From SEO to GEO: How AI is Redefining Search

That shift is what has taken us from traditional SEO to GEO, or Generative Experience Optimization. The idea has been around for a little while, but now it is starting to reshape how we think about visibility in higher education. So let’s break down how SEO and GEO differ and what this shift really means for colleges and universities.

This is the first post in a three-part series exploring how AI is transforming the search landscape and what it means for higher ed marketers.

The SEO Playbook

For a long time, the way higher ed marketing teams approached visibility was pretty simple. Search was about keywords, backlinks, and making sure your content was optimized for Google. The playbook was clear: write relevant content, tag it correctly, structure your pages well, and you would show up where you needed to.

I remember when I was leading digital strategy in-house and we were laser focused on ranking for a handful of high-value keywords. We built blog content around those terms, optimized every headline and meta description, and celebrated when we started earning featured snippets. It felt like we had cracked the code. There was a playbook, I followed it, and it worked. And in many ways, Google was incentivizing that behavior. It rewarded teams who played by those rules, who published the right content, used the right tags, and optimized the right pages. The better you followed the playbook, the more visible you became.

The goal was straightforward too. Get clicks. Bring people from the search results page to your site, where they could take the next step. Everything revolved around those click throughs. And to be fair, it worked. We had clean feedback loops that made sense. Impressions led to clicks, clicks led to conversions, and it all felt measurable. SEO became the backbone of digital strategy. It shaped how we planned content, how we designed websites, and how we reported success.

But over time, something shifted. We started to equate success with volume. More visitors. More clicks. More traffic. And somewhere along the way, we lost a bit of focus on whether the right people were finding what they needed or if our content was actually answering their questions.

Before we start talking about how AI is shaking everything up, I want to make one thing really clear: don’t toss out the basics. Titles, meta descriptions, internal links, and crawlability are still the building blocks. AI isn’t replacing that foundation; it’s building on top of it. Even as the landscape evolves, those fundamentals still play a huge role in helping both search engines and AI systems understand and surface your content.

From Keywords to Conversations. Enter GEO

We’re in the middle of a massive shift. Search is no longer just about showing up in a list of blue links. It’s about how your brand is represented when someone asks a question.

GEO is what happens when SEO evolves for the AI era. Instead of optimizing for ranking, we’re optimizing for representation or visibility. The question isn’t just whether users can find us anymore. It’s whether AI systems can understand us well enough to explain who we are and what we do accurately.

For colleges and universities, this marks a real turning point. Visibility isn’t only about being the first organic result. It’s about making sure AI-driven tools like Google’s Ai Overviews and OpenAI’s new search features can surface your programs, your differentiators, and your institutional expertise when prospective students start asking questions like, “What’s the best program for me?”

This is where content, structure, and clarity start working twice as hard. They need to speak to humans and machines at the same time, making sure both can interpret what your institution stands for and why it matters.

The Human Layer: Why Clarity and Expertise Still Win

Even as AI changes how students find information, it still relies on something very human: trust. AI tools can surface information, but they draw from sources they understand to be credible and clear. That means your institutional voice and expertise are more important than ever.

Your content has to do two things at once. It needs to reflect your authentic perspective, highlighting your programs, your people, and your differentiators. It also needs to be organized in a way that AI can easily interpret. Clarity is not only good for users, it is what helps AI understand what your institution stands for.

Consistency matters just as much. When your website presents structured, reliable, and regularly updated information, it signals to AI systems that your institution is the authority on that content. The more cohesive and connected your information is across pages and topics, the more confidently AI can reference it and surface it in search experiences.

The content that performs best in this new landscape is still grounded in strong storytelling, subject matter expertise, and a genuine sense of purpose.

Looking Ahead

The fundamentals of SEO still matter, but now they sit within a bigger ecosystem shaped by AI. We are no longer optimizing just for visibility; we are optimizing for understanding. That means our strategies need to serve both people and machines, balancing clarity, authenticity, and expertise.

In the next post, we will look at how this shift is changing the way we measure success. When clicks are no longer the only signal that matters, how do we define visibility, engagement, and impact in an AI-driven world?