Why GEO experts matter (and why now)

AI answer engines have transformed search behavior, increasingly diverting clicks and mindshare away from blue-link search. While Google search impressions have gone up 49% year-over-year, click-through rates have decreased by 30%.

About 10% of referral traffic now comes from AI conversations on platforms like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Google AI Overviews alone surface zero-click summaries for a substantial number of queries—90% of healthcare and education and 70% of B2B tech queries.

But if you’re responsible for demand generation, you need to follow more than just the algorithm changes. You also need to know the humans who drive the GEO playbooks. Below, we spotlight seven experts whose research and tooling are pushing the field forward.

How we built the A-list

We started with 102 operators who self‑identify with GEO on LinkedIn, X, Substack, or conference agendas. We then scored them on four weighted signals based on our original research.

Weight	Signal	What we measured
35%	Original thought leadership	First use of GEO frameworks, patents, or peer‑reviewed research (2018‑2025)
25%	Demonstrated results	Published case studies or platform features that measurably move answer share of voice for brands
20%	Peer & AI recognition	Mentions in tier‑one media and frequency with which AI answer engines cite them unprompted
20%	Educational impact	Courses, newsletters, OSS tools, or talks that upskill the ecosystem

Seven experts cleared the 80th percentile across all four metrics.

The 2025 GEO Power Seven

Name	Title/Role	Organization
Lily Ray	VP SEO Strategy	Amsive Digital
Aleyda Solis	AI Search Optimization Consultant	Orainti
Mike King	Founder	iPullRank
Josh Blyskal	AI Strategist	Profound
Kevin Indig	Growth Advisor & Author	Growth Memo
Chris Long	VP of Marketing	Go Fish Digital
Jason Barnard	Founder	Kalicube

Meet the 2025 GEO A-List.

(Ordered by our composite score—except we’ve pushed the original “founders” of the term to the end so you meet the fresh voices first.)

1. Lily Ray: VP SEO Strategy, Amsive Digital

Lily Ray tracks what actually happens when Google rolls out AI features, including running large‑scale data studies on how AI Overviews choose citations. She isn’t afraid to call Google out on spam problems either.

Her LinkedIn exposé on Google AI Overview spam sums up many of the most egregious issues and explores how easy citations can be to manipulate.
Lily’s blog post, Which AI Search Tools Are the Most Gullible, features an experiment that reveals how quickly you can influence LLM answers—and which are the simplest to manipulate.
She regularly speaks about SEO and GEO at conferences, on podcasts, and in webinars—like her conversation on How Search Is Changing This Year.

Our take: Lily blends forensic analysis with evangelism, generating evidence and conversation.

2. Kevin Indig: Growth Advisor & Author, Growth Memo

Kevin Indig bridges product‑led growth with entity SEO. He publishes frequent GEO experiments and in-depth analyses in his newsletter, Growth Memo, which has more than 20,000 subscribers.

His usability study of Google AI Overviews is the first of its kind to explore how people use and think about this AI feature, including their behavior, emotions, and thoughts.
Kevin’s analysis of what content works well in LLMs analyzes the attributes that reliably secure brand citations across AI answer engines.
His newsletter on how to measure topical authority includes a step-by-step walkthrough of how to calculate this metric post-Google AI Overviews.

Our take: Kevin translates technical GEO into roadmaps executives and operators can act on.

3. Aleyda Solis: AI Search Optimization Consultant, Orainti

Aleyda Solis cuts through AI search confusion by creating the practical frameworks that practitioners need to improve visibility. She breaks down complex GEO concepts, making them both accessible and actionable in her popular newsletters and videos.

Her AI Search Optimization Checklist is the blueprint for creating content that gets cited by AI answer engines. It includes a nine-step process with tips and examples.
Aleyda’s SEO FOMO newsletter has over 35,000 subscribers and provides weekly updates on everything SEO and GEO—including an early look at Google AI Mode.
Her YouTube channel features weekly conversations with GEO experts, covering topics like ChatGPT citations, the impact of AI search, and traditional SEO vs. AI search optimization.

Our take: Aleyda is the methodical guide who gives you proven systems to target AI visibility.

4. Mike King: Founder, iPullRank

Mike King is the creator of relevance engineering and the architect of technical content optimization. He’s laid the groundwork for the schema, embeddings, and retrieval pipelines that AI answer engines consume.

He hosted the inaugural SEO Week 2025 and delivered the keynote The Brave New World of SEO, which covered AI overviews, vector embeddings, and the future of SEO.
Mike’s blog post on How AI Mode Works and How SEO Can Prepare for the Future of Search was one of the first comprehensive analyses of Google AI Mode, complete with technical explanations of query fan-out and how reasoning works.
His Technical Content Optimization webinar covering the science behind search engine algorithms, is essential viewing for SEO and GEO experts.

Our take: Mike is the builder who shows you how to ship GEO‑ready content infrastructure.

5. Josh Blyskal: AI Strategist, Profound

Josh Blyskal has access to the full Profound dataset, which he uses to identify and explore insights on trends we're seeing across millions of prompts. His research helps shape our recommendations and grounds our frameworks in what AI engines actually surface.

His LinkedIn post exploring AI search volatility includes data from 80,000 answer engine prompts between June and July 2025. It shows that almost half of domains cited by answer engines shifted in a single month, reflecting high volatility.
Josh analyzed 40 million prompts to build his talk, Measuring the Unclickable: GEO Metrics that Matter, at brightonSEO UK in April 2025, which packed a 700-seat hall.
His LinkedIn post analyzing Wikipedia citations in AI answer engines reveals how heavily ChatGPT began relying on Wikipedia from November 2024 to March 2025—accounting for 7.5% of all ChatGPT citations.

Our take: Josh brings insider information from the platform that brands like Ramp, Indeed, and US Bank use to improve AI visibility.

6. Chris Long: VP of Marketing, Go Fish Digital

Chris Long is the VP of Marketing at Go Fish Digital, where he specializes in solving advanced search challenges and driving organic growth through technical SEO and a deep understanding of Google's algorithms.

Chris is recognized for his expertise in website architecture analysis, structured data implementation, crawl control (robots.txt, URL parameters, robots directives), log file analysis, keyword research, on-page optimizations, content & UX improvements, and eCommerce/faceted navigation.
He believes that AEO/GEO is fundamentally different than SEO
His insights have been published in top outlets such as Moz and Search Engine Land, and the content he posts organically on Linkedin and X gets large amounts of engagement.

Our take: Chris brings a technical, data-driven approach to GEO, helping brands solve complex search problems and implement advanced strategies that drive measurable results.

7. Jason Barnard: Founder, Kalicube

Jason Barnard coined answer engine optimization (AEO) in 2018 and is known as a top authority on digital brand intelligence. He also built the Kalicube Process, an entity‑first blueprint that hundreds of brands now follow.

He’s a regular contributor to Search Engine Land, where he covers topics like chunks and passages in Google AI Mode, a roadmap for AI search, and how to optimize content for LLMs.
Jason frequently speaks on GEO topics at conferences. He delivered the keynote, Your Brand Is What Google and AI Say It Is, at Digital Marketing Europe 2025.
He published the book Entrepreneurs Winning the Game in Google and AI with Their Personal Brand in June 2025, exploring new tactics brands can use to optimize AI visibility.

Our take: Jason helped define the language of GEO, and he continues to push it forward.

GEO Optimization Tactics

GEO Optimization Tactic	Why it matters
1. Optimize for Chunk-Level Retrieval	AI search engines don't index or retrieve whole pages — they break content into passages or "chunks" and retrieve the most relevant segments for synthesis. That's why you should optimize each section like a standalone snippet.
2. Optimize for Answer Synthesis	AI search engines synthesize multiple chunks from different sources into a coherent response. This means your content must be easy to extract and logically structured to fit into a multi-source answer.
3. Optimize for Citation-Worthiness	AI search engines will cite content when it's perceived as factually accurate, up-to-date, well-structured, and authoritative. Not every included chunk gets cited - to earn attribution, your content must meet higher trust and clarity criteria.
4. Optimize for Topical Breadth and Depth	Google AI Mode use the query fan-out technique, where a complex query is automatically broken into multiple related subqueries (facets, angles, intents), and those are executed in parallel to retrieve the most relevant content for each aspect, gathering and synthesizing information from diverse sources. This will reward sites with topical breadth and depth, the ones that feature content that covers each facet in-depth. If your site is seen as an authority on the whole topic, multiple subqueries might pull from different pages on your site.
5. Optimize for Multi-Modal Support	AI search systems are increasingly retrieving and synthesizing multimodal content, -including images, charts, tables, videos-, to better answer user queries, giving opportunity to provide more useful, scannable and engaging answers for users.

What enterprise marketers should steal from the experts

Insight	Tactical takeaway	How Profound operationalizes it
Entity authority is everything (Barnard, Ray, Oberstein)	Map and enrich your entity graph before chasing keywords.	[Answer Engine Insights](https://www.tryprofound.com/features/answer-engine-insights) tracks your brand mentions across AI platforms and identifies authority gaps in how engines perceive your entity.
Track answer share not rankings (Indig)	Measure how often your brand appears inside answers across AI engines.	Answer Engine Insights shows citation share and share of voice across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, and other engines—updated daily.
Test answer variability at scale (Blyskal)	Re‑query AI engines hundreds of times to understand volatility.	Answer Engine Insights runs structured prompts across AI platforms, analyzing variance in brand mentions and competitive positioning.
Structured data and embeddings still matter (King, Solis)	Feed AI engines machine‑readable context.	[Agent Analytics](https://www.tryprofound.com/features/agent-analytics) tracks which AI crawlers access your content and measures how structured data impacts AI-sourced traffic attribution.
Optimize for chunk-level retrieval, not page-level ranking. (Solis, King)	Structure content so individual sections can stand alone as complete answers.	[Actions](https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/introducing-actions) generates content briefs specifically designed for AI citation, helping you create content that optimizes for chunking and performs in answer engines.
Monitor competitive AI narrative shifts (Blyskal, Indig)	Track how competitors reframe industry comparisons in AI responses.	[Conversation Explorer](https://www.tryprofound.com/features/conversation-explorer) reveals real user prompts and competitive mentions, showing how brands position against each other in AI-generated responses.

How Profound accelerates GEO

Profound helps brands appear in AI-generated answers by analyzing millions of real conversations across tools like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. It tells you:

What people are really asking AI: See trending questions and topics in real time, based on what users type into answer engines.
Which competitors are winning AI visibility: Monitor when other brands get mentions or citations, and reverse-engineer their strategy,
Which AI mentions matter: Correlate exposure in AI answers with post-exposure conversations using our GA4 integration.
Where to prioritize GEO efforts: Build a prioritized list of GEO opportunities based on potential gain versus level of effort, inspired by expert frameworks.
What content formats get cited: Understand whether tables, FAQs, how-tos, and comparisons are most likely to appear in AI responses.
Where AI crawlers land: Find out which AI bots are crawling your site, how often, and which pages they reference.

If your brand doesn’t appear in AI answers today, odds are it won’t tomorrow—unless you provide the structured, entity-rich signals AI engines need. Profound is the shortest path to those signals.

Take the lead in AI visibility with Profound

Get our best and most comprehensive recommendations in our GEO Playbook. This step-by-step guide walks you through GEO from analysis to iteration.

Book a strategy call with our team. We’ll benchmark your brand against expert GEO methodologies and show you how to win AI visibility. No fluff, just strategic clarity.

The 2025 A‑List of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Experts