Outsmart AI Overviews On SERPs: How GEO Brings Back Your Customers

Being visible on SERPs isn’t enough anymore, with the rise of AI Overviews and generative answers. You need to be citable by these tools. The good news is you can outsmart AI Overviews on SERPs by making your content the one AI chooses to summarize.

The rise of AI Overviews and AI answers means that being on the front page of every SERP doesn’t guarantee traffic any longer. AI Overviews now dominate above-the-fold visibility, summarizing the answers users need, often without requiring a single click.

What Are AI Overviews? Why Do They Matter?

AI Overviews are Google’s generative summaries that appear at the top of search results, blending in information from multiple web sources to produce quick, conversational answers.

While convenient for users, they’re disruptive for businesses: your website or Atlassian Marketplace listing could be the source, but never be visibly credited or appear.

For Atlassian Marketplace vendors, this shift is critical. Even if your app ranks well for ‘meeting room booking for Jira’ or ‘test management plugin,’ AI Overviews may now synthesize your competitors’ content, or worse, provide their product names as examples – burying your listing beneath AI summaries that users trust first.

Generative Engine Optimization Strategies

The good news? There’s a fix. It’s called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). In this zero-click landscape, winning visibility means training AI to cite you, not your competitors. And that’s exactly what GEO is for.

GEO helps you to structure content, add expertise signals, and build authority so AI systems like Google’s AI Overview, ChatGPT, and Perplexity cite you and not your competitors. With GEO, your content doesn’t just rank. It’s read, understood, and quoted by AI, ensuring your brand stays visible and relevant in every search experience.

What’s Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?

• GEO is a multi-layer strategy that ensures your brand’s content is understood, cited, and mentioned accurately by AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview.
• This means ensuring your product pages, documentation, and listing are structured, factual, and authoritative, allowing systems like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity to quote you directly.
• GEO frameworks, like the one outlined in Brighttail’s GEO playbook, complement SEO by optimizing technical signals, content quality, structure, and sources so AI models treat your content as the most authoritative response.
• GEO doesn’t make your content rank; it makes it recognizable, retrievable, and reusable by AI models. When done right, your Atlassian app becomes the “default answer” AI assistants surface for Jira / Confluence users looking for solutions in your niche.

GEO: The Unsung Brand Booster

GEO puts the spotlight back on your brand by making sure that you’re visible to AI systems.

Being visible to AI systems is important because AI overviews appear in a little over 16% of US searches (Ahrefs, 2025), while 67% of users turn to AI platforms to jumpstart their research (GEO Platform, 2024).

Pew Research Center discovered that 58% of users are less likely to click when AI summaries appear. Insidea, on the other hand, noted that 63% of users prefer using AI assistants instead of traditional search engines. These show a trend towards consumer reliance on AI overviews and AI answers instead of traditional search strategies.

For Atlassian Marketplace vendors, that means your content and listing aren’t just competing for clicks; they’re competing for citations.

When your Marketplace content appears in AI summaries or LLM-generated answers, you don’t just recover visibility, you build credibility, helping potential buyers discover your app before they even land on the Marketplace.

Discover how Brighttail has helped our Atlassian Marketplace vendors and partners to dominate search results for their businesses.

Your Generative Engine Optimization Strategy

GEO isn’t a single tactic—it’s a multi-layer structured framework that covers technical clarity, content quality, and metrics in the era of zero-click searches.

Brighttail’s GEO Framework covers all the components needed to outsmart Google AI Overviews and protect your visibility, some of which are presented below.

Technical Clarity

A key part of Generative Engine Optimization strategies is making your Marketplace Listing and website AI-ready for both search crawlers and AI models to find, read, understand, and cite.

• Implement schema markup: Use markups like ‘FAQPage’ or ‘HowTo’ and ‘Product’ to tell AI models what your content is about. It helps AI crawlers parse content for retrieval later.
• Use AI-Friendly Formatting: Structure content with bullet points, numbered lists, and tables for easy extraction. Include comprehensive FAQ sections which can boost AI citation rates by up to 35% (GEO Platform, 2024).
• Write for Clarity (BLUF): Start sections with concise, direct answers, ensuring only one main idea per paragraph. Your content needs to be structurally easy for AI to scan, summarize, and reuse.
• Optimize Render & Speed: Run render-parity and crawlability inspections to ensure AI bots see the same content humans do. Remediate Core Web Vitals issues.
• Add /llm-info Page & /llm.txt: Create a dedicated page summarizing brand facts, products, and approved citations to guide AI systems.
• Clarify Content Freshness: Add “last updated” stamps and a refresh cadence plan to signal recency.

Content Authority

Visibility means nothing without trust. GEO helps signal your brand’s expertise across the website by signalling authority in your content.

• Earn Unlinked Brand Mentions: Encourage reviews, press coverage, and third-party quotes. AI models look for how often your brand name appears across the web, with or without a hyperlink. According to Insidea, link-free brand mentions are utilized in 43% of ChatGPT responses.
• Off-Site Authority: Stay active where AI bots look for answers. Sites like the Atlassian Community, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, and review platforms (G2 or Capterra) are commonly cited in LLMs. If you’re present on these platforms, you can diversify your traffic and build brand awareness.
• Include Evidence: Support your claims with statistics, proprietary data, and expert quotes. Aggarwal et al. (2024) noted that pages with quotes or statistics have 30-40% higher visibility in AI answers.
• Expertise Signals: Standardize author bio and a curated Source Whitelist to reinforce EEAT.
• Topical Hub Depth: Develop content clusters with semantic links so AI learns how your topics are connected and cites them with each other.
• Prompt-Intent Mapping: Audit LLM queries related to your solutions and mirror their phrasing in your content so they can mention your solutions easily.

Track your Metrics

Brighttail’s GEO framework also covers how to track the efficacy of your GEO strategy with new metrics.

• AI Citation Rate: One key performance indicator (KPI) of your GEO strategy is the AI Citation Rate. It looks at how often your content is referenced by an AI. Another KPI would be the Share of AI Voice; how many times your brand is mentioned, compared to your competitors, in AI answers
• AI Output Monitoring: Regularly test conversational queries across major AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Deepseek to see who is being sourced accurately.
• Conversion Quality: While click volume may drop, traffic you receive from AI sources is often higher quality and converts at a significantly higher rate because the user already has strong intent.

Conclusion

AI isn’t stealing your click; it’s rewriting who gets discovered. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is how you take control back.

For Atlassian Marketplace vendors, GEO means that your product pages, blog posts, listing, landing pages, documentation, and customer stories can be surfaced by AI, even before a user opens Google or Atlassian Marketplace search.

Future-proof your business by outsmarting AI overviews. If you’re ready to boost your brand awareness with GEO, Brighttail’s GEO Framework is designed to quickly get your team up to speed.

Don’t let AI answers cannibalize your traffic and trust anymore. Schedule a consultation call now to reclaim your customers from AI overviews today.