Generative Engine Optimization: Designing for the Age of AI Discovery

By Toby Evers and Rich Klein

For years, discovery was defined by a search engine’s page of blue links, but that model is fading. With the rapid adoption of generative AI, people are searching, evaluating, and buying in new ways. What once began with keywords now starts with natural conversations. Research that used to require switching between multiple tabs and comparing reviews can now be condensed into a single, curated response. Search no longer just ends with information retrieval; it often ends with an action, like buying, booking, or building directly from the search experience itself. This isn’t just a marketing issue; it’s a fundamental design challenge.

At Work & Co, we believe that Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) must be treated as a product design problem. Companies now need to design their content, data, and various touchpoints so that AI systems can confidently interpret, recommend, and act on their behalf. 

The Strategic Imperative

Leaders who move now to design for generative engines will secure a durable advantage, with GEO’s impact extending far beyond the bounds of customer acquisition. Here’s three of the biggest immediate opportunities to jump on:

1. Turn Your Brand Into a Trusted Authority: Generative engines thrive on trusted, authoritative sources. By optimizing your content, you can become the voice an AI relies on to answer a customer’s question. This establishes your brand as a credible and helpful partner in the customer’s decision-making process, building brand trust and affinity long before a purchase is made.
2. Reclaim the Customer Journey: The “messy middle” of the customer journey, where people once weighed options and formed intent, is being compressed into a single conversational experience. By designing for this new reality, you can capture attention and drive conversion at the precise moment a decision is being made. This also presents an opportunity to reduce support costs. Customers will increasingly turn to AI first to solve issues. A brand that provides robust, AI-ready information can empower these AI agents to resolve common problems, freeing up your support teams for more complex issues.
3. Capture Agentic Commerce: We now know that the future of digital commerce isn’t just about humans interacting with your properties, but also about AI agents operating on behalf of humans to gather information and complete tasks. The ability of these agents to find and act on your data is a new frontier for digital experience leaders, and winning in this space means designing for clarity and actionability for non-human users too.

Implications Across Industries

While every sector shares the challenge of the collapsing customer journey, each industry faces unique discoverability problems. Whether the core issue is low consumer trust in insurance, fragmented booking in travel, or disappearing clicks for media publishers, GEO provides a disciplined, design-led framework to address them.

• Insurance: Customers often don’t fully understand coverage and trust in the industry is low. GEO allows insurers to provide clear, structured explanations that an AI can directly cite, offering transparency precisely when trust is most fragile. This can reduce reliance on paid search and build brand trust.
• Travel: Travelers were once overwhelmed by fragmented information. Now, people are asking AI to plan entire trips, complete with budgets and preferences. By providing structured itineraries, destination guides, and transparent pricing, travel companies can ensure they are included in AI-curated plans instead of being sidelined by aggregators.
• Retail and E-commerce: The stakes are just as high. Consumers no longer start their journey by browsing category pages. Instead, they might ask an AI for the best running shoes for flat feet under a certain price. Brands that have their product data, reviews, and contextual guidance prepared for AI will be included in these recommendations.
• Healthcare: In healthcare, patients are increasingly asking AI for advice, such as whether to go to urgent care or the emergency room. Providers who offer clear, patient-friendly, and medically accurate explanations will have their voices represented when people seek guidance in these vulnerable moments.
• Editorial & Media Publishers: For years, publishers have relied on organic search to drive traffic, visibility, and revenue. But as generative AI increasingly provides direct answers, even when sourced from publisher content, those clicks are disappearing. GEO offers a way to stay relevant, by ensuring articles are structured, authoritative, and AI-readable. Publishers that optimize for AI discovery can maintain influence, protect attribution, and ensure their content is surfaced when audiences ask the kinds of questions they used to Google.

Integrated Approach to Generative Optimization

A purely marketing-centric or tactical view is too narrow for this strategic shift. Only those who treat GEO as a holistic ecosystem will succeed. Work & Co’s GEO approach integrates content, design, and technical signals to ensure brands are both understandable to people and interpretable by machines, will secure a durable advantage and own the conversation.

• Technical Foundations: Websites must be designed so both search engines and AI systems can easily crawl, index, and interpret them. Using structured data and product feeds helps maximize visibility and enriches shopping results with the information customers need to make confident decisions.
• Content Strategy: Generative engines rely on high-quality, plain-language content to produce their answers. Brands need to create content that not only attracts and informs shoppers but also builds topical authority. This means anticipating the real-life questions customers ask and writing clear, structured content that AI can directly use in its responses.
• Earned Media & PR: Generative engines favor trusted, well-cited sources. Strategic PR and thought leadership help position your brand as credible and reference-worthy across the open web, boosting your chances of being included in AI responses. When design and PR work together, brand stories can be both beautifully presented and easily cited, increasing visibility across human and machine audiences.
• Measurement: Traditional SEO metrics don’t fully capture GEO performance. Brands will need to track how often they appear in AI-generated answers, product recommendations, and conversational queries. Defining these new KPIs early will help you understand visibility and optimize accordingly.
• Design and Experience: In the age of AI, design is the ultimate differentiator. Your content should be scannable and modular, and your digital products should be organized in a way that allows for seamless AI-driven discovery and action. This means designing for both a human user and an AI agent.

Every major shift in digital discovery has rewarded early movers. The shift in customer behavior—from keyword searching to conversational seeking—is creating a new product design mandate for brands. The question is not whether AI will redefine your brand, but how you will design the holistic ecosystem required to own the conversation.

About the Authors

Toby Evers is the Head of Media & Intelligence at Work & Co, part of Accenture Song, where he leads innovation in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). He helps brands navigate the shift to AI-powered discovery by shaping strategies that connect content, technology, and design to ensure visibility and influence in LLM-driven consumer journeys. With deep expertise in digital media and data intelligence, Toby has built and scaled high-performing teams that deliver measurable business impact across industries from retail and e-commerce to health and financial services.

Rich Klein is a Senior Manager of SEO Strategy at Work & Co, with over a decade of experience spanning DTC, editorial, and news publishing. He works with clients to maximize organic reach while creating seamless site experiences that serve both business goals and user needs. Rich specializes in aligning brands with the latest SEO practices and navigating the fast-moving landscape of generative search (GEO), keeping sites future-ready in an evolving search ecosystem.