Why Memetic is so interested in Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)

By David Lewis, Memetic Founder

Anyone who knows me knows I’m not usually one to jump on a bandwagon. I like calm well-planned strategy over grasping for shiny things.

But I am rather excited about Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) – the practice of making companies discoverable and recommendable to GenAI-driven search.

To understand why, let me take you back to the start.

Solving the 'too much bad content' problem

When I started Memetic, I had a theory. Maybe you’d even call it a vision. It went something like this: Most B2B content is rubbish, and it would be better if it wasn’t.

No one wanted it to be rubbish of course. But incentives conspired against good content.

SEO incentivised companies to hack the algorithm, stuffing banal ‘owned’ content with keywords that made it unreadable.

The rise of clickthrough-funded online media incentivised journalists – and the PRs who fed them stories – to write lots of short clickbait articles, offering controversial views and headline-grabbing stats.

But – I believed then and still believe today – most people don’t actually like this content – addictive though it may be. Business decision-makers in particular don’t like it. They want insight to help them understand a complex world. They decide whether to trust an organisation based on whether they see it as having expertise.

How we planned to change communications (and why we only partially succeeded)

In 2019 I set out to change this by starting Memetic, an agency that would help science and engineering companies build reputations for quality, by creating content that gave their senior customers real insights.

And many organisations – from Capgemini Engineering to FTSE 100-listed Croda, to innovators like Connected Kerb and Levidian, to research organisations like Imperial and the National Physical Laboratory – have bought into this vision over the past six years.

But the incentives were never really on our side. Media and algorithms and social media favoured a churn that kept large audiences ‘engaged’ (clicking), not thoughtful targeted insight that gave a few important people a solution to a thorny challenge.

And so others thrived who could churn out content and coverage that was seen by lots of people but didn’t say anything useful to them. Memetic stayed small and specialised, doing fascinating work for the incredibly innovative organisations. Which I was perfectly happy with.

But, I have a sneaking suspicion GenAI means things could be about to change. And our experience with quality, expert-led content means we just might be the best-placed agency in the UK to help.

The incentives are changing towards quality content and PR, thanks to GenAI.

What’s changing is that people are using GenAI for recommendations, information, and to evaluate organisations they might work with.

And GenAI values quality.

When returning answers, GenAI looks for depth, accuracy, and deep subject matter expertise. It wants content that uses expert language. It likes detailed technical explainers, clear case studies and thought leadership (just ask it if you don’t believe me). This is exactly the sort of content we set out to create.

It values this on your own website when making an assessment, but it values it even more if that same content is published on an authoritative source.

Authoritative! The FT, not the Daily Mail. The Engineer, not Buzzfeed. It’s exactly the sort of PR we have done for organisations from the Fusion Industry Association to RAICo.

Will GEO create a more informed world?

So GEO feels good because it is what we set Memetic up to do. A GEO strategy – programmes of well-told technology stories and thought leadership – is what we offered even before GEO was a thing (ok, we have made a few tweaks to calibrate things for the LLM world, but the fundamentals were there).

And I’m not just optimistic about Memetic’s prospects. I think this could be good for the quality of information more generally.

If companies are incentivised to create informative, accurate content, they will do that. If one good piece of thought leadership has more sway than five quick blogs on a question like ‘which engineering company leads the way in data centre water management’, then it makes sense to spend the time on that one good piece. Quantity could go down. Quality could go up.

And as we settle into this new world, media quality could improve too. PRs will need to focus more on quality publications. Those same sites will recognise their value. They may charge LLMs to crawl their pages – with higher quality commanding a higher premium. More investment in quality journalism could follow.

This is perhaps part of a wider change that was happening anyway. Google has been trying for a while to change SEO to favour ‘helpful content’. LinkedIn is promoting insightful articles within niches, and demoting intentionally viral content.

Content-wise, it may be that we have finally reached the bottom of the barrel, and are beginning to climb out.

And if that is true, it could be a good time to be an agency that was founded on helping companies build trust and authority through quality, accurate, insightful content and PR.