This summer, the PR agency Bospar was preparing a major announcement for its client, the AI computer vision company RealSense, when it discovered an awkward problem.
When Bospar asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot for information about RealSense, each one provided a version of the same answer: RealSense was no longer in business.
In reality, the company was on the verge of announcing a spin-out from its parent, Intel, and a $50 million funding round. How could RealSense get top-tier press coverage if the leading AI tools had already written its obituary?
“There’s no 1-800 number for ChatGPT if there’s an error,” said Curtis Sparrer, principal at Bospar.
About half of US consumers are using AI-powered search to evaluate and discover brands, per a recent McKinsey report. In this new era, Google — which has introduced its own AI search features — still dominates the overall search market, responsible for roughly 90% of global search engine traffic, according to Cloudflare.
As the nature of search begins to shift, businesses from travel companies to clothing brands are racing to ensure they show up prominently — and accurately — inside these answer engines.
This story is one of a five-part series exploring the changing online search landscape and its impact on consumers, media companies, advertisers, and tech platforms.
Stay tuned for:
- A guide to your search options if you’re tired of Google
- Google after Google: How the search giant is disrupting itself
The trend has spawned a cottage industry. Former experts on SEO (search engine optimization) are now declaring themselves gurus of GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization).
LinkedIn and Meta feeds are flooded with ads from startups, agencies, and consultants saying they have a formula to boost visibility on top AI platforms. There’s a huge market for the taking: only around 16% of brands systematically track their AI search performance, according to McKinsey.
The search shifts have also sparked a fierce debate: Can GEO and AEO experts actually deliver on their promises?
“Everyone is going crazy about becoming the next agency — all the side hustlers and snake oil sellers with their tools already on the train and riding the hype,” said Kai Spriestersbach, an applied AI researcher, web scientist, and SEO veteran.
Business Insider spoke with SEO experts and three of the top AI search platforms — Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity — to investigate what content optimization looks like in the age of AI. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
The takeaway: Some GEO techniques can help brands boost their visibility in AI-generated answers, but these gains may be fleeting in a fast-changing space where models are constantly retrained and updated. In some ways, GEO is a new label for companies’ existing brand-building strategies, which involve a mix of maintaining good website hygiene, a solid PR strategy, and traditional paid advertising to help boost consumer awareness.
One AI visibility tracking tool, Lorelight, recently shut down, with its founder saying that there was no such thing as a “GEO strategy” separate from brand building, at least for large companies.
“There’s going to be a lot of people who benefit from implying that they’re very good at GEO. And then there’s going to be a lot of tech companies, specifically AI companies, who benefit from saying that it’s all hogwash,” said Jesse Dwyer, head of communications at Perplexity. “The reality is always somewhere in between.”
GEO vs. SEO
SEO, which is largely focused on Google search, refers to the practice of designing web pages and securing links from quality sites to help your brand rank highly on search engine results pages.
The SEO industry is built on more than 25 years of study, experimentation, and some disclosures from the search giants themselves about how the ranking algorithms work. But there are key differences between GEO and SEO.
For starters, the GEO world has far less historical data to build its assumptions on. For traditional search, practitioners can draw on tools like the Google Search Console to see how their sites appear in search results and Google Trends to identify trending terms. AI platforms keep this sort of data much closer to the vest, beyond the occasional blog post, such as a recent study from OpenAI that found people were largely using ChatGPT for everyday tasks, including help with writing and tech support.
“You don’t know how people are looking for brands and services right now,” within AI chats, Spriestersbach said.
There’s also the personalization factor. The front page of traditional search generally looks the same for everyone, though Google offers options to tailor results. Now, companies must try to make their brands shine in unique and deeper conversational searches. Answers can vary wildly for different users based on how they’ve configured their preferences and their chat histories.
Further complicating things: Platforms are regularly retraining their models, which can dramatically change how a brand shows up from one day to the next, said Tim de Rosen, cofounder of GEO auditing firm AIVO Standard.
While many GEO companies offer services like dashboards that analyze a subset of user prompts, most of what’s being measured isn’t reproducible. The different ways users ask questions and how models respond — plus the data they’re drawing from — are all in a constant state of flux, de Rosen said, which makes results “inherently unstable.”
The platform view
Major platforms say the key principles of SEO still apply in the age of AI. Similar to SEO, AI systems rely on fresh, highly ranked, and trustworthy content, said Krishna Madhavan, principal product manager for Microsoft Bing.
“Be skeptical of shortcuts,” he said.
Danny Sullivan, director at Google Search, said any GEO tools that advise designing content solely for rank and visibility purposes lose “track of the big picture.”
“Are you doing things that are useful for human beings?” he said. “That’s what we want to reward.”
Sullivan shared an example of popular advice from SEO/GEO experts that could soon go stale: that large language models favor bite-sized content.
“Maybe they’ve seen that this seems to work in some edge cases in some places,” but the model will inevitably change, he said. “All that work you did to please the system may not carry through to the long term.”
What is new, Madhavan of Bing said, is that companies must think about optimizing for inclusion in a synthesized answer, rather than simply a list of links on a search results page.
“Think beyond keywords to user intent, question‑answer structure, and machine‑readable cues that make your content easy to parse,” Madhavan said.
How companies are navigating GEO
As the GEO industry takes shape, companies are proceeding with caution and seeking guidance from multiple practitioners.
Vineet Mehra, CMO of fintech company Chime, said marketers often make the mistake of working with one tool or agency.
“We try to use multiple companies to create a little bit of competition,” he said. “You see who’s going to customize their product road map for you, who is innovating faster than the other.”
The PR agency Bospar also determined that bringing together a patchwork of solutions was better than relying on a single consultant or GEO platform. They ultimately traced RealSense’s premature “death” to a 2021 news article that had misrepresented a restructuring, which then snowballed when it was discussed on platforms like Reddit — an important source of content for training large language models.
Bospar sought a correction from the original publication and made changes on RealSense’s website, including an FAQ section addressing the closure rumor. The agency also encouraged RealSense executives to actively participate in trending robotics and AI conversations on social media to demonstrate their thought leadership.
While AI visibility tools like dashboards are in their infancy, Bospar’s tactics should be familiar to anyone handling a company’s reputation in the digital era.
“It’s pretty early days in GEO and AEO for anyone to raise their hands and declare themselves as an expert,” Bospar’s Sparrer said. “I think that’s a little rich at this point considering how new the science is.”
Here are some key pieces of GEO advice from Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity
Google:
Sullivan said the core principles of SEO generally apply to new forms of AI search.
“Plenty of sites succeed because they don’t do SEO, or hire SEOs,” Sullivan said. “They don’t think about it because they’re just focused on making great content.”
General website and structured data hygiene always make sense, ensuring Google’s search crawlers can actually get to the relevant content, Sullivan said, especially as AI answers still have a lot of traditional search results at their core.
AI formats are also getting better at multi-modal queries — a user might ask “what’s in this video?” for example.
“If you’ve still been a text-only kind of player, more images and videos may help you. But they would have helped you anyway,” Sullivan said.
Microsoft:
Madhavan said the fundamentals of SEO are still critical, including structure and freshness signals that make content easier for AI to consume. This includes using Q&A sections, sitemaps, and schema, a code that helps search engines understand your site, as well as adopting IndexNow, a protocol that lets search engines know when your site changes.
Stylistically, Krishna also suggests lists and tables instead of long walls of text, and advises keeping punctuation simple, including avoiding em dashes and symbols.
Perplexity:
With the shift from SEO to GEO, “the biggest mistake you can make is to just try and transfer your understanding apples to apples,” Dwyer said — and a lot of the companies offering GEO services are doing just that.
Dwyer said he’s also been advising marketers that AI search will shift budgets toward old-fashioned brand marketing. AI removes the “friction” of search and lets people buy things just by asking for them. As a result, building a strong brand will become increasingly important, he said.
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