The SEO vs GEO Playbook: How to Optimize Event Content for AI

[00:00:00] Sam Brown: For the longest time, SEO was all about, if you rank in the top three, you're essentially guaranteed a click. Google isn't really designed to give clicks anymore. AI is not designed to give clicks and we shouldn't be competing for clicks in an ecosystem that doesn't want to give them out.

[00:00:15] Alyssa Peltier: Great Events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites and connects audiences well, that takes a village. And we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

[00:00:27] Rachel Andrews: I'm Rachel.

[00:00:28] Camille Arnold: I'm Camille.

[00:00:29] Felicia Asiedu: And I'm Felicia.

[00:00:31] Alyssa Peltier: And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

[00:00:40] Camille Arnold: AI isn't just changing how we create content today. It's changing how buyers make decisions, how they discover brands, and most teams are still optimizing for Google rankings and when it comes to their buyers, they're searching for things on platforms like ChatGPT or Claude. Hey everyone, I'm Camille Arnold. Welcome back to Great Events. Today, we are getting into GEO. We're going to unpack what it is, we're going to define it. We're going to tell you why it matters and how it's going to take you beyond just a traditional SEO strategy. So, we're going to get into how marketing and event teams need to rethink visibility in a world where AI is the new front door for your brand.

And I'm so excited that we have someone here today to join me who is the expert. It's not me. I am here to learn like all of you. Sam Brown, thank you so much for joining me today. Welcome. Tell us a little bit about your role and then we can go ahead and dive right into what we're here to talk about, which is what is GEO and why does it matter to marketing and events professionals today?

[00:01:49] Sam Brown: Awesome, thank you, Camille. Happy to be on the podcast. I am a search engine optimization lead here at Cvent. So, naturally within the last year, my job has really transitioned into the GEO realm, because GEO is really an extension of what SEO was. We're talking about search engine optimization into generative engine optimization, and there are different concepts that require different principles and tactics for optimization, but it's really the evolution of search. Google itself has become more agentic, but also these new platforms have emerged within the last three years. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and even Gemini tools within Google search itself.

So, when we talk about the difference between SEO and GEO, we're really talking about how discovery has shifted from 10 blue links in Google to these new front doors, like you mentioned, through search. These can work hand in hand. Users are going to ChatGPT as a first layer of discovery and then going to Google for validation. So, the way that these platforms and the way users engage with these platforms is largely one and the same, but marketers and event planners need to be thinking about how they work together, right? If somebody goes to Google, they may have already qualified and shortlisted brands and products in ChatGPT first. So, considering how your traffic looks now isn't the same as it was three years ago.

[00:03:17] Camille Arnold: And this is really important, especially because with the rise of AI, and I'm sure other factors too, and just when we think about how buying behavior has changed, everyone has been talking about this drop in terms of website traffic, right? So, how do we combat that and kind of counteract some of those headwinds that we're facing? I'm curious if you can share a little bit more around what you've learned so far in terms of how AI tools are shaping early-stage research. You mentioned someone might go into Google and search with a specific term, but maybe they already have that shortlist that they've already kind of gotten somewhere else. So, what are your observations?

[00:03:58] Sam Brown: The thing that these AI tools do so well is they go and they crowdsource this ecosystem of information that exists online and really condense it down to exactly what a user is looking for. And that's why these tools are so popular for early-stage discovery now. Think about the Reddits and the G2s of the world. These are millions of pages of information, user-generated content that a user wants to see when they're evaluating different products of brands. And AI does such a good job of distilling that into a single answer that it makes sense. That would be the first level of discovery that somebody wants to take when they're evaluating products.

And the way this works together is Google is we traditionally in SEO, we relied on that click for so long. If you've ranked highly in Google, you're almost guaranteed that click, but that's not the case anymore. Google's changed their structure to align more with the way ChatGPT and these other platforms serve information. But I'm here to say, don't panic if you're seeing that your clicks are going down. The thing that marketers need to focus on is this change in KPI to mentions, and ChatGPT mentions are becoming the new currency.

If you're being mentioned in ChatGPT, you'll continue to see traffic coming into your site from Google, but it just might be more qualified traffic because you've already gone through that process of getting qualified through an AI output. And now what you're seeing in Google is that second layer of an action that somebody is taking to then go to your website.

[00:05:21] Camille Arnold: So, the shift from we've got to pay for the right keywords or make sure that we are ranking high when people are using certain keywords, the shift is more so we need to make sure we have credibility that is coming through these AI tools. What kinds of content is AI pulling from to generate the answers that we see when we ask a question like how can I improve my event marketing strategy as an example?

[00:05:50] Sam Brown: Yeah, and that's the most frustrating part for SEOs and marketers is this traditionally, in search engine optimization in Google, you could really control how you were showing up in search. If you created a web page that targeted a specific keyword, your own web page would then show up in that Google search result. That's not the case so much in generative engine optimization, GEO. You're being treated with your own content that along with what the entire web ecosystem is saying about you. So, you're controlling a portion of the narrative, but you have to stay attuned with the rest of the web's saying.

And there's some universal heavy hitters that get cited all the time that ChatGPT is leaning on really heavily for its answers. Wikipedia being one, Reddit being one, YouTube being one, keeping a pulse on all these different places, all these domains that marketers know that ChatGPT is leaning on really heavily for its answers. You can start to concoct a new strategy that is more about narrative building than anything, what you're saying on your own website connected to what the rest of the web is saying about you. That's likely how you're going to be showing up in ChatGPT.

So, I would implore marketers and SEOs to start just taking a look at the prompts that you think your user might be searching or your ideal customer might be searching. And just get an understanding of how you're showing up now and pick out those themes and patterns, and then use that in your own content. If you're not showing up for certain prompts, you're not showing up in the way you want to be showing up, start thinking about how that message and message of how you'd want to show up in these outputs can play a role in the content that you're creating on your own website and start thinking less about, I want that click, I want that keyword ranking and start thinking more about I want the sentiment of how I'm being perceived and these answers to shift.

[00:07:32] Camille Arnold: I've been hearing a lot more marketers talk about this return to brand and the importance of brand, whether you need to drive brand credibility or just brand reach and awareness. I'm so fascinated to see how the landscape continues to change as we get deeper into understanding how to balance a traditional SEO strategy or other with this new GEO kind of thinking framework. I'm sure you can speak to this too. There's so much that we're learning, right? Have you seen anything around patterns when it comes to types of content that AI is rewarding? I know you mentioned Wikipedia and Reddit and YouTube.

So, I'm thinking video is going to be even more important, but I am curious if types of content or structure, any tactical tidbits, or things that you think marketers should be thinking about today, when it comes to thinking about those AI prompts that your target audience might be typing into their AI tools. That sounds like a really good way to spot some gaps. If there's a really big difference in what is being said about you or your brand versus what you are saying about your brand or your organization on your own channels and platforms, but taking it a step beyond that. And once you have that baseline, how do you start to rethink your content or even your events?

I also think about event content, and that could be the copy and content on your event registration or landing pages. It could be other things as well. So, I'm just curious what thoughts you have if any or if you're still like, "Hey, I'm learning, but here are the things I would be paying attention to so that the marketers listening in on this can have some nuggets that they can dig into."

[00:09:25] Sam Brown: You mentioned earlier that this is also new. And because it's new, these bots that are crawling web pages from AI are a lot less advanced than the bots that have been crawling web pages from Google for years. So, what a lot of marketers are having to shift to is the way they serve content has to be readable and really easily understandable for these bots. So, a couple examples of that are listicle content, comparative content. These are really easily understandable pieces of content that an AI bot can easily scan through and understand the content of the page.

I saw a great data point from Profound's GEO tracking software that 32% of citations right now are coming from listicle content, because that's the way that content shows up a lot of the times. In these outputs, it's a list one through 10. If you serve content that way, you're just giving something very easily understandable to these less evolved crawlers. And I'm glad you mentioned event pages because this is very key. The devil's really into details with making sure that you're serving information up in the correct way. So, you're going to want to include as many specifics as possible.

Your event name, the start time, the end times, the venue name, the full address, a full description, high quality images, as much detail as you can put on an event page. So, all that information is there and easily understandable. AI is not going to necessarily understand sales copy a lot of the time you have to be very direct in serving the information to it because it is just less evolved. Another thing that we've seen work really well is like FAQ style content, questions and answers, because again, that's typically how users engage with the platform. The user serves up a question, AI gives it an answer.

It's a really easily understandable format and it might feel not supernatural for marketers to kind of switch into that language of very basic kind of copy. But what we're seeing at least with this stage in GEO is that is how these crawlers are understanding page copy the best and then repurposing, right? Getting your event content into these highly crawlable places across the web. We know YouTube is a very highly cited domain. We know that blogs do really well because long-form content is really easy to extract text chunks from.

So, just making sure that you're getting that event content into these places on the web that are known to get crawled and cited very often, YouTube blog, long form, taking even your transcripts from YouTube and repurposing it into blog content can be really helpful as well. So, I would say the first step is do your research and understand where AI pulls from the most, and then really just go into those channels and repurpose, repurpose, repurpose, and just get that narrative, get that information in as many places as you can. On the technical side, structured data and schema is huge right now for GEO.

[00:12:25] Camille Arnold: Can you explain that in layman's terms for someone who might not be super familiar with what you're talking about now?

[00:12:32] Sam Brown: I would say get your SEO team rolling on this if you haven't already. But this is code that tells a crawler exactly what this page is. So, if you have an event landing page, you can put event schema on it. So, when an AI bot then goes and crawls that page, it sees it in HTML and says, "Okay, I know what I'm engaging with right now." You can do the same for an FAQ page, say this is an FAQ page, it's technical. Yes, SEOs, you know what it is, get your team rolling on it. Because as far as technical SEO goes, this is probably item number one to accomplish with your web content.

[00:13:06] Camille Arnold: Okay, I love that. I love when we share actionable tips, especially. Here's how to get started if you haven't already. You heard it here, folks first, Sam says, "Get your SEO team on figuring out this schema." Did I say that right?

[00:13:20] Sam Brown: You absolutely nailed it.

[00:13:22] Camille Arnold: Can you tell this is my area of expertise? No, this is really helpful. Okay, quick follow-up question for you. Video content, you mentioned listicles being really helpful. I imagine for written content, is it the same for video content? Is it different? Any tidbits you have on how to think about structuring or approaching your video content for AI or for GEO specifically?

[00:13:49] Sam Brown: That's a great question because there is a distinction that we've noticed: how-to videos, product tutorials. ChatGPT loves pulling in videos for those kind of prompts. If you're doing a product tutorial, I would highly encourage you to have that on YouTube, how-to as well. We're seeing that those come into play, especially with Perplexity and Claude much more often. So, if you have a step-by-step, here's how you use this product, YouTube's a great platform to put that in. And I'll mention one thing with written content too is data studies. For years, SEOs, we were creating similar content to rank for keywords.

If you have first-party data that you can leverage into thought leadership content, that's a big way to get your name mentioned to own topics. With the crowdsourcing in AI, AI's not going to always go to the web and give out citations or attribute things back to a specific brand, but if you have some great first-party data that you can turn into a blog or any kind of crawlable content, it's a great way to stand out in this new ecosystem, where content is really compiled together and crowdsourced for you to create a quick answer.

So, I would lean into your data as much as you can because we're seeing that as the big separator for ownership over specific topics in AI, and also a great way to get citations. ChatGPT is going into the web fairly often to attribute things back. So, if you have that data that nobody else has, definitely lean into it.

[00:15:13] Camille Arnold: That's smart. That first-party data is huge. Shameless plug for the marketers, if you haven't already thought through how you're using your events to capture as much first-party data as you can, that's a huge miss. You should absolutely start doing that and if not for any of the other reasons that I could rattle off for the exact reason that Sam just spoke to. Using it to build that credibility, get more mentions and citations. I want to talk a little bit more about applying this to events. You just sparked a thought for me, which is the thought leadership.

You can do that through your own people who work for your organization, your own subject matter experts, but also if you had an event where you had really notable speakers who have their own point of view and potentially their own following, you could potentially have them publish thought leadership before or after your event, and that could help on the GEO front too. Just thinking about the relationship between events and content and how all of that can fuel your approach to GEO, right?

[00:16:30] Sam Brown: Absolutely. And it's such a weird and interesting transition because for years in SEO, backlinks was the currency, getting a high authority domain to link back to you, and that essentially was a vote of confidence to your domain to rank higher in Google. But what you're describing now, a co-citation or a brand mention carries so much more weight in GEO and even from a brand building perspective, it makes a lot more sense. So, I would a hundred percent agree. It's a great strategy to employ if you're an event planner and you'll surely see those gains in GEO, because we're finding through industry data on our own data that brand mentions are one of the most pivotal things to show up, to be mentioned by AI.

[00:17:13] Camille Arnold: There are a lot of marketers out there, there are so many areas they're trying to lean into, right? They need to get a master on AI and just working more efficiently. Also, that means getting a mastery of AI also means figuring out their GEO. I'm like, "How do they potentially up-level their content and their event strategy to help fuel all of that?" And so, if you're listening to this and you're like, "Oh my God, one more thing for me to prioritize in 2026, how am I going to do it all?" I would say one way you could work smarter, or maybe just a little bit more strategically, and see a bigger lift is using your events to fuel your content engine.

And then that content engine is what helps to feed GEO and SEO, too. And I guess that's one follow-up question for you, Sam, is like what are your thoughts on balancing traditional SEO with GEO? SEO is not totally off the table. It's not like it's not something that we need to think about or care about, right? What are your thoughts on walking that line, and is there risk over-indexing, and then what could that impact be?

[00:18:21] Sam Brown: It's a very fine line, and I would even go as far as to say the things that I would say aren't necessary for, we can just call it search marketing in general are along going to the wayside with the way that Google is evolving. If anybody who's searched in Google in the last year can see that Google is more agentic now. AI overviews are all over Google search, and that's part of GEO, honestly. So, if you're optimizing for Google, you're optimizing for an agentic landscape right now. So, those strategies really should go hand in hand. Look, there's a lot of strategies that held great weight in SEO, but hold a lot less weight in GEO.

We just mentioned one, backlinks for instance, don't matter so much. You need a presence in Google still. So, having these things as part of your strategy is still really important. But I would say the biggest change that needs to be adopted throughout SEO and GEO is, this has become a much more of a visibility industry. For the longest time, SEO was all about if you rank in the top three, you're essentially guaranteed a click. That's not really the case anymore. If you go to Google, you'll see an AI overview, you'll see a lot of snippets. Google isn't really designed to give clicks anymore.

AI is not designed to give clicks, and we shouldn't be competing for clicks in an ecosystem that doesn't want to give them out. So, ultimately, visibility is what we should be focusing on in both our SEO and our GEO strategies. We should be looking to get visibility in Google through all the different ways that structure has changed over time. You want to be visible as a blue link result, but you also want to be visible as a brand name in the AI overview. If you have a YouTube channel, you want that showing up because YouTube's all over Google. These things will feed your AI strategy, too. If your strategy is based around getting mentions and getting visibility and ranking highly, that's going to help you and GEO also.

So, the two should honestly work hand in hand, and that's why SEO teams are really uniquely equipped to make this transition into GEO because ultimately it's search. This is the way that search is going. It's a very interesting time. And I will say too that if you're still reporting on clicks and wondering if your clicks are coming back, they're likely not. And I would really implore you to start making that transition into visibility in mentions, because these are different ecosystems, Google and ChatGPT, but they're heading the same direction as far as what we should be reporting on, as I guess SEOs and GEOs now search marketers.

[00:20:50] Camille Arnold: This is all so helpful. I just feel like SEO marketers and SEO teams need to get more embedded with the rest of marketing, especially if you are owning events and/or content for your organization. So, if you have not locked arms with your SEO counterparts, please take this as your sign to do so. A couple other things that have come to mind for me in terms of applying this to an event marketing strategy would be you don't always see FAQs on event landing pages. That might be something to experiment with a little bit. And then recaps like any post-event content or recaps that you're getting that can all be helpful here.

And then on demand, whether you're hosting webinars or other virtual events or experiences that are generating video content for you, getting that on your YouTube sounds like low-hanging fruit, just like why not do it? There are tools that exist today that make all of that super easy, and I feel like those are probably table stakes for 2026 and moving beyond. But I'm curious, Sam, as we kind of wrap up here, are there any other things that you feel strongly about that marketing team should either start doing or stop doing or just any kind of final takeaways here, like the North Star metric of success to know if all of this is working and GEO is working for you is visibility and brand mentions. That's the North Star metric?

[00:22:25] Sam Brown: Yeah, I would say that, and I'll give this recommendation too. If you haven't adopted GEO tracking software, which I don't think a lot of companies have yet, a good way to see what might be working for you so far in GEO is I would recommend you go into your Google Search Console if you or your SEO team is using that for your SEO efforts and just filter and see clicks coming from queries that your brand is mentioned in. So, for us, it would mean going into Google search and just putting, I only want to see clicks from queries that have Cvent included in them and just see what that looks like, see if those clicks are trickling up.

And if you can't really put your finger on why that might be happening, there's a good chance it means you're getting mentioned more in AI. And then, because there's not that direct path from AI back to your website, a user was then turning back to Google and finding you that way. It was a big metric we relied on before our reporting became a little more robust. There's been data studies around the SEO industry showing this. And if you're new to this, if you're early to it, just go check that out, see what your brand to traffic looks like.

And also, if you're new to GEO, I would just go into those tools, start prompting as if you were your ideal customer, and just kind of see if the landscape looks similar to what you've seen in SEO before. If you're seeing yourself show up as citations, if you're seeing your brand show up in mentions, how your brand might be showing up in mentions, and just maybe get comfortable prompting around a little bit, and the language that you think your customers might be using. If you were your own ideal customer, how would you find you? And just start prompting that way. That might give you a good starting point of where we are right now in our GEO process, what kind of content is showing up, and getting cited a lot.

You might be able to pull out some patterns and trends of, okay, here's our successful blog content or successful YouTube videos. What should we be doing more of, and how do we show up currently?

[00:24:19] Camille Arnold: I love it. So, let's recap just some of the actionable takeaways that listeners can grab onto and run with. Please just give us what you feel are the top takeaways for people who are looking to win with GEO in 2026.

[00:24:37] Sam Brown: I think we started by talking very granularly about discovery. Discovery used to take place in Google search, and now these other platforms then might be that first layer. Google may be working hand in hand more with ChatGPT. Somebody might be qualifying brands through ChatGPT first and then go into Google. There's this black box of attribution, but we know it's happening based on industry data. So, there needs to be an awareness that, hey, discovery is not just happening in Google anymore. It's happening in ChatGPT. It's happening in Claude.

And then I believe we got into the kind of content that you can be creating right now to benefit your GEO strategy. For marketers, YouTube videos, listicle blogs, comparative content, and data studies to stand out in a really crowded content ecosystem, try to take ownership of the topics that you really feel strongly about that you're the industry leader in. Re-purpose that content across the channels that matter most. Your blogs, YouTube, if you have partnerships off-site, leverage those as well to make sure that your narrative and your message is getting across the web ecosystem and not just through your own content.

And then for event planners, making sure your event pages are detailed, that you're leveraging FAQs, that you're using all of those specific items on your page, the name, the description, the venue address, and then getting your web team and your SEOs involved and making sure you have that schema. I'll say it again: schema structured data on your event pages. So, it's getting easily crawled by AI. And then I believe we closed with what can you be doing right now if we are early to this, go prompt around, check out how your brand is looking, check out what the sentiment is, the narrative, try to pick up those patterns and themes. And then once you recognize those, start using that in your content.

If you're not showing up in the matter that you want to be showing up, take that into your content strategy and put it directly into a copy. Just start trying to ship that narrative and then just go see in your search console data if your brand and traffic is going up, if you still have kind of a black box into what your visibility currently is in AI search, just go see if you're getting more traffic from your branded terms because that's a good indicator that you're being mentioned more and then a user is finding you through Google later on.

[00:26:51] Camille Arnold: Well, I learned so much, and you just jam-packed a whole bunch in. This was really, really helpful for me personally. I think a lot of people listening in will also find so many gems that they can use to be more successful this year. Sam, I think we're going to have to have you back whenever we have any major new findings, trends or tips to share because this is a rapidly changing landscape and it's really helpful to have someone like you come on the show, you have your finger on the pulse of how things are evolving and how marketers and event professionals can keep up and or stay ahead. So, thank you so much for joining me today, Sam.

I appreciate all your knowledge sharing, and this is me officially confirming we're going to have to have you back on. So, prepare for that.

[00:27:45] Sam Brown: It's a rapidly changing industry, who knows what it will be six months from now.

[00:27:49] Camille Arnold: Truly. I wish one of us had a crystal ball. But anyways, in the meantime, we're doing our best to learn together, share those learnings, and just appreciate all that you brought to this conversation today. So, thank you.

[00:28:02] Sam Brown: Absolutely. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

[00:28:05] Camille Arnold: All right, folks, that's it for today. Until next time, take care, hope you tune into the next episode of Great Events.

[00:28:15] Alyssa Peltier: Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

[00:28:25] Rachel Andrews: And you can help fellow event professionals and marketers just like you discover Great Events by leaving us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

[00:28:34] Felicia Asiedu: Stay connected with us on social media for behind-the-scenes content, updates, and some extra doses of inspiration.

[00:28:41] Rachel Andrews: Got a great story or an event to share? We want to hear from you. Find us on LinkedIn, send us a DM or drop us a note at greatevents@cvent.com.

[00:28:52] Felicia Asiedu: Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

[00:29:01] Alyssa Peltier: And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.