Optimizely announces first GEO-ready CMS; future-proofs for AI-powered discovery

NEW YORK, July 29, 2025 – Optimizely, the leading digital experience platform (DXP) provider, today introduced the latest innovations to its CMS with new features designed to help increase discovery in the AI era. As AI redefines how people search and discover content, Optimizely is helping brands solve a problem they didn’t know they had: invisibility. Its newly enhanced CMS turns websites from content warehouses into visibility engines, built for discovery in the age of AI.

Online behavior is fundamentally shifting with website traffic predicted to drop 25% by 2026 as generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are increasingly used as a search engine. This shift has accelerated the need for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)—a new approach to structuring content so it can be surfaced, summarized, and selected by AI agents. To compete in this model, content must be trustworthy, machine-readable, and strategically structured.
 
“Your website isn’t broken—it’s just invisible,” said Shafqat Islam, President of Optimizely. “The entire business of model of the web is being upended, and how marketers generate demand or sell products is being transformed. Marketers need to make sure their websites serves two audiences – humans who demand speed and clarity, and machines that extract and summarize the content. If your CMS isn’t structured for AI discoverability, your content won’t be found. With the combination of our new CMS features and power of Optimizely Opal, we help brands move faster, create content smarter, and scale for a world where machines, not just people, are consuming your content.”

To ensure Optimizely’s CMS becomes a visibility engine for brands navigating a dual-audience world, it will include new capabilities across three core areas: page optimization, site-wide optimization, and GEO analytics.

Page Optimization: Make every page GEO-ready
To be surfaced in AI summaries, content must be well-structured, trustworthy, and machine-readable—down to each page. Optimizely supports better page optimization with:

• Q&A field generation – Auto-generates question-and-answer pairs based on page content

• GEO-specific metadata – Populates titles, descriptions, and EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) elements for generative engines

• Markdown summary generation – Injects page-level summaries for improved AI scanning and indexing

Site Optimization: Optimize for LLMs from the top-down
AI agents don’t browse—they scan. A top-down site structure ensures content gets indexed, summarized, and surfaced. Optimizely simplifies site-wide optimization with:

• llms.txt auto-generation – Automatically signals which pages should be indexed by LLMs and bots

• GEO topic templates – Generates topic-specific pages designed to rank in AI-generated summaries

• Bulk metadata population – Applies GEO metadata in bulk, including to existing content

GEO Analytics: Site performance tracking in the age of AI
AI agents are reading and referencing content, often without triggering a click. Optimizely brings visibility into this hidden layer with:

• GEO health index – Scores page against AEO and GEO best practices

• Crawl-to-refer ratio – Measures how often AI bots crawl a brand’s site vs. refer to your site

• Crawl rate by model – Shows which LLMs are hitting a brand’s site most frequently

As AI decides what gets seen before a click ever happens, content that isn’t structured for machines won’t make the cut. With Optimizely, marketers can now stay visible in a world where discovery starts with AI. To learn more about how Optimizely CMS helps brands prepare for the next wave of search, visit: www.optimizely.com/next-gen-search-optimization