For strategically-minded executives, optimizing for LLM visibility is as critical as traditional SEO. And learning how to report on the success of GEO, and the KPIs associated with success, can help prove out the benefits of your investment.
Lots of our posts are technical. On our Generative Engine Optimization blog, you can find tactical posts on everything from how to create llms.txt files, to how AI bots crawl a site, to how to structure your site for AI, and a lot more.
This post takes a more philosophical approach. Here, we’re looking at LLMs from a marketing executive perspective, and answering the following questions:
- What do executives need to know about AI SEO/GEO/LLM search optimization? How are my customers and prospects interacting with LLMs now? How has the landscape changed?
- Why do I need to optimize my marketing apparatus for generative SEO? (Marketing “apparatus” because GEO efforts go way beyond optimizing a website)
- What does the future look like if I let my competitors win in GEO?
- What are the KPIs of generative engine optimization? How can I tie what we’re doing to revenue?
Table of Contents
What should a CMO know about GEO?
The basics are a good place to start when talking to executives. Here are a few key facts:
AI as a referral source: More and more people are finding out about your company from AI. AI overviews are pushing traditional links farther down on the page. On top of that, users are relying less on Google search and more on typing in their question on ChatGPT, and others. Because of both of these approaches, prospects are learning about you from LLMs more, and learning about you less from traditional search.
AI as a research tool: How users are engaging with LLMs is a lot different from how they use search engines. They’re diving deep. They ask the AI tool to rank companies, explain feature sets, and differentiate against competitors. They expect LLMs to be able to help them select a product or a service and accurately address their pain point, even when that expectation isn’t realistic. And they trust the answer!
Your brand is at stake: AI doesn’t always get it right. Hallucinations (where LLMs fully make up an answer that seems plausible) are a major source of misinformation, along with competitor misrepresentations, and third-party deceits or outdated information. A CMO needs to make sure their “owned” spaces (like a website) are seeding LLMs with the right information, and that they’re getting their brand well-represented on “earned” (like social media) and “paid” (like affiliates or ads) channels as well.
Marketing in the new world of GEO
How does this relate to generative engine optimization? For most executives, these major market shifts are a signal that prioritizing when and how your company shows up on LLMs is going to be a priority. It’s a new channel that rivals organic search, PR, social media, and all the other ways you’ve been communicating your message to the market. And as such, it’s a huge opportunity if you do it right, and a major problem if you’re losing out to the competition.
GEO changes how your brand and content are represented and discovered, and how users engaged with all of it. Top-of-funnel, optimizing for GEO will help you capture more impressions and engagement from users. Bottom-of-funnel, optimizing GEO will help you deliver more marketing qualified leads to sales (through user deep-dive research into your solutions).
Why it matters to beat your competition in GEO
LLMs are ranking your competition, sometimes ahead of you. Maybe ChatGPT is telling users that your competition’s security is stronger than yours. Maybe Perplexity is telling them that you’re not as strong as a competitor when it comes to support. Hard to say, until you audit what’s happening. But if you’re not focused on how your company is showing up on LLMs, you can bet your competition is. And in these early days of AI search optimization, strategic executives had an opportunity to be early adopters and drive revenue by getting a leg up on the competition.
KPIs for GEO
Due to the nature of LLMs, with their constantly evolving answers and tools that aren’t yet as sophisticated as monitoring tools for other channels, measurement isn’t as straightforward as it is for SEO. But there’s still a lot a CMO can do to prove out the effectiveness of this channel and tie GEO to revenue.
- Ranking: It’s a crude measurement, and it doesn’t tie directly to revenue, but a great place to start is to measure (for a variety of questions, keywords, and queries) how your brand ranks on AI overview, and, separately, how it ranks in LLMs. Using a B2C example, if a user types in “what shoes should I buy my 17-year-old who loves basketball?” it makes a big difference whether your Nike LeBron’s show up in front of or behind the competition’s Adidas Anthony Edwards sneakers.
- Presence: How often is your brand showing up on major LLMs compared with your competitors? Presence measures how frequently your brand is cited in response to given prompts. There are several AI search tools that can help you see the volume of AI search for topic areas where you’d like to focus.
- Citations: Similar to “presence,” but here in stead of seeing how often your brand is mentioned, you can see how often your website is cited. Like presence, citations is an important “share of voice” metric. But similar to the above, these are more tactical metrics you want to improve in order to boost your AI SEO performance, and are not directly tied to revenue.
- Traffic: LLMs are novel in part because of their zero-click ability to provide answers to complex inquiries. But users to still sometimes click through to your website, whether they’re using Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT or another LLM, since these (and others) often site their sources and provide links for more information. By tracking these referring links the same way you would for other digital channels, you can measure traffic that comes in from LLMs as a referral source.
- MQLs: Once (as noted above) you’re able to tie traffic to LLMs, you can begin to tie form conversions to the original source. And, in having that, with a little bit of work on the CRM side, you can not just tie your GEO efforts to MQLs, but you can tie it to total contract value or other measures of revenue. Leads generated by LLMs represents only a small fraction of the value of LLMs to your brand and business, but it’s a good way to show just some of the impact GEO can have on your bottom line.
On Marketing is your GEO expert
Expertise in this rising field of GEO is hard to come by. For your AI search optimization you need a consultative partner with focus and leadership in the space, which is why we hope you’ll consider On Marketing. Contact us to get a strategic and customized explanation of how we solve B2B pain points for GEO.