How to master GEO and SEO content research with AI: 4 steps with examples

Does content research feel like a time thief? You're not alone. Spending hours finding target keywords and reading competitors can overwhelm you, and you may still wonder if your content will rank in traditional search engines or get referenced in AI search by generative engines.

That's where AI tools can be a serious time-saver.

A successful, scalable content strategy isn't just about blasting hundreds of robotic posts and hoping something sticks; a good content strategy does not mean publishing hundreds of robotic posts and hoping one works. It’s about using AI to streamline and supercharge everything that comes before you write a single word: SERP-based research, keyword analysis, and identifying topic gaps. This is the new frontier where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) meets Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

So if you want to speed up—or even skip—the tedious parts of the content research process, you're in the right place.

We'll show you how AI-powered writing and optimization platforms can transform your workflow, helping you create content that ranks, resonates, and gets referenced.

Let's dive in!

GEO & SEO research: The hidden time cost of AI content

A modern content strategy requires a dual focus: SEO for traditional search rankings and GEO for inclusion in AI-generated answers.

Why does some content drive high organic traffic and conversions while other articles fall flat?

In today’s evolving era of search, it’s not enough to have the best keywords for SEO or to write the best content. It’s not even enough to simply optimize for search engines with the rise of AI search. The most successful content is search engine optimized with keyword research, generative engine optimized by taking into account how AI engines operate, and generally well-written and high-value. Let’s break this down further.

Keyword research is the process of finding and filtering search terms with the goal of finding the easiest ranking opportunities. This involves comparing metrics such as the monthly search volume (MSV), number of links, and authority scores.

But that’s just the first step.

Even with a high volume and low competition, the top 3 organic search results still get over two thirds of the search volume according to First Page Sage. So how do posts outside page 1 start climbing ranks in the first place?

It boils down to creating more value than the top 3. SEO Content research is the process of efficiently answering the user search intent while overdelivering with additional, relevant knowledge. It’s a combination of methods such as:

• Covering more, if not all related topics in-depth
• Making the content more scannable and easier to explore
• Enriching content with data sources, images, infographics, tables, videos…
• Sharing unique examples and original research (e.g. expert quotes)
• Covering topic gaps revealed by user frequently asked questions

And then there’s the advent of generative search and optimization best practices for AI engines. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of optimizing your content so it surfaces in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Perplexity. It focuses on building authority, clarity, and structure to align with how generative engines retrieve and present information.

Today’s content creators need to not only continue with their existing SEO workflows, but they also need to follow GEO principles to achieve their organic traffic goals, especially seeing as Gartner predicts that by 2026, traditional search volume will decline by 25%, with organic search traffic falling by more than 50% as consumers shift toward AI-driven search experiences.

If this all feels a little overwhelming, that’s okay! We know you only have so much time in the day, so we are going to dive into one thing at a time, starting with Keyword Research!

(Looking for information on the other must-haves for successful content? You can check out our article on GEO here and dive into additional content on our blog.)

Let us ask you a question: Does your AI writer empower you to efficiently create a full-length, researched, and optimized article including these principles? It just doesn’t happen… Unless it was designed for AI content research and optimization like Frase. If you want to try it out, you can grab your free trial here (no credit cards).

Now, let’s start with the first building block of SEO keyword research.

How to do keyword research for AI content

Keyword planning is overlooked—you start with a search query, and then start drafting, right? But what if you don’t know what keywords to write about in the first place?

Well, you could buy technical tools like Ahrefs to discover all SEO metrics, which might be a bit overkill if you already know your target audience. If you just want to discover high demand topics, here are other methods to try:

1. The Niche Detective: Enter your niche or business model term into Frase. This reveals competitor posts and comparison keywords you might be overlooking.
2. The Problem Solver: Think of the problems your audience faces and the benefits your product or service delivers. Frase turns these insights into how-to content ideas.
3. The Topic Explorer: Plug in a broad keyword for discovery. Frase discovers related topics, user questions (Quora, PAA, SERPs), and even breaking news for fresh ideas.

(For keyword tracking, Frase also integrates with Google Search Console.)

Pro Tip: You can also use Google Trends to discover if the keyword relevance is fading or growing over time.

Once you have a potential keyword, look at the SERPs:

• Are there other long tail keywords (3 words or more)?
• Are there SERP features that can be improved (e.g. image packs, knowledge panels…)?
• Do the Top 10 results have low domain authority?

With these steps, you will know if the keyword is worth writing about before having to learn anything about the topic.

How to do SEO content research in 4 steps

Now that you know everything that goes into content research, let’s see how to speed this up with AI. So it’s more visual and clearer, we’ll be showing the steps on Frase. Here’s the free version if you want to follow along.

Step 1: Analyze Competitors with AI

Before you think about outranking competitors, let’s start with what you know is already working. Normally, you would have to go post by post, reading and taking notes. So what’s the AI shortcut?

When you enter your keyword in a Frase document, you’ll see all the content research in a sidebar:

Let’s say you’re writing about “lead generation.”

We went to Outline > Explore Headings to scan through all the structures of the top results and build your own in a few clicks. No need to go one by one. It’s all in one place, making your keyword research significantly faster.

Want even fewer steps? Select “Generate Headings with AI” and Frase will build the outline based on those competitors.

Pro Tip: Look at the rank and domain authority (DA) at the top. If a 50 DA website ranks in the top 3, above 90+ DA results, they likely have the best content to model.

Step 2: Uncover questions & keywords

High-demand topics tend to change with new keywords, news, and unanswered questions. The top search results may rank high but were likely written months ago. That’s why we don’t stop at competitive analysis.

But you don’t have time to browse through forums, so what’s the AI alternative?

First, start with the most searched questions (PAA):

Right below, you can go to “Generate Brief” and discover more related questions. Select all relevant boxes and you’ll find out within seconds:

Want even more ideas? You can go to Info Gain > Questions to see the most recent ones by source (SERPs, PAA, Quora, Reddit…):

To organize them, you can make two groups:

• Directly-related questions to answer in your core content
• Overly-specific questions to address on FAQs at the end

Now, you have enough data to effortlessly make the outline.

Step 3: Build a winning outline

As you’ve seen, there are different ways to structure your content:

• Choose headings directly from competitor outlines
• Generate it in the content brief (SERP tab)
• Generate it from the AI Wizard

Here’s how to customize your content structure with the outline explorer from before:

On the right, Frase generated a SERP-based outline in one click. You could also start from scratch by selecting headings on the left or typing them below.

Before adding more details:

• Scan the left results again for relevant headings you may have missed
• Scan the right AI outline to remove redundant or irrelevant topics
• See if you can include some of the user questions you found as headings

If you want to keep things simple, you could just go with the first outline and generate the content. But if you want the highest AI quality, that depends directly on the input (the prompts). The more specific, the better.

Luckily, Frase can generate its own prompts. “Generate instructions with AI” will do just that: Specific prompts for every headline, which you can then edit if needed.

With this H3 for example (inbound lead generation), the AI will write like an expert even if you know nothing about this topic.

Add the last details to the brief if they’re missing (e.g. PAA questions), and you’re ready to write.

Step 4: Guide content with research

You can stop at step 3 if you’re targeting keywords with low ranking difficulty. But if you want to not only outrank trusted sources but get more results down the line (e.g. subscription sign-ups), then do this next.

To stand out even more:

1. Add trusted sources to your content, either with citations or stats. You can find most of these at Info Gain > Stats with zero research work:

1. Add case studies and examples. The search algorithm rewards those who don’t just rehash information but expand with original points. And it keeps readers more engaged. You can easily add this to your post with a quick prompt:

Another example if you prefer using real case studies:

1. Repurpose your content into images and infographics. This is like a magnet for backlinks. It will gradually raise your domain authority so you can outrank 80+ DA giants more easily long-term. And yes, Frase can also help with image suggestions:

You could go to AI tools (left sidebar) and create a prompt like this. Then, from the inline editor, you select the text, type the AI Tool name, and it will do just that:

You can then pass this to your graphic design team or an AI image generator.

1. Lastly, craft a quick linking strategy with AI. Find external links to show Google that your content is based on trusted sources. Use internal links so that when your post is a massive success, you can redirect that traffic to other pages that are harder to rank.

Above, we asked Frase and it returned a few keywords with their linking strategy, again, based on the SERPs. More ideas for future content.

Now that you have a complete outline to guide the AI writer, let’s see what it looks like in action.

How to improve AI content with SEO research: 3 methods

First things first, if you want the most hands-off approach (fastest), there’s the “Rank-Ready Documents."

In a few clicks, Rank-Ready Documents take you from keyword to a fully developed article first draft, optimized for search engine best practices that will skyrocket you to the top of the rankings:

Want more control over the content development? Below are three methods:

#1 In-line AI editor for SERP-driven content

When you ask the AI in the in-line editor, there’s a toggle for search results:

With this option enabled, Frase will go out to the top SERPs, read the articles, and generate content based on that live data. It’s essentially a guarantee that the content will be relevant to Google because it appears in the highest-ranked pages.

And what if you only want to scan trusted pages? Turn off Search Results and paste the links with the prompt:

Or you can ask without links or search results if you want the writing to be more creative.

#2 Real-time SEO content scoring

How far is your content from being good enough? There’s a score that updates in real time to show you. Frase not only tracks your topic score in real time, but also your competitors’:

Whenever someone updates their posts, you will know.

This isn’t just a keyword score. It considers how complete your content is across all relevant topics. The higher, the better the chances of ranking.

For example, “lead generation” is full of pages like Hubspot with domain scores of 90+. But “leadfeeder.com,” a page with just ~50, ranks in the first position. According to Frase, it scores almost at 100, being one of the reasons it outperforms.

“Cognism.com” at #5 is a similar example. It confirms that new websites can rank for this query by making better content.

If your first generation on Frase doesn’t reach these scores, below is how to increase it.

#3 Optimize with keyword insights

While it’s not* a guaranteed ranking formula, the Optimize tab shows you what your content is missing:

If you want to include missing keywords:

1. Specific optimization: Find a section that you want to enrich, and then click keywords on the right to auto-paste them in a list. Highlight and write a prompt that rewrites it with the new keywords:

1. Generic SEO content optimization: Select sections and write a prompt like the one below to automatically add missing keywords, even if you don’t know which ones:

Do this for emptier sections to effortlessly raise your score. Keep in mind, however, that your content will sound more natural if it has a higher score from the start, hence the content research process.

One last thing you can do to complete your article is to look for topic gaps that others missed (Outline > Topics):

To add missing topics, you would copy the term and then ask Frase to either make it a section or include it on existing ones.

And now, you have all the tools to generate impactful content!

AI-powered research for content that converts

Unless the tool is built for content research, you may be stuck tweaking prompts for hours, discarding dozens of versions that simply don’t work. And when it’s good enough, you still don’t have the data to trust if it will perform or not.

As you’ve seen in this guide, Frase.io can fix that.

If you value speed, the AI Wizard can plan and write posts with a few clicks. If you prefer control, you can edit, AI-generate, and customize every step of the research process. You can go autopilot mode or copilot mode, or both.

Supercharge your content research with AI

For more information, see how Frase can automate your GEO and SEO Research here.

Sign up for Frase today and start scaling with research-based content that drives results.