20 Aug 2025

From SEO to GEO: 10 Years of Search Evolution and the Rise of Generative AI in Search

Robert Goldenowl

Introduction: A Decade of Shifts in SEO

Imagine it’s 2015. An SEO specialist is tweaking meta tags and building backlinks, hoping to climb Google’s organic rankings. Mobile-friendly sites are just becoming mandatory, and Google’s RankBrain AI is quietly learning how to interpret search queries. Fast-forward to 2025: People are asking questions to ChatGPT or getting instant answers from Google’s AI-powered SGE (Search Generative Experience). The SEO landscape has transformed profoundly in these ten years. We’ve moved from a world of “10 blue links” to a world of zero-click searches and AI-generated answers. This journey “from SEO to GEO” – from Search Engine Optimization to Generative Engine Optimization – encapsulates the industry’s evolution in the past decade, as well as where it’s headed next.

In this storytelling guide, we’ll explore how SEO changed over the last 10 years and how generative AI is redefining search today. We’ll hear from multiple SEO experts – from veterans like Rand Fishkin and Barry Schwartz to modern voices like Lily Ray and Brian Dean – each offering straight and sometimes skeptical takes on what’s going on. By the end, you’ll understand the key trends that have shaped SEO, and how the GEO era is creating both challenges and opportunities for search marketers.

The Evolution of SEO (2015–2020): From Dark Ages to Renaissance

The mid-2010s marked a turning point often seen as an SEO “Renaissance.” After Google’s early 2010s crackdowns on spam (Panda, Penguin, etc.), the focus shifted from aggressive tricks to quality content, credibility, and user experience. SEOs realized that success meant serving users first, not just algorithms. As SEO strategist Lily Ray put it, “From darkness came enlightenment: content, UX, and credibility took center stage.” In practice, this era saw the rise of:

Mobile-First & Speed: Google’s Mobilegeddon update in 2015 forced sites to be mobile-friendly. Page speed and usability became critical, foreshadowing today’s Core Web Vitals focus.
Intent & Relevance: Search engines got much smarter at understanding searcher intent. Google’s RankBrain (2015) and later BERT (2019) meant results weren’t just about matching keywords, but delivering what the user actually wanted. SEO expert Brian Dean notes that Google evolved from relying “almost 100% on links and on-page SEO” to using sophisticated tools that identify if people are generally happy with the search results, adjusting rankings until searchers are satisfied. In short, Google learned to measure user satisfaction.
E-A-T and Content Quality: Google’s “Medic” core update (2018) underscored the importance of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) for content, especially in sensitive niches. Creating long-form, authoritative content became the norm. Low-quality, thin content was increasingly filtered out.

Despite all these changes, many fundamentals remained steady. “The principles of SEO remain the same: content, links, and on-page SEO,” Brian Dean reminds us. Earning relevant backlinks and optimizing page structure still mattered. What changed was how we execute those principles. Tactics like keyword stuffing or exact-match domains faded away, replaced by intent optimization and semantic SEO. The mantra became: satisfy the user, and the rankings will follow. SEO veteran Barry Schwartz emphasizes that even with AI on the rise, “the fundamentals of SEO haven’t changed — marketers still need quality, original, and helpful content, strong technical foundations, authority and trust, and a focus on user experience.” In other words: no gimmicks – just make your site the best answer for users.

The Rise of Zero-Click Search: Shrinking Organic Opportunities

As the 2020s began, a new challenge emerged: search engines started answering more queries directly on the results page, leading to fewer clicks leaving Google. Featured snippets, Knowledge Graph panels, local packs, and other SERP features were already stealing attention. Then came the data that shook SEOs: by 2019, over half of Google searches ended without a click to any website. By 2024, that number hit 58–60% of searches resulting in zero clicks. Essentially, Google had become an answer engine, not just a referral engine.

Rand Fishkin (co-founder of Moz, now CEO of SparkToro) was one of the first to highlight this “zero-click” phenomenon. His research showed roughly 60% of Google searches end without a click. What does that mean for those of us fighting for organic traffic? Fishkin suggests a perspective shift: “Zero-click organic search is a branding opportunity. If your boss or client is pushing you for traffic, push back with data on how much you can influence an audience on Google’s results (and how much companies pay for those visibility and branding opportunities).” In other words, even if the user doesn’t click through, appearing in that coveted snippet or answer box can build awareness. The SERP is your new billboard.

Still, fewer clicks mean a smaller slice of the pie for everyone. “We’ve just about reached the peak of everything online,” Fishkin observed, noting that total internet usage has plateaued and the fight for attention is now a zero-sum game. With Google keeping users on its pages, SEOs had to adapt. This has led to strategies like:

Optimize for Featured Snippets and “People Also Ask”: Earning position zero (the snippet) became as valuable as ranking #1, since it might be the only thing a user reads. Structured, question-and-answer content helps here.
Treat impressions as wins: Even if you don’t get the click, being visible for high-volume queries has branding value. (Your content might influence the user’s next step or a future need.)
Diversify Traffic Sources: Smart marketers diversified beyond Google – investing in email lists, social media, YouTube, podcasts, etc. This point is echoed by Barry Schwartz, who advises that since “Google is sending less traffic to websites” due to zero-click results and AI answers, businesses must “build your audience and own your data” via direct channels Relying solely on organic Google traffic is riskier than ever.

Lily Ray agrees that in the AI era, it’s no longer just website-first; it’s brand-first and entity-first. Your overall brand presence (across Wikipedia, social media, Google’s own entities) influences whether you get featured in answers. The key insight: brand-building is the new SEO. If search engines increasingly favor known, authoritative entities (and can answer simple queries themselves), you want to be the trusted brand that AI and search alike defer to.

AI Disruption (2020–2023): Content Generation and Google’s Response

By the early 2020s, two parallel revolutions were happening: AI in search and AI in content creation. On one hand, Google was integrating more AI into its algorithms (e.g. the BERT and MUM models making search results more context-aware). On the other hand, content creators gained powerful generative AI tools like GPT-3/4, which could produce blog posts or product descriptions at scale. This opened a new chapter in SEO – and not without controversy.

In late 2022, as GPT-3 powered tools and AI writing assistants proliferated, webmasters started flooding the internet with AI-generated content. The quality ranged from decent to downright spammy. Google’s stance was initially cautious: it warned that “automatically generated content” intended to manipulate rankings could violate guidelines. In 2022 and 2023, Google rolled out the Helpful Content Update and other core updates aimed explicitly at demoting low-value, bot-written content. “The SEO robots arrived. AI content flooded the internet and search got smarter in response,” Lily Ray quipped, noting Google’s pattern of adjusting algorithms to counter new forms of spam. An anonymous SEO joked, “If 2012 was the year Google killed link spam, 2024 might be the year it killed AI-spam.”

SEO experts largely agree that AI content is not a silver bullet. Brian Dean believes Google’s Helpful Content Update “was sort of a dud in terms of overall impact, but it shows that AI content is under attack from Google”, meaning Google is wary of pages that read like machine-generated fluff. AI writing tools can assist with outlines or drafts, but “they’re far from clicking a button and getting a usable article,” Dean says. Quality still requires human editing, originality, and expertise. Barry Schwartz has a simple rule: “It’s not about how the content’s created – does it help the user? Is there value in it? Otherwise, don’t do it.” In short, helpfulness and authenticity are non-negotiable. Google even updated its guidelines to say “E-E-A-T” (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) applies to all content, whether human or AI-produced.

At the same time, AI became increasingly embedded within search products. By 2023, Microsoft’s Bing integrated OpenAI’s GPT-4 to provide conversational answers, and Google announced its SGE for generating AI snapshots of search results. These developments set the stage for a new era of SEO, as we’ll explore next.

Distribution of user actions after a Google search (data by SparkToro). Nearly 58.5% of searches end without any click, reflecting the rise of “zero-click” results

From SEO to GEO: Generative Engine Optimization in 2025

Enter Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) – a term capturing the new challenge for SEOs: optimizing content so that it’s chosen and cited by AI-driven search engines and assistants. In the age of ChatGPT, Google’s AI overviews, Bing Chat, and voice assistants, users aren’t just searching, they’re prompting. They expect engines to generate answers, not just list websites. GEO is about making sure your brand’s information is what those generative AI tools output to users. As one marketing blog succinctly put it: “SEO drives people to your site; GEO makes sure your brand is in the answer.”

So, what exactly is GEO? In principle, it’s an extension of traditional SEO with a twist:

Traditional SEO focuses on improving visibility and ranking in search engines (Google, Bing, etc.), aiming to earn clicks to your website. This means optimizing for 200+ ranking signals (keywords, links, technical SEO) to satisfy the search algorithm.
Generative Engine Optimization focuses on structuring and crafting your content so that AI systems (like language models) can understand, trust, and directly use it in their answers. The “rankings” here are about being selected as a source in a ChatGPT answer or Google’s AI summary. That requires emphasis on clarity, factual accuracy, and authority – so the AI feels safe quoting or citing you.

In practice, GEO means you need to ensure your content is AI-friendly. Some new best practices emerging include:

Provide Clear Answers & Structure: Generative AI loves content it can easily parse. Using FAQ sections, concise definitions, and schema markup (structured data) helps AI models identify relevant pieces to pull. Content should be formatted in a way that’s skimmable and citable (think bullet lists, Q&A formats, and well-organized headings).
Demonstrate Credibility (E-E-A-T): AI systems cross-check information across sources. They look for “authority signals like domain expertise, credentials, fresh information, and unique insights”. Make sure to back up claims with data, cite expert sources, and keep content up-to-date. A generative engine is more likely to trust and cite content that comes from a site with a reputation (brand) for expertise on the topic.
Technical SEO for AI: Ensuring your site is crawlable and indexable remains crucial – Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that AI search uses the same crawler (Googlebot) and index as traditional search. So, technical fundamentals (clean URLs, proper HTML structure, fast loading, no blocking of bots) are as important as ever. If an AI can’t access or interpret your content due to technical issues, it definitely won’t include it in an answer.
Optimize Beyond the Click: In a GEO world, success isn’t just measured by click-through rate, but also by impressions and citations within AI answers. For example, if ChatGPT or Bing cites your blog as a source for an answer, that’s a win – even if the user never visits your page directly. Some brands are already tracking “AI visibility” – how often their content appears in AI-generated responses. It’s a shift from pure traffic metrics to influence metrics.

Crucially, Google representatives say you don’t need to panic or reinvent the wheel for AI. Google’s search liaison has noted that “AI SEO” is not a separate thing – standard good SEO is all you need to rank in AI results. The same content quality and relevance that rank a page organically will also make it a candidate for AI summaries. In Google’s words: new AI features “utilize the same core index and ranking systems” as classic search. So, rather than thinking of SEO vs GEO, it’s wise to see them together: SEO + GEO = a comprehensive search strategy.

That said, the rise of GEO underscores some strategic shifts. One is the importance of entity optimization – ensuring that algorithms recognize your brand or author as an authority in a given domain (via knowledge panels, schema, Wikipedia, etc.). Another is focusing on conversational content. Many people now phrase queries conversationally (“What’s the best way to do X?”). Generative engines are tuned to answer those, so content that mirrors natural questions and provides conversational answers can perform well. As Search Engine Journal observes, “Generative search doesn’t eliminate the need for quality content; it amplifies it”, because AI-driven tools still need reliable material to draw from. In fact, getting cited by AI can drive very qualified traffic – users who saw your content contribute to their answer and trust you already. Being one of a few cited sources in an AI answer can be more valuable than ranking #1 in traditional search.

In sum, GEO is about future-proofing your SEO for an AI-heavy world. It’s the art of not just ranking for a query, but becoming the answer itself. As one agency put it, “You don’t need to panic, but you do need to reframe. SEO isn’t dead. It’s evolving into something broader… With GEO, you’re preparing your brand to be the expert source behind tomorrow’s AI-generated answers.”

Voices from the Industry: What SEO Experts Are Saying

No single person has all the answers on where SEO is headed – but by listening to a range of experts, we can piece together the big picture. Here are perspectives from five SEO thought leaders on the state of SEO and the impact of generative AI:

Rand Fishkin (Founder of Moz & SparkToro): Rand has been vocal about the diminishing share of clicks from Google. His research shows that zero-click searches are now a majority of cases, which he interprets as a sign that Google is keeping users on its platform. He advises SEOs to adjust expectations and strategy: focus on branding and creative marketing beyond just classic SEO. “Many folks in search marketing have been chasing the same rankings for a decade. Given the zero-sum nature of search traffic, think how you can win by being more creative – try channels your competitors haven’t, like podcasts, newsletters, or communities,” Fishkin suggests. He also warns against chasing keywords that generative AI or featured snippets might satisfy: “A lot of folks are throwing away time and money chasing traffic for terms that are never coming back [because AI now answers them]. Check your results; don’t just rely on broad studies.” His take is a bit skeptical of the hype: SEO isn’t dead, but the easy wins are dwindling. It’s time to diversify and innovate.
Barry Schwartz (Founder of Search Engine Roundtable): Barry, who has reported on search for over 20 years, emphasizes sticking to fundamentals amid the noise. He believes helpful content and technical soundness will carry you through any algorithm changes. “It’s not about how the content’s created… does it help the user? Otherwise, don’t do it,” he says simply. Barry acknowledges AI is changing how results look, but he’s clear that “the future of SEO is brand-first, not website-first”. He encourages SEOs to break out of silos and work with other marketing teams (social, PR, paid) to raise the overall digital presence of the brand. And in an AI-driven SERP, “start building your brand now — or AI will decide which brand gets the click later.” In essence, Barry’s outlook is pragmatic: Don’t chase every new shiny trick; focus on quality and brand trust, and you’ll weather the changes.
Lily Ray (SEO Director and E-E-A-T Expert): Lily is known for her expertise on Google’s quality guidelines and E-E-A-T. She has witnessed SEO’s evolution from “stone age” tactics to today’s AI revolution. Lily underscores the massive shift from keyword-focused SEO to intent-driven optimization and the growing importance of entity authority. In the age of AI search, she advises publishers and site owners to educate stakeholders that traffic alone isn’t the only success metric. Visibility across multiple platforms and formats is key. Lily often points out that if your content or brand has strong authority, it can appear in places beyond your website (like Reddit threads, YouTube, or AI answers). She notes, “Organic visibility must now stretch across platforms… It’s no longer just about your website; you have to be everywhere your audience is, and seen as credible there.” Her advice for the AI era aligns with others: invest in brand, double down on quality, and don’t rely solely on Google for eyeballs. She’s optimistic but realistic – those who prioritize authenticity and user value will thrive, even as the medium of search changes.
Brian Dean (Founder of Backlinko): Brian built his reputation on practical SEO strategies and content marketing. He sees a continuity through the changes: “Google’s ability to evaluate search intent” is the big improvement of the last decade, but “the principles… remain the same: content, links, and on-page”. In his view, the best SEOs today are those who marry the old and new – they still create exceptional content and earn backlinks, but also ensure that content aligns perfectly with user intent and query needs. Brian has been watching the AI content trend too, and he tends to caution against shortcuts. He found that Google’s recent updates were “likely targeting AI-generated content” and advises using AI tools carefully – for research and drafting – but not as a replacement for human-driven writing and expertise. His approach is educational: adapt new tools (AI included) into your workflow, but keep your SEO fundamentals strong.
Search Engine Journal (Industry Publication): SEJ’s contributors have echoed a balanced view on AI’s impact. In one article, it’s noted that apocalyptic predictions of “SEO’s funeral” are premature: “AI isn’t replacing SEO. It’s expanding SEO into new territories with bigger opportunities.” Generative AI might reduce some traditional organic traffic, but it also creates new surfaces for content discovery. For instance, if you can get your site cited in an AI answer, you might reach users you never did via classic SERPs. SEJ emphasizes optimizing content for retrieval, not just ranking – meaning writing content that answers complex questions comprehensively so that AI systems choose to include it. They also highlight that Google’s own AI Overviews still link to sources, so being one of the trusted sources is the new gold mine. The tone here is optimistic: SEO isn’t dead at all; it’s evolving into multidimensional search marketing – part traditional SEO, part content strategy, part digital PR (to build authority), and part data optimization (to feed AI).

Key Takeaways from the Experts

User Experience & Intent are king: Over 10 years, Google shifted from keyword matching to user intent satisfaction. If your content fulfills the searcher’s need (and is accessible), you’re future-proofed.
Build a brand, not just a website: Authority now extends beyond your site. Cultivate a brand presence and reputation so strong that search engines (and users) recognize you as a go-to source.
Embrace new metrics: Don’t obsess solely over clicks. Impressions, mentions, and citations in various platforms (Google, Bing, AI answers, social media) are the new SEO currency in the GEO era.
Quality over quantity (now with AI assist): High-quality, human-vetted content remains essential. AI can aid in creation, but human expertise, originality, and trust signals make the difference between getting featured or getting filtered.
Stay curious and adaptive: The only constant in SEO is change. The last decade brought mobile, then voice, then AI – and the next will bring something new. As Robert Goldenowl might say, the story of SEO is still being written, and the savvy marketers are those who keep learning, testing, and adapting to whatever comes next.

Conclusion: Thriving in the GEO Era

“From SEO to GEO” isn’t just a catchy phrase – it encapsulates how far search has come and where it’s going. Ten years ago, SEO was about understanding Google’s algorithm. Today, it’s about understanding users on a deeper level and the AI platforms serving them. The shifts of the past decade – the dominance of mobile, the crackdowns on spam, the emphasis on E-A-T, the explosion of zero-click searches – have all been leading to a singular truth: provide real value or be ignored. That was true in 2015, and in an AI-saturated 2025, it’s truer than ever.

The good news is that all these changes have a common thread. Search engines, whether powered by algorithms or AI models, ultimately want to connect people with helpful, relevant information. If you commit to being the source of that information – the site that genuinely answers questions, solves problems, and earns trust – you have a place in the future of search. Or as Google’s Gary Illyes reassured, “AI search doesn’t require a whole new optimization strategy – focus on content quality,” because the same fundamentals apply.

For SEO professionals and content creators, the task now is to reframe our approach without abandoning our roots. We must optimize not just for clicks, but for coverage – ensuring our brands are visible wherever answers are being sought. We must combine technical know-how with creative storytelling (and maybe a bit of AI assistance) to produce content that stands out to both humans and machines. It’s a challenging, yet exciting time.

In the spirit of storytelling, think of SEO’s journey as a long epic – with plot twists and new characters (hello, AI) keeping it interesting. The last 10 years were one transformative chapter. Now the next chapter unfolds: one where search is more conversational, more everywhere, and more intelligent. Those who embrace Generative Engine Optimization – who make their content the kind that today’s engines love to generate – will find that there’s plenty of opportunity in this new world. As one industry article said, the game isn’t ending; the rules are just changing. And in true SEO fashion, if we learn the new rules, we can still win.

Educational Note: The evolution from SEO to GEO teaches a valuable lesson: always put the user first. Whether it’s a human reader or an AI summarizer, content that genuinely educates, helps, or entertains will rise to the top. As you plan for the future, remember the core question behind every algorithm update and AI model tweak: “Is this content truly useful?” If you can confidently answer yes, you’re not just optimized for search engines – you’re optimized for people, and that’s the ultimate goal.

Sources: This article integrated insights and quotes from leading SEO experts and publications, including Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Lily Ray, Brian Dean, as well as recent analyses from Search Engine Journal and others. For full attributions, see the cited sources: Fishkin’s data on zero-click searches, Barry Schwartz’s commentary on AI and search fundamentals, Lily Ray’s historical SEO overview, Brian Dean’s interview on SEO’s future, and SEJ’s reporting on generative AI’s impact on SEO, among others. These sources paint a comprehensive picture of an SEO industry in flux – one that has constantly reinvented itself over the past decade and will continue to do so in the age of generative AI.