From SEO to GEO: How to make your brand visible in AI-powered search — and what you can do about it today
Created: July 18, 2025
Why GEO Matters for Your Business
Your customers are already using AI search. When they ask ChatGPT "What's the best project management tool?" or request Perplexity to "Compare email marketing platforms," they're bypassing Google entirely. If your brand isn't optimized for these AI engines, you're invisible to a rapidly growing audience.
AI-powered search is reshaping how people discover brands, and the question isn't whether this shift will happen — it's whether you'll be ready.
How AI Search Works
Understanding AI search mechanics is crucial for effective optimization. When someone queries an AI system, the process follows five key steps that determine which sources get cited.
1. Query analysis & expansion: The AI system analyzes user intent, cleans the text, and spawns paraphrases to improve recall and understanding.
2. Query fan-out: Queries dispatch in parallel to multiple retrieval modes including keyword, vector, code, SQL, and web search.
3. Source retrieval: The system simultaneously searches internal indexes (private data) and web search (fresh public pages) to gather relevant content.
4. Retrieval, scoring & context assembly: Every backend returns candidate passages while a ranker merges, reranks, and deduplicates results, keeping only the top-performing content for context assembly.
5. Answer synthesis with citations: The LLM reads assembled context, drafts a response, and tags each fact with source markers for transparency.
Your goal is becoming the trusted source the AI cites in its response.
The AI Search Paradigm Shift
This transformation requires understanding three fundamental changes:
From keywords to context: AI models understand meaning and semantic relationships, not just keyword matching. Your content must demonstrate topical authority and comprehensive coverage.
From traffic to authority: Success means establishing your content as a trusted source for AI rather than driving clicks. Being correctly cited in AI responses matters more than search result positioning.
From ranking to references: Your optimization strategy must focus on citation-worthy content that AI systems can extract, understand, and confidently reference.
The Complete GEO Optimization Process
Use getmint.ai to follow the complete path to AI search success:
- Measure your brand visibility, sentiment, and alignment across all AI platforms to understand your current position and identify improvement opportunities.
- Analyse sources consulted by LLMs to understand what content AI systems use to formulate their responses and which websites influence your industry's AI search results.
- Work with most external influential sources to build authority through strategic partnerships, guest content, and community engagement on platforms AI systems trust.
- Identify content/competitive gaps to own your concepts by becoming the definitive source for specific topics and user intents in your industry.
- Deploy cross-format content creation and cross-platform distribution strategy with unique perspective, internal data, high publishing frequency (while keeping human touch), and expert educational approach to become THE best response to user intents.
- Get your own content fit for LLMs through technical optimization, structured data implementation, and content formatting that enables easy AI extraction.
- Increase AI Search traffic, conversion rates and revenue by systematically implementing optimization strategies and measuring results through specialized GEO analytics.
Mint Detailed Framework to Own AI Search
Our comprehensive approach covers everything needed to dominate AI search through three strategic pillars:
- Own Your Concept: Define and embody your core business concepts through unique perspective, internal data, high publishing frequency, and expert educational approach. Become THE best response to user intents from AI models.
- Optimize External Sources: Build authority through listings in directories, engagement in communities and forums, high-authority PR coverage, and strategic social media presence. Focus on review management to ensure positive brand mentions across the web.
- Perfect Owned Sources
- Structure: Ensure content freshness, optimized titles and meta descriptions, snippet extractability, and key info visible upfront.
- Depth/Quality: Use rich formats like tables, tutorials, and FAQs. Create guides and expert content with conversational tone and semantic coverage. Include citations to reliable sources.
- Technical: Implement clean HTML structure, structured data markup, and optimized URL architecture to provide content that's accessible and easy to extract for AI models.
Adapt Your KPIs to AI Search Era
Track success through specialized metrics that matter for AI visibility:
- Visibility: Spontaneous brand mentions and industry share of voice percentage show your presence in AI-generated responses versus main competitors.
- Sentiment: Brand sentiment score (equivalent to generative NPS) ensures AI systems present your brand positively.
- Alignment: Brand elements and positioning compliance score maintains consistent messaging across AI-generated content.
- Sources: Ranking of most influential sources in your market helps prioritize partnership opportunities. Focus on influence on visibility, risk for brand sentiment and alignment.
- Content: Site performance scores based on technical optimization, structure, content quality and depth to optimize use and extraction by AI models.
- Traffic & Conversion: Tracking of traffic from agents (user queries) and bots (knowledge base) with conversion attribution from AI traffic sources.
Mint provides a structured three-phase approach to GEO success:
- INSIGHTS (Live): Real-time monitoring delivers AI visibility and industry share of voice tracking, brand sentiment scoring, competitive monitoring, sources analytics identifying most influential websites, and prompts analytics revealing content gaps across all relevant business focuses.
- OPTIMIZATION (Beta): Strategic planning provides optimization action plans to adjust or create content fit for LLMs, domain authority assessment, page intelligence enhancement, and influential sources action plan execution.
- CONTENT (Soon): AI-assisted content generation based on prompts analytics, competitive gaps analysis, and market monitoring ensures your content strategy stays ahead of AI search trends.
This represents the complete opportunity continuum: Insights → Optimization → Content for systematic GEO success.
The GEO opportunity requires systematic approach and specialized tools. Mint provides the analytics, optimization framework, and content strategy needed to succeed in AI search. Start by understanding your current AI search performance, then systematically optimize your content and external presence. The brands that master GEO early will dominate their industries as AI search becomes the primary discovery method.
Use Mint
The GEO opportunity requires systematic approach and specialized tools. Mint provides the analytics, optimization framework, and content strategy needed to succeed in AI search.
Start by understanding your current AI search performance through our insights platform, then systematically optimize your content and external presence according to proven GEO principles. The brands that master GEO early will dominate their industries as AI search becomes the primary discovery method for informed consumers.
Joan Burkovic
CEO @getmint.ai
FAQ
What is Generative Engine Optimization?
GEO encompasses all actions to take (INSIGHTS, OPTIMIZATION, CONTENT) to be as visible and recommended as possible by LLMs and to generate the most business possible thanks to LLMs.
How does AI search differ from traditional search?
AI search analyzes queries, searches multiple sources simultaneously, evaluates credibility, and synthesizes answers with citations. Success means being cited in responses, not ranking high in result lists.
What does Mint's framework include?
Three pillars: own your concept (become the definitive industry source), optimize external sources (build authority through partnerships), and perfect owned sources (technical and content excellence).
How do I measure GEO success?
Track visibility metrics, sentiment scores, brand alignment, source analytics, content performance, and traffic from AI agents through specialized GEO analytics that differ from traditional SEO metrics.
What can I start doing immediately?
Onboard on getmint.ai, carefully set up visibility prompts, launch analysis, see results, analyze sources consulted by LLMs, and get a better understanding of your current position, competitors position and AI search environment (sources, content gap...). We call this "placing sensors" as early as possible to gather data and understand where to act strategically - mapping your competitive landscape, identifying influential sources, and discovering your brand's current AI visibility.
How does Mint help with implementation?
Mint provides a three-phase approach: insights (monitor current performance), optimization (audit and improve content), and content (AI-assisted generation) with tools progressing from live to beta to coming soon.