How audiobook discovery is changing – and what I'm building with Fabely.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is about how content becomes visible and understandable in a search experience that no longer just returns a list of links.
Classic SEO makes sure a website gets found by search engines. GEO goes a step further: content also needs to be understandable, accessible and citable for systems like ChatGPT, Claude and other AI-based search and answer engines.
I work on this topic mainly in the context of Fabely, an audiobook platform and community built around a large, multilingual audiobook catalog. This isn't about building a dedicated AI chatbot for Fabely. The more interesting question for me is how a large, international audiobook catalog can be structured and enriched with context so that audiobooks stay relevant in future forms of search and discovery.
Classic search follows a simple pattern: a user types a query, the search engine returns results, and the user decides which result to follow.
Generative search shifts that pattern. Users ask more complex questions and increasingly expect a coherent answer rather than a list of links. The system therefore doesn't just need to find matching content — it needs to understand relationships and connect sources with each other.
This is especially interesting for audiobooks. Questions like "Which audiobooks fit my mood right now?" or "Which stories have a similar atmosphere to …?" can't be answered by genre, author or publisher metadata alone.
Search
↓
Search + Recommendation
↓
Conversation
↓
Answer + Recommendation
A single product record with title, author and ISBN can identify an audiobook — but it only explains to a limited degree why that audiobook might be relevant to a specific question. Context comes from curated lists, descriptions, recommendations, reviews and the different perspectives of a community. For me, this breaks down into five aspects:
That combination is, to me, the interesting part of GEO — and the bridge to Fabely's lists and the discovery graph built on top of them.
Fabely is a practical use case for exactly this: a large, multilingual audiobook catalog combined with a community for discovery, recommendations and curated lists.
An audiobook page doesn't just hold bibliographic data. Artist pages, audiobook lists, descriptions, reviews, recommendations and cross-links create additional relationships between titles, topics, authors, narrators and interests.
For me, that extra layer is what matters most: discovery doesn't come from an audiobook's title alone, but from the context in which people find and recommend it.
Author
│
Topic ─────── Audiobook ─────── Narrator
│ │
List ────── Recommendation ── Community
│
Context
On Wednesday, October 7, 2026, from 1:00–1:30 PM, I'll be speaking at Frankfurter Buchmesse on the Imagination Stage (Hall 4.0, Booth J85) about:
"From Search to Conversation: Audiobook Discoverability and the AI Customer Journey"
The talk covers the shift from classic search to more complex queries, AI-driven answers and new forms of audiobook discovery — and the role that content, context and community play in that shift. The topic is closely tied to my work on Fabely and the approaches to discovery, GEO and community we've developed there.
View the session on the Buchmesse calendar: "From Search to Conversation" →
My hands-on work on Fabely has turned into a more detailed whitepaper. It covers the evolution of audiobook discovery, GEO, the role of context and trust, vertical communities, and the concept of a Fabely Discovery Graph.
The full whitepaper will be available on Fabely after publication.
Coming soon on Fabely.
To me, GEO isn't simply "SEO for ChatGPT." It's about how content gets structured, linked and given context so it still works in a world where users no longer just search for documents, but ask questions and expect answers.
An audiobook can be discovered in completely different ways depending on context. A list like "Strong Women," "Audiobooks for Fans of …," or a themed recommendation each creates a different relationship between a title and a user's question. These additional layers of context are exactly what will matter for future audiobook discovery. Two examples from my own Fabely lists: