The way people discover content has shifted.
Traditional SEO once dominated digital visibility, but today audiences and AI agents increasingly bypass homepages altogether. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) are the new battlegrounds.
In this new landscape, visibility is not about appearing in a list of ten blue links. It is about being the source that AI engines select and the answer that platforms deliver. For marketers and digital leaders, the challenge is clear: how do you ensure your content is chosen, cited, and surfaced?
The answer lies in a CMS that is designed for this new reality. Optimizely’s CMS does not just publish web pages. It engineers content for generative discoverability.
The Shift from SEO to GEO and AEO
The old playbook was simple:
- Attract visitors
- Tell your story
- Convert to sales
Yet website sessions are declining by 10–30 per cent year on year for many brands. Why? Because AI agents and answer-first platforms are increasingly intermediating the customer journey.
- Humans still browse, but they expect branded experiences and deep validation.
- AI agents scan, summarise, and surface. They do not browse, they extract.
Your website is no longer your digital front door. It has become a content source for both humans and machines.
That is why GEO and AEO matter:
- AEO ensures your brand is the direct answer in voice and AI-powered responses.
- GEO ensures your content is machine-readable, indexed, and cited by generative engines.
How Optimizely CMS Supports GEO
Page-Level GEO Optimisation
AI agents extract answers at the level of the individual page. To surface in summaries, content must be structured, trustworthy, and machine-readable. Optimizely CMS provides:
- Q&A field generation which automatically produces question-and-answer pairs from page content
- GEO-specific metadata to populate titles, descriptions, and E-E-A-T elements tailored for AI engines
- Markdown summaries that improve AI scanning and indexing
This ensures that every page is answer-ready and positioned to appear in AI summaries and overviews.
Site-Wide Optimisation for LLMs
AI agents do not explore sites like people do. They scan them. Optimizely CMS enables top-down optimisation with:
- llms.txt auto-generation to signal which pages should be indexed by large language models and bots
- GEO topic templates that create topic-specific pages optimised to appear in AI summaries
- Bulk metadata population to apply GEO metadata consistently across your content library
This means your site is comprehensible not only to Google, but also to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other AI models that increasingly shape how answers are delivered.
GEO Analytics: Visibility into the Hidden Layer
One of the biggest challenges of the GEO and AEO era is that AI engines may read, summarise, and surface your content without ever triggering a click.
Optimizely CMS provides analytics designed for this hidden layer, including:
- GEO health index to score your pages against GEO and AEO best practice
- Crawl-to-refer ratio to measure how often AI bots crawl compared with how often they cite your site
- Crawl rate by model to identify which language models (such as OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic) are crawling your site most frequently
This visibility is essential in an era where traditional analytics tools no longer tell the full story.
Opal Agents: Scaling Content with AI
To succeed in GEO and AEO at scale, automation is crucial. Optimizely’s Opal Agents help teams:
- Generate Q&A content across whole sections of a site
- Apply consistent metadata and summaries
- Continuously refresh content to align with evolving AI engine behaviour
Instead of reworking hundreds of pages manually, Opal Agents ensure your content is AI-ready by default.
How Optimizely CMS Supports AEO
- Question-and-answer friendly content creation: Templates and workflows encourage natural, conversational formats that align with how people ask questions.
- Authority through experimentation: Built-in experimentation helps test headlines, formats, and structures so your most engaging and authoritative content rises to the top.
- Personalisation for relevance: Content can be adapted for different audiences, industries, or regions, ensuring engines detect high relevance and prioritise your material.
Why This Matters
- Customer journeys are changing: Many will never reach your site through a traditional search click. GEO and AEO ensure you are still visible.
- Authority is everything: Being cited by an AI engine gives credibility and trust.
- Future-proofing is vital: SEO is not disappearing, but GEO and AEO are growing rapidly. Optimizely CMS ensures readiness for both.
Conclusion: From Pages to Answers
The digital playbook has changed. Websites are no longer just for human visitors. They are fuel for AI agents. The winners in this new environment will be those who optimise not only for people but also for machines.
Optimizely CMS is built for this new age. From page-level Q&A generation to site-wide optimisation and GEO analytics, it redefines what a CMS should be in an AI-first world.
With Optimizely, you are not simply publishing content. You are engineering discoverability in the age of answers.
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