You’ve doubtless seen the trend towards using ChatGPT and other AI tools for search; and the knock-on effect from this – search traffic to websites from organic search engines like Google is down across the board. Digital publishers and marketers are now looking at ‘Generative Engine Optimisation’ (GEO) as an alternative to SEO. But it’s not something you should rush into – there are serious pros and cons to consider.
Arguments for:
- Users are adopting AI search and there’s a risk that if our content doesn’t appear there, we lose ground
- AI citations and links can help to drive relevant traffic
- And there’s the future proofing part – some tools may move to entirely AI-based search whether we like it or not
Arguments against:
- Hallucinations (a kind word for glaring errors) – these are a huge issue with LLMs, and not one that’s going to go away. AI search could get something dangerously wrong attributed to you, and this is particularly risky with sensitive topics.
- The intellectual property concern – you may want some content kept away from AI scraping completely, particularly if you have content about or provided by service users or volunteers
- Becoming over-reliant on AI – there’s very good evidence that AI is in a huge hype cycle at the moment, and we could see a situation in the next year or so where previously free AI tools are withdrawn because they’re costing their providers too much money
I’ll do another post soon going into the AI bubble in more detail, but for now, some good sources for rigorous skepticism on the claims made by AI companies are:
In the short term, my advice to charities figuring out GEO is to start by defining your policy. Decide if you want all, some or none of your content to be scraped by AI. Once you’ve made a decision on what you’re doing, these resources will help you to develop your GEO strategy: