From SEO to GEO: How women’s health brands can get found in the age of AI

By Martin Piria, senior machine learning engineer at Ema

Search has changed.

For years, Women’s Health companies have invested in SEO, optimising their websites so Google would surface their content.

But now, as consumers increasingly ask health questions directly to AI like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Ema, or Claude, a new frontier is emerging for brands that want to market their women’s health product or service: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

Here’s how women’s health brands should think about GEO today.

GEO ≠ SEO — But They Overlap

Think of it like this:

• Google vs Bing: Searching on Bing doesn’t influence what you see on Google.
• LLMs vs Search: Similarly, what OpenAI scrapes to train its models isn’t connected to how Anthropic’s model is built. Each AI has its own training architecture and knowledge base.

SEO remains critical because most grounding searches still pull from Google.

But GEO adds a new layer: how your content is scraped, stored, and tokenized by large language models.

What LLMs “Love”

LLMs aren’t people. They’re statistical machines predicting the next token. To show up inside them, your content needs to be:

• LLM-friendly HTML: Clean, semantic code that models can parse.
• Fact highlights: Clear, authoritative statements that models can confidently repeat.
• Structured links & references: High-authority citations that reinforce your credibility.
• Accessible APIs: Easy integrations for platforms like Bing, Perplexity, or Google’s SGE.

You need to learn which tokens trigger what generations in the LLM.

Tokens that the model has well-modeled won’t go to the web. You want tokens where the model has low confidence, and you want to be the first hit when it grounds the answer.

How to Spot “Weak Tokens”

Weak tokens are concepts or queries where the model has low confidence and goes searching the web for reinforcement. That’s your opportunity.

If your Women’s Health company creates the most authoritative, well-structured page on that concept, you become the go-to reference.

Pro tip: Ask ChatGPT (or another LLM) to generate an answer in your space, then look for where it hesitates, says “I don’t know,” or provides shallow coverage.

Those are your GEO goldmines.

Action Steps for Women’s Health Brands

• Keep building SEO: Traditional search still drives discovery and traffic.
• Audit your content for LLM-friendliness: Is your HTML semantic? Are facts highlighted clearly? Do you have structured data?
• Target underserved queries: Use AI tools to test what’s missing from LLM answers in your domain.
• Be the first grounding result: For low-confidence tokens, make sure you’re the top hit on Bing, Perplexity, and Google.
• Think prevention-first: Just as we design Ema to prioritize safety and clarity, your content should be structured, factual, and easy to cite.

Resources to Go Deeper

• GPT-3 Linguistics 101 (Medium) — a great breakdown of how tokens and vocabularies work in LLMs.
• Research from AI marketing leaders on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
• Technical guides on schema markup and structured data for SEO, which often doubles as LLM-friendly content.

The Bottom Line for Women’s Health

• Clarity + authority = visibility. The more accessible and trustworthy your content, the more likely LLMs will surface it.
• Your opportunity: Make your Women’s Health brand the voice that AI turns to when women ask critical questions. SEO found you on Google. GEO will get you found inside the conversations that matter next.

Find out more about Ema at emaapp.co