If you are an SEO in a niche market, chances are you’ve honed your craft to be more efficient and deliver higher quality than industry outsiders. The only problem is that is exactly what’s expected. This cat-and-mouse game between expectations and reality can often drive innovation, which is what happened when my teammates and I created our niche keyword generator. 1

What is a niche keyword research generator?

A niche keyword research generator produces a keyword list with built-in clustering in seconds using common query patterns specific to your vertical. And best of all, beyond a small investment for the initial research, it is completely free.

A scholarly paper was published in November on arXiv, a free preprint repository for STEM research. The paper studied how to improve domain visibility within a generative AI search environment. Playing off of “SEO”, the authors coined the phrase Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO.

This was a timely release as Google was supposedly nearing its final stages of the Search Generative Experience (SGE) experiment 1, with many anticipating it would be released to all users in early 2024. This could potentially shake up the paid and organic search landscape more than almost any other development in the past 25 years.

Most of the reactions I found in SEO circles were more about the name, GEO, than the findings and methodologies themselves. Understandably, the name may be a little confusing as it is also a geographical prefix. However, the findings were quite bold (e.g., “…GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses.”), and I was a bit surprised not to see anyone pressure testing them.

So, I read it. Some of what I found was problematic enough I felt compelled to write about it.