GEO: we’ve been doing it for years. We just didn’t call it that.

Everyone talks about GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — as if it’s the big revolution of 2025. The novelty that makes everything we knew about SEO obsolete. I get the excitement. But for those of us who optimized content for major brands in tobacco and pharma before ChatGPT even existed, let me say this: the underlying logic isn’t new. It has evolved.

What GEO is, for those who don’t want to get lost in technicalities

GEO is the set of practices that optimize content not for ranking in traditional search engines, but to be cited, extracted, and returned by generative AI models — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini.

In simple terms: it’s no longer enough to appear on the first page of Google. You need to be the source that the AI chooses to cite when a user asks a question.

The gatekeeping has split: there’s still the traditional search algorithm, but now there’s also the language model that decides what it knows, what it cites, and what it ignores. And the criteria aren’t the same.

The blogs that anticipated everything

Looking back, we’ve worked across many industries — tobacco, design, automotive, healthcare — and one of the central tools was the blog: informative, well-structured content optimized for SEO, designed to intercept questions the audience was beginning to ask: electric cars, innovative design, new products in the pharmaceutical sector.

What were we really doing? We were building semantic authority. We were creating content that answered specific questions, with clear language, logical structure, and trustworthy sources. We were positioning a brand in a new informational territory — like risk reduction in nicotine consumption — at a time when there was no established framework yet. That is exactly the logic behind GEO. Applied to SEO, years before generative models entered the consumer market.

What AI has changed in research processes

Today, a user doesn’t necessarily open Google or click on ten results. They ask a question to ChatGPT or use Google AI Overviews and get a summarized answer. If your brand or expertise isn’t among the content the AI has indexed as trustworthy, you don’t exist in that answer.

The problem for many companies is that they’re still optimizing for a constantly evolving user behavior. They publish content for ranking. But ranking is no longer the only measure. GEO requires content that is: structured for easy extraction, authoritative in its source, specific in its answers, and consistent over time.

It’s not a revolution. It’s evolution. But it requires knowing how to create content that answers a real question, not just a keyword

The difference between those who study GEO and those who have practiced it

There’s a generation of communication professionals who learned SEO in the field — on real briefs, with demanding clients, in regulated industries where every word had to be justifiable. That generation has a head start today.

Because GEO is not just technical. It’s understanding how trust in information works. How to build authority. How to answer a question in a way that will be remembered — both by a human and by a language model.

At MiRò, we work with methodological awareness. Not as a trend to chase, but as the natural evolution of an approach we’ve always had: content as substance, not noise.