Hey there 👋

SteelSeries had strong SEO, with high rankings, traffic, and a well-known gaming brand. However, when gamers started asking ChatGPT and Perplexity which headset to buy, SteelSeries wasn't among the answers.

You can rank on Google and still be invisible to the models that are making product recommendations for your customers, because traditional SEO and AI search visibility aren’t the same thing. Yes, there’s overlap, but not as much as you’d think.

SteelSeries figured this out, audited its content and product feeds for machine readability, and rebuilt its presence specifically for how AI platforms evaluate and cite brands.

Let’s get into how it was done. 🚀

McKinsey reports that half of consumers are now using AI-powered search, potentially impacting $750 billion in revenue by 2028. The shift from traditional search to AI recommendation engines is happening faster than most brands realize, making GEO a critical revenue defense strategy. [Source: McKinsey & Company]

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): How to Win in AI Search. As large language models (LLMs) change how people discover information and make decisions, GEO is how you ensure your brand and content show up in AI-generated answers. [Source: Backlinko] 

In a case study published by NoGood, SteelSeries partnered with the agency to execute a Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) strategy designed to turn AI search into a scalable revenue channel.

The problem NoGood and SteelSeries set out to solve is one most e-commerce brands will recognize: they were losing recommendation territory to competitors in conversational AI interfaces, despite dominating traditional search.

Standard SEO wasn’t giving them visibility when users asked ChatGPT for a specific product recommendation, and the answer turned out to be structural optimization.

Typical architecture for a GEO campaign of this kind draws on a short, well-established list of pillars, and understanding that list is useful regardless of which specific category a brand operates in.

The first step was acknowledging that AI models read content differently than humans or traditional search crawlers.

SteelSeries restructured its content specifically for how AI platforms evaluate and cite information. Instead of focusing purely on keyword density, they focused on entity-rich, authoritative content.

They mapped out the exact, conversational questions gamers were asking AI assistants about compatibility, comfort, latency, and specific use cases. Then, they structured their content to provide direct, factual, and easily extractable answers to those questions. When an LLM needed to recommend a headset for a specific scenario, SteelSeries had already provided the perfect, machine-readable answer.

When a user asks an AI to recommend a product, the AI needs to know the exact specifications, current price, and availability.

SteelSeries conducted a deep audit of its product feeds and Product Detail Pages (PDPs). They reviewed both the technical infrastructure and the content to ensure alignment with "agentic commerce" best practices. 

This meant ensuring that technical specs, compatibility matrices, and pricing data were structured in a way that LLMs could instantly parse and trust. If an AI model can't confidently extract your product data, it will recommend a competitor whose data is cleaner.

ChatGPT values social trust and conversational context, Perplexity prizes structured data and real-time citations, Gemini favors real-time expertise and Google ecosystem integration, and Claude respects legacy authority and deep, nuanced analysis.

SteelSeries optimized its presence across the board, ensuring their technical infrastructure and content strategy appealed to the unique citation behaviors and sourcing patterns of each major platform.

A major challenge in GEO is proving business value, as most brands treat AI visibility as a vanity metric because it's hard to track.

SteelSeries solved this by implementing real-time AEO monitoring and attribution, tracking how mentions translated into traffic and revenue.

By establishing a baseline in January 2025, they were able to measure the exact impact of their optimizations over the following 10 months, proving that AI visibility drives high-intent, high-converting traffic.

The numbers from this 10-month campaign were as follows:

By October 2025, AI traffic had grown 6.7x to over 1,500 daily visitors. More importantly, the conversion rates from this AI traffic exceeded their traditional search benchmarks, and SteelSeries ended up with an established, highly profitable new acquisition channel. 

Use this prompt with your preferred LLM to audit your own product pages for "agentic commerce" readiness, just like SteelSeries did.

The scenario:

You are the Head of E-commerce for a consumer brand. You want to know if your top-selling product page is structured in a way that an AI model can easily read, extract, and recommend. You’ve been tasked with evaluating the page strictly from the perspective of an AI search engine (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini).

The Prompt:

Act as an expert in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Agentic Commerce. I am going to provide you with the text and structured data from one of our core Product Detail Pages (PDPs).

Your task is to evaluate this page strictly from the perspective of an AI search engine (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini) that is trying to extract factual information to recommend to a user.

Current Situation:

We rank well in traditional search, but we are not being cited in AI recommendations for our core product categories, and we need to know if our product data is machine-readable and entity-rich.

[PASTE YOUR PDP TEXT AND ANY SCHEMA/STRUCTURED DATA HERE]

QUESTIONS

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What SteelSeries' 10-month campaign shows is that success comes from starting with a clear definition of the visibility problem you're trying to solve.

The underlying principles aren't new because marketers have spent years structuring information and making content easier to understand. 

What's changed is how search systems consume that information, and to gain visibility, your brand has to make it easy for machines to understand the brand, what it offers, and why it's relevant.

Until next time, keep exploring the horizon. 🌅

Alex Lielacher

P.S. If you want your brand to show up in Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, reach out to my agency, Rise Up Media. That's what we do!