes.

Crystal-clear and smooth! (Yet head-scratching, LOL)

How Did I Do It?

For every piece, I dug deep into the end client’s offerings, majorly AR virtual tryons, their target B2B verticals (jewelry, fashion, eyewear, and beauty), and what made them stand out.

Simultaneously, I scoured through n-number of websites to know more about AR-enabled virtual tryons, had to click “next” on search result pages multiple times. For more up-to-date info, I set the settings of the search results to “past year.”

Plus, I took cues from these websites to figure out how to craft intros, outros, and the remaining body part as catchy and engaging as possible. That included sentence formations, vocabulary, and a continuous flow between paragraphs.

Besides, I extracted relevant statistics from those websites to support any statement, and verified that their primary sources are max a year old.

Lastly, I gave a test-drive to Gen AI tools for research just to see whether they were worth the fame they amassed (Back in 2022). Unfortunately, the bubble burst! I face-palmed and decided to better bank on Google.

This was my general approach while writing the various types of content: short-form (up to 1000 words), long-form (more than 1000 words), and landing page refreshes.

• Short-form articles had to be concise yet informative, enough to intrigue and inform the end client’s target audience on current trends in retail AR tech.
• Long-form articles had to be in-depth thought leadership pieces that turned complex AR/AI-related concepts and trends into digestible, value-driven narratives for their B2B customers.
• Certain landing pages (LP) contained more catchy headlines, strengthened value propositions, and clear and persuasive CTAs to make their AR-enabled solutions truly irresistible. I tailored every LP content according to the industry, like jewelry, fashion, and beauty.

Although I wasn’t involved in content strategy directly, I ensured all content pieces echoed the end client’s positioning and the digital marketing agency’s high editorial standards. For that, I chit-chatted with my point of contact at the agency whenever I felt stuck.

What Content Did I Deliver?

These were the deliverables by the end of the project:

• 7 short-form articles (500-1000 words)
• 30 articles were 1000-1500
• 41 long-form articles (1000 and above words), of which
  • 10 articles were 1500-2000 words
  • 1 article was 2000-2500 words
• 5 landing page content refreshes

What Were The Results?

While I couldn’t access the backend performance metrics (as I am a third-party consultant), the qualitative outcomes were clear and positive:

My content got “thumbs up” from the agency’s and the end client’s respective in-house teams with minimal to zero revisions. (Phew!)

• Insightfulness: Checked ✅
• Readability: Checked✅
• Clarity: Checked✅
• Adherence to guidelines: Checked✅

Although there were slight delays sometimes—writer’s block (IYKYK)—I submitted almost every deliverable well on time.

The end client’s publishing workflow got smoothened out, as my content was often ready to go live right after submission and proofreading. This meant they could reach their B2B audience with context-driven, insight-laced content faster.

(Note: I handled this project work under the umbrella of the digital marketing agency, with the end client being theirs. While I don’t have direct permission to name them publicly, I retain all original drafts and project records (written by me) as proof of authorship.)

The GEO vs. SEO battle isn’t just another marketing rumor—it’s an underlying shift already affecting your web traffic, whether you realize it or not.

Imagine this: you own a bookstore, and you want it to be super easy to find on a busy street. So, you put up a big, clear sign, make sure your window display is attractive, and even list your store in the local directory. Your goal is to get people to turn to your store when they’re looking for a book.

This is search engine optimization (SEO).

Now, you (as a bookseller) must combine your excellent knowledge of books with your charm and wit. So, once a customer steps in, you have a natural and meaningful conversation with them and amaze them with your to-the-point replies instead of beating around the bush. You then recommend the perfect book based on the customer’s preferred genre, past reads, and even their current mood.

This is generative engine optimization (GEO) or large language model optimization (LLMO).

So, SEO gets people to your door, and GEO helps them find exactly what they need and have a memorable experience once they’re inside.

This analogy might puzzle you right now, but stay with me. By the time you’re done reading this article, all confusion will disappear. Let’s hop on!

GEO Vs. SEO: Key Differences

Search Results

For starters, traditional search engines offer users multiple search result options in the form of clickable blue-color links. It’s up to the users to browse the ones that (they believe) might answer their search query most accurately.

Gen AI tools scour through multiple result options, including articles, images, videos, audio, and social media posts. Instead of the dozens of blue links traditional search engines display, AI-enabled search platforms provide one multimodal result that summarizes all the information users need.

Primary Goal

SEO pushes your website’s to the top of traditional search engines like Google and Bing, improving its visibility and clickability/click-through rates. The idea is to remain in search algos’ good books by ticking off their content and technical checkboxes.

GEO helps you optimize digital content for AI-enabled generative engines like Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and  Google AI Overviews. The goal is to ensure that the AI-generated responses include, cite, or synthesize your content, even if people never browse the original website.

Indexing & Ranking Methods

Indexing and ranking factors of both GEO and SEO somehow overlap with each other.

In the case of SEO, you need to:

• Add as many keywords as possible (organically, of course)
• Include internal and external backlinks
• Add suitable meta tags, headers, and sub-headers
• Build relevant and helpful content (articles, social media posts, or landing pages)
• Improve user experience with smooth site loading speeds and mobile friendliness

While you should include the above SEO steps in your GEO rulebook, there are a few unique ones that’ll further boost the chances of your digital content showing up on Gen AI search responses include:

• Creating high-quality, well-structured content
• Being to the point instead of adding unnecessary fluff
• Including structured data like schema markups
• Referencing your facts, claims, and statistics to authentic sources (those with high domain authority)

Type of Content

While keywords, backlinks, and technical elements are crucial, traditional search engines’ algorithms favor informative, well-written, and user-friendly content that truly answers search intent.

This optimized content flashes as a natural response in SERPs to queries containing the keywords. For instance, when someone wants answers to “how does generative ai work,” top SEO-friendly results will have keywords like “what is generative ai.”

Gen AI search tools are built to produce human-like, conversational responses. These large language models rely on users’ prompts to decide the type of content to display. As such, you must nail user intent and context with content that’s conversational, easy-to-understand, and answer-focused to improve GEO.

For instance, let’s say someone is searching for “How to improve content for Gen AI tools?” on Gemini. It’ll search through the data it has access to and analyze how often specific words occur in relevant parts of its dataset. Then, based on this frequency, it predicts the answer most likely to satisfy the search intent.

The following SEO vs. GEO image summarizes their key differences.

GEO Vs. SEO: What Does This Mean for You?

Genuinely speaking, it’s not really a case of picking one over the other. Instead, you must combine the best of both worlds to achieve the same goal: getting your content to the right people. Because now you’re not just optimizing your website content for Google rankings—you’re competing to sneak into AI-generated responses too.

While successful SEO plans remain essential for traditional search engines, GEO is a must-have if you want to stand out in the era of AI-driven search. So, better understand the nuances between these two digital strategies to craft content that’s not only seen but also becomes a go-to information source.