The search is duplicated. Alongside SEO which remains the driving force of business, GEO becomes the complementary channel to capture demand for LLMs. What marketing departments must activate.
45% of French people have already transferred part of their Google queries to an LLM. Search does not replace itself, it duplicates itself. And with it opens a new territory of visibility that marketing departments must integrate into their system, without denying the SEO assets which remain their main engine of growth.
SEO continues to generate the majority of qualified traffic for French brands, and this reality is not going to be reversed tomorrow. Google still processes several billion daily queries in Europe, its organic positions convert, its technical fundamentals remain valid. But next to this base, a parallel channel takes shape.
ChatGPT collects 2.5 billion prompts per day. Contentsquare measures AI traffic growth of 632% in one year on e-commerce sites. Adobe notes 42% additional conversion on this traffic compared to traditional search. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is not the successor to SEO, it is its natural extension onto a new playing field.
A paradigm shift: from position to citation
SEO optimizes for clicks, GEO optimizes for citations
The SEO doctrine is based on a proven equation: one query, one intention, one page, one position. This mechanism remains fully operational on Google, and will continue to be so. GEO adds a complementary dimension.
When a user queries ChatGPT or Perplexity, the model doesn’t return ten blue links, it writes a summary and cites three to five sources. Visibility is no longer measured only in SERP ranks, it is also measured in mentions in the generated response. A new KPI is therefore necessary: the citation rate, which measures the frequency with which your brand appears in the responses of LLMs on your strategic prompts.
1. SEO capital that facilitates the transition
Good news for brands well established in SEO: the two disciplines share a substantial part of their infrastructure. A fast site, a clean website, sourced content, a solid domain authority serve Google as much as an LLM. The accumulated SEO work constitutes capital that facilitates the GEO transition, not an inheritance to be liquidated.
It remains that the KPIs diverge. A brand can monopolize Google positions on a query and be completely absent from the final citation in ChatGPT. It is this delta that must be measured and gradually reduced, without giving up the SEO performance acquired.
2. A fragmenting LLM market
The landscape has transformed in twelve months. ChatGPT went from 86% to 64.5% market share. Gemini has quadrupled its market penetration. Claude equips 70% of the Fortune 100. Perplexity and Grok are gaining strength in specialized uses.
Each engine uses a different index: Bing for ChatGPT, Google for Gemini, Brave for Claude, proprietary index for Perplexity. The fact that Google remains Gemini’s source index is a direct advantage for brands with robust SEO: the acquired knowledge is partially transferred, without additional effort.
Understanding the RAG: the mechanism that selects your content
Real-time reading, not simple memory consultation
Retrieval-Augmented Generation is the mechanic that must be mastered to activate the GEO lever. When faced with a prompt, the LLM not only consults its static memory (pre-training frozen six to eighteen months ago), it triggers a workflow in real time on the web.
This workflow is based on four successive stages, each offering distinct optimization levers.
Step 1: the fan-out query
The user prompt is split into parallel subqueries, up to more than twenty in deep search mode. Strategic consequence: the “one main keyword” logic must be enriched with coverage by a bundle of variants.
Important detail for French brands: some of these sub-queries are written in English by the model, even when the initial question is in French.
Step 2: SERP pre-filtering
Before visiting a page, the model audits titles, URLs and meta-descriptions to save its tokens. The work on tags, already central in SEO, takes on an additional dimension here: they must speak to Internet users as well as LLM fan-outs.
Step 3: extraction by chunks
The LLM does not read an entire page, it extracts self-supporting pieces of it. The information density of the first 300 words becomes decisive. A “to remember” box, an HTML comparative table, an FAQ modeled on People Also Ask are formats that simultaneously serve SEO and GEO.
The emerging golden rule: an HTML summary table placed in the first 200 words of the page is probably the most powerful and least expensive lever for winning citations. Unbeatable info/token ratio, native LLM format, clean semantic extraction.
Step 4: Reciprocal Rank Fusion
The rankings from each subquery are merged into a unified score. A source positioned modestly (rank 5 or 6) on several fan-outs can exceed an isolated #1 page on a single request. Consistency complements raw performance, without replacing it.
For brands, this means aiming for multiple angles of the same topic rather than frontal domination of a single keyword. Broad semantic coverage beats single position.
Off-site authority: an asset shared between SEO and GEO
What others say about you matters as much as what you say
The classic pillars of SEO (EEAT, domain authority, link profile) find a direct extension in GEO. An LLM judges your brand largely on what others say about it. Wikipedia is systematically present in the training corpus of major models. Reddit is massively overweight. Specialized media are systematically sourced.
Three levers to activate in addition to the existing SEO system.
1. Reddit: an under-exploited strategic area
Reddit is becoming a strategic area in its own right. The platform combines four qualities that make it a source prioritized by LLMs: authentic conversations between humans, contrasting points of view, explicit user intention and content in constant renewal.
The mapping of business subreddits, the identification of recurring threads, the expert and non-promotional presence of identified authors constitute a marketing asset which also serves brand awareness, independently of LLMs. The hard and fast rule: Reddit hates promotion. It is real, sourced, regular expertise that transforms into brand mention.
2. Wikipedia and Wikidata: the native knowledge graph for LLMs
Wikipedia and Wikidata structure the knowledge graph that LLMs read natively. Check the accuracy of your file, enrich it with verifiable third-party sources, structure related entities (subsidiaries, managers, products): a modest investment, with a high return, which also consolidates your Google Knowledge Panel.
A point of attention: Wikipedia is demanding on neutrality and sources. No promotion possible, we contribute. Brands that venture into a promotional editorial logic systematically have their modifications revoked, or even banned.
3. Press relations evolve, without giving up the backlink
PR changes its purpose: without giving up the backlink, it now targets, above all, the citation in the media that the LLMs actually crawl. Three principles structure this evolution.
The original data (proprietary study, barometer, methodological survey) takes precedence over the generic forum. The identified author beats the anonymous article: a name, a title, visible qualifications reinforce the EEAT criteria and increase the probability of being cited. Sustainable content (guide, in-depth analysis, definition) beats news, whose lifespan in AI corpora is short.
These formats serve both channels at once. A well-constructed sector study generates SEO backlinks, press coverage and AI citations. ROI is cumulative.
Five Tech Foundations That Unlock GEO Eligibility
Before producing specific content, you must ensure that AI bots can read the site. The majority of audits reveal blind spots: WAF which blocks GPTBot, Cloudflare which rejects ClaudeBot, robots.txt which explicitly does not authorize any crawling of generative engines.
Five actions, executed in one morning of development, generally separate an invisible brand from a citation-eligible brand.
Action 1: open robots.txt to AI crawlers
GPTBot for OpenAI, ClaudeBot for Anthropic, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, Google-Extended for Gemini (separate from Googlebot). Many sites block them by default. You must also check the WAF and CDN side, which frequently filter them without the technical team being aware of it.
Action 2: ensure HTML rendering without JavaScript dependencies
LLMs do not render JavaScript client-side. A simple curl -A “GPTBot” vossite.fr command allows you to check what the bot actually sees. If the content does not appear, you must switch to SSR (Next.js, Nuxt) or prerendering (Astro).
Action 3: deploy consistent JSON-LD Schema.org
A schema by page type: Organization and WebSite on the home page, Product on the files, Article on the blogs, FAQPage on the support pages, LocalBusiness for points of sale. Markup gives LLMs the structure of content without them having to guess.
Action 4: Publish an llms.txt file to the root
A markdown file that lists your key pages in natural language, like an editorial sitemap readable by a human or a model. The standard is already adopted by Anthropic, Cloudflare, Stripe, Mintlify. Almost zero cost, upside to check. It is a GEO “free call”, the impact is not yet proven but the implementation time is so short that we recommend doing it.
Action 5: maintain a TTFB below 500 ms on mobile
AI crawlers give a few seconds maximum before giving up. CDN, server cache, hosting close to the target market, HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 activated: the levers are classic but their impact is multiplied in GEO.
None of these five actions degrade SEO. They all reinforce it. This is precisely what makes this first wave of projects essential, whatever the GEO maturity of the organization.
Strategy: manage two complementary channels
A landscape that continues to move.
In this rapidly changing world, the brand is no longer just a URL. It is also an entity recognized by a knowledge graph, cited by third-party sources and structured to be extracted by heterogeneous engines.
A dual-pilot strategy, not a shift.
The right strategy is not to switch from SEO to GEO, it is to manage them in parallel, with distinct KPIs and a shared technical infrastructure.
SEO remains the main driver of business for most advertisers, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. GEO becomes the complementary channel which captures new demand, more qualified for conversion, and which builds the authority of the brand in the reference corpora of the next generation search.
What will distinguish the prepared brands
Marketing departments that now measure their citation rate alongside their Google positions are equipped with a complete reading of their visibility. Those who structure their semantic footprint on Wikipedia, Reddit and specialized media are building an asset that is difficult to replicate. Those who adapt their editorial formats to RAG mechanics without sacrificing their SEO relevance obtain leverage on both channels.
It is this double management which will distinguish, in eighteen months, the prepared brands from those which have been surprised. GEO is not a disruption that cancels SEO, it is a complementary discipline that extends its value. The challenge for marketing departments is to organize this complementarity before the market does it for them.
