How Well-Structured Content Contributes to GEO

The surge in adoption of large language model platforms (LLMs) is changing how people find your site. With more visitors and search engines using LLMs (often referred to as “AI”), it’s important to consider optimization techniques to ensure your organization appears in AI-generated summaries as well as traditional search results.

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the emerging field of best practices for placing your content in generative engine results. The good news: preliminary research shows if you’re following best practices around traditional search engine optimization, accessibility, and user experience, you’re well on your way to good GEO.

In particular, well-structured content is a huge boon for GEO—we’ll explain why that’s the case and walk you through the dos and don’ts of structuring content for generative search. 

How does GEO differ from SEO?

Generative engines produce different results to traditional search engines—which means we’re looking at different metrics for success in terms of engine optimization. Search engines assume visitors are searching for relevant sites, and so generate a ranked list of web pages. Generative engines assume visitors are searching relevant information, and so produce a text summary of paraphrased or copied information synergized from relevant sources, with links to those sources.

The essential aim of SEO and GEO is the same. Broadly, the goal is to have people discover, click on, and engage with your site—but how we achieve those aims differs. The discovery metric tied to SEO is high rankings on relevant pages. With GEO, you’re looking to have your information presented and sourced for relevant queries.

Where search engine visitors typically use very short phrases (on average, five words) to find the resources they’re looking for, AI platforms can use much longer search terms to surface relevant information (leading to a rise in mid-length queries, and queries over 15 words).

Typical search engines also consider an entire page, whereas AI search engines consider multiple “snippets” of text (typically 2-4 words) from multiple pages to generate results. Thus, the goal with GEO relies less on using the same one or two keywords repeatedly, but to establish authority over a topic throughout a text.

Like SEO, GEO is a black box, with experts gleaning information through trial and error. Luckily, early testing and research have discovered a list of best practices that can lead to impressive results. 

How important is GEO, really?

The vast majority of web searches are still carried out via traditional search engines, but the percentage carried out on generative AI platforms is growing fast. According to SparkToro’s State of Search report, AI searches accounted for 1.54% of all desktop events in December 2025—a marked rise from just 1.07% in December 2024. Traditional search still accounts for 10% of all desktop events—so about 10 times that of AI search. However, the lines between AI and traditional search begin to blur when you consider that Google and several other popular search engines have started incorporating AI summaries into their search results by default. So AI hasn’t fully replaced traditional search overnight, but it’s definitely worth being mindful of GEO best practices as its use continues to rise.

Moreover, while GEO clickthroughs might be lower in number, they’re higher in quality. According to Patrick Stox from ahrefs, 0.5% of their traffic in 2025 came from AI—but accounted for 12.1% of their signups. That means site visitors from AI platforms converted at a 23% higher rate than those who found their site via traditional search.

Luckily, in terms of content structure, SEO and GEO best practices are complementary—you don’t have to sacrifice one to optimize for another. 

How information presentation contributes to GEO

A groundbreaking study presented at the 2024 Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining tested a range of GEO and SEO methods against 2 leading AI platforms: Chat-GPT and Perplexity. They found that some traditional SEO methods—such as repeatedly using the same keywords and using diverse vocabulary—had very little impact on GEO. However, they identified seven key methods that dramatically improved a page’s frequency of appearance and prominence in AI search results:

• Authority: Modifying text to be more persuasive and authoritative
• Statistics: Added quantitative facts and figures
• Citing sources: Linking to relevant authoritative sites
• Quotations: Including direct quotations from domain experts
• Ease of understanding: Presenting information that’s clear, logical, and accessible
• Fluency: Demonstrating a high level of fluency in terms of language and information presentation
• Technical terms: Using and explaining jargon relevant to the topic

When it comes to content structure, the most relevant of these metrics are “easy to understand” and “fluency”. The paper states: “Interestingly, stylistic changes such as improving fluency and readability of the source text [...] also resulted in a significant visibility boost of 15-30%. This suggests that Generative Engines value not only content but
also information presentation”. The evidence certainly suggests that well-structured content can profoundly boost your site’s frequency and prominence in AI search results. 

Questions to consider for generative engine optimization

The good news: content that’s good for AI is also good for humans. AI platforms favor content that is “fluent” and “easy to understand”. If you’re already following best practices for structuring content for accessibility or SEO, you’re well on your way to GEO success.

Some questions to consider when trying to optimize your content for GEO:

Are you dividing your content with relevant headings and subheadings? Nobody likes to read a monolithic wall of text—and neither do AI crawlers. Giving each new idea its own paragraph, and dividing each new topic with relevant headings and subheadings is the way to go.

Are your headers clear and descriptive? Creative, unique headers might seem fun, but AI platforms prioritize clarity over diverse vocabulary.

Does your content have a logical flow? Logical flow is a key aspect of fluency. It’s best to stick to: one idea per paragraph, fewer than five ideas/paragraphs per section, and clearly demarcated sections with descriptive headings. If your paragraphs are looking too long and unwieldy, try breaking it up into lists, tables, or bullet points.

Is it clear where hyperlinks point to? For GEO and for accessibility, clearly highlighting your sources is crucial. For example: using  “You can find our content strategy guide here” as your hyperlink text is much more useful than simply “click here”.

Is the most crucial information at the start of each paragraph? For both AI fluency and human readers, the best practice is the “inverted pyramid” method: start each paragraph with the key information, then embellish your point with explanation, examples, and “nice to know” information.

Are your sentences manageable lengths? Manageable sentence and paragraph lengths are a critical part of making content easy to understand. According to a 2009 study from the American Press Institute, readers understand 90% of sentences that are 14 words or fewer. That comprehension plummets to 10% after 43 words. Making sure your sentences are as clear and concise as possible is the way forward.

Are your content sections mutually exclusive? Each section should be totally comprehensive and make sense without reading the content that came before it. Exclusive content blocks are more AI-friendly because AI search doesn’t look at your whole web page—it considers a range of 2-4 word “snippets”. Site visitors typically read 20% of the average web page, so making sure each content block has all the context they need is useful for human visitors, too.

Are you balancing readability and brevity with authority and persuasion? Many claim that chunking your content into dry blocks of data is key to success. However, the 2024 paper by Aggarwal et al. demonstrates that adding words that contribute to authority and persuasiveness boosts GEO—up to the tune of 132.4%. Clear, accessible content doesn’t mean it should be sterile; infusing personality and persuasiveness is also important. 

Takeaways: Follow the evidence, focus on structure

GEO is an emerging field since AI platforms are in a rapid phase of development. As such, there’s been an influx of guidance on how to optimize for AI platforms—and not all of it is based on quantitative research. The evidence-backed recommendations we have gathered suggest content structures that are logical, fluent, and easy to follow can increase your appearance in AI search results by 15-30%.

The best strategy is to follow content management best practices that have been in place for years—but we also know that good content governance is no mean feat. It can be tricky, time-consuming, and often gets bumped down the list by more urgent priorities. But it doesn’t have to be that way—learn more about how we can use LLMs and expert oversight to create content strategies that set you up for success well into the future.