Three GEO playbooks: How to prepare your content for generative search

Search is changing — again. But this time, it's not just about ranking well on Google or optimizing for the right keywords. It's about becoming a source in answers generated by large language models (LLMs). In the third installment of our GEO video series, Senior Solutions Strategist Allan White and Senior SEO Lead Joshua Lohr present three playbooks for adapting your strategy in the AI-first era.

Video: Watch AI Search Series Episode 3

Content strategy in the GEO era

Generative engines represent a profound shift in how users find and consume information, and they require a fresh approach to content strategy and SEO.

This is where generative engine optimization (GEO) comes in. GEO is not a replacement for SEO; it’s an evolution. As Josh puts it: “While GEO is rapidly evolving, thankfully, the fundamentals of good SEO still apply.” 

The playbooks discussed here will cover three pillars: content, technical and brand. The broader context is covered in the first two installments in our GEO series: Understanding GEO and Optimizing for various LLMs.

How search entities shape AI search results

The first step is understanding what large language models (LLMs) are actually doing. Rather than simply crawling pages for keywords, these models construct knowledge graphs built around search entities — well-defined and distinguishable concepts like people, organizations, or places.

The LLM relies on structured knowledge graphs to deliver contextually accurate responses. These graphs are built around entities and their relationships."[Entitles are] a well-defined and distinguishable concept,” Josh says. “It could be a person like me, an organization like Contentful, or a place like Edinburgh."

For marketers, this means content must clearly communicate what an entity is, what it relates to, and why it matters.

"Entities are central to LLMs and thus visibility," Josh explains. “If your content is entity-optimized and the LLMs see you as a trusted source, then your content is more likely to appear in AI responses.”

This foundational work — defining and interlinking content around entities — is essential to making your brand legible to AI.

The GEO Content Playbook

While the search landscape was fully disrupted with the introduction of GenAI, one shining star in this chaos is that good SEO applies to GEO. This includes aligning GEO to the core SEO principals — content, technical, and authority, which we’ve done with our playbook.

The content playbook starts with a core goal: build great content … through structured, accessible, and cross-functional content strategies.

With the GEO content playbook, we need to create content AI can understand and trust, and understand how AI is positioning your brand in their responses.

Here’s how to align your content with this new reality:

• Make content AI-ready by using natural language and simple formatting. This can include structured headings, bulleted lists, and Q&A-style content that makes parsing easier for both AI and users. These are already standard SEO best practices — “If you are [doing this], you've hit two birds with one stone.”

• Demonstrate E-E-A-T in content through firsthand expertise and original data. We can align our content to Google’s E-E-A-T quality rater guidelines, which stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust through incorporating original research, data-backed insights, or expert commentary. “This inclusion will inspire citations and links,” Josh notes. This practice is critical for earning credibility with both human readers and AI systems.

• Establish topical expertise by building interlinked content around core themes. Organize content around your brand’s core themes by creating interlinked pages that reinforce topical authority, either by building content pillars or clusters around these themes. This strategy benefits traditional search rankings while strengthening entity signals in generative engines.

• Identify and fill content gaps by reviewing AI-generated responses regularly. A newer GEO-specific tactic is to track queries important to your brand and review the AI responses frequently to spot gaps in your content. It’s akin to reviewing Google's “People also ask” section in organic search results, but more nuanced — and potentially more fruitful.

• Monitor trending discussions on community platforms to identify new topics. Platforms like Reddit, Discord, Quora, and Stack Overflow are rich sources of emerging questions and unmet needs. Josh advises monitoring these spaces for new topic opportunities, particularly around your core themes and product domains.

The GEO Technical Playbook

GEO also brings new challenges to your technical stack — especially when it comes to discoverability by non-Google crawlers. Many AI bots have different capabilities and requirements, and they don’t always behave like the search engines we’re used to.

“One of the more simple items, but a critical one,” Josh says, is to ensure that “AI bots have access to our website’s content.”

Here's how to build a technical foundation for GEO:

• Ensure AI bots can access content, sitemaps, and robots.txt error-free. Your site might be inadvertently blocking AI bots like ChatGPTBot or PerplexityBot in your robots.txt file. Josh cautions that this is “a fairly common accident.” Verifying access and removing unnecessary barriers is essential.

• Be aware most AI bots can't render JavaScript, so limit usage or render for them. Unlike Googlebot, most AI crawlers don’t render JavaScript. Josh is clear: “If they can't render it, they can't see your content.” Techniques like server-side rendering or prerendering ensure your pages are accessible to all bots, not just human visitors.

• Employ structured data generously to enhance AI’s ability to interpret content. Structured data, or schema markup, enhances AI’s ability to interpret content and improve your chances of appearing in knowledge graphs and entity associations. “This enhances AI's ability to interpret your content. It’s a no-brainer.”

• Equip images and videos with metadata to appear in multimodal search results. AI isn’t yet as sophisticated at interpreting rich media. So, to help it along, use alt text for images and provide transcripts for videos. As Josh notes, “The jury’s still out on how well all the AI bots can actually process video,” but transcripts are an important step to ensure accessibility and visibility.

• Deliver seamless, high-speed experiences by optimizing your site’s performance. Google’s Core Web Vitals remain the benchmark. “We need to deliver seamless and reliable high-speed experiences for both our users and for bots,” Josh explains. Fast, responsive pages support both GEO and SEO goals.

The GEO Authority Playbook

Authority isn’t built on your site alone. LLMs gather information from across the web and build associations between brands, topics, and entities. To boost your visibility, your brand needs to be mentioned in the right places.

“Brand mentions matter more than ever,” Josh says. “And when those mentions are across multiple trusted sources around your core themes, this will strengthen your authority and improve visibility on these topics.”

Here’s how to strengthen your brand’s authority:

• Earn citations naturally through the creation of E-E-A-T-optimized content. High-quality content earns citations naturally — but amplification matters too. Work with your PR and comms teams to extend reach across relevant publications and platforms.

• Ask the LLMs for their sources on core topics to get featured and earn mentions. Want to know where LLMs are getting their information? Ask them. “You can simply ask the LLMs for their sources, and they will tell you,” Josh explains. This transparency lets you target the right outlets with your placement efforts.

• Deliver consistent brand messaging across all channels, both onsite and off. Inconsistent messaging across your website, social media, and third-party profiles can create confusion for AI. Josh emphasizes the importance of a shared messaging and positioning framework (MPF): “This can confuse AI and disrupt their outputs.”

• Enhance brand entity performance by maintaining owned media profiles. Owned media properties like Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Crunchbase help reinforce your brand’s legitimacy. Keep these updated to strengthen your presence in AI’s knowledge graph.

• Track, experiment, and continuously adapt in this uncharted territory. The tools for measuring GEO visibility are still evolving, so Josh advises experimentation. “There’s no perfect tool or method to do this just yet… most importantly, adapt.”

How Contentful gives you an advantage in the GEO era

The Contentful platform is already well aligned with GEO needs. Its structured content model helps create clean, organized data that’s ideal for AI to parse. Combined with fast performance and integrations with key optimization tools, it lays a strong foundation for generative engine visibility.

"Contentful’s foundations are built with content modeling... which creates structured content and lends itself perfectly to structured data. This is really bliss for bots."

With a fast architecture, API-first structure, and rich support for structured content, Contentful is ideally suited for GEO-readiness.

Don’t start over — start adapting

Despite the complexity of GEO, the core message is one of continuity. “Don’t panic,” Josh says. “Most of what you're doing already is going to lend itself very well to generative engine optimization. Only a third of these playbook actions are unique to GEO, with the remaining being actions you should already be doing for SEO. So, the bottom line is, if you're practicing good SEO, then you're two-thirds of the way there for GEO. And that's good news.”

GEO builds on strong SEO fundamentals, only with a new lens. Structured content, cross-functional insight, technical hygiene, and a little experimentation go a long way toward ensuring your content is present where today’s users—and machines—are searching.

Stay tuned for our next episode, where we’ll be looking at how Contentful has helped brands all over the world keep their content current, adapt to changes that GEO requires quickly, and future-proof their investments in content to sustain these new customer journeys. Or catch up on the first two installments in our GEO series: Understanding GEO and Optimizing for various LLMs.

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