As the industry debates the rise of generative engine optimization, Callum Dolan argues that if you don’t have the basic foundations of digital marketing, no amount of GEO hacks will improve your brand awareness or digital discoverability.
All the talk is of the decline of SEO and the rise of GEO. We’re being told to forget traffic volume and click-through rates – these are just vanity metrics in an AI world. What matters now is authority, citation, and trust signals.
Gartner optimistically predicts that by 2026, traditional search engine volume will drop by 25% as more of us turn to AI-powered tools for answers. And Google’s AI Overviews will likely appear in 70% to 80% of results by 2027.
With traditional SEO, it’s been about dominating the SERP to maximize the real estate for your brand to drive clicks. With GEO – generative engine optimization – it’s about optimizing your content so AI tools can understand, summarize, and cite it when generating answers for users.
But while the adoption of AI assistants and agents has been little short of explosive, we’ve actually been moving towards AI in search for a while now. Search is powered by AI and what’s driving it – and has been for several years – is authoritative content, demonstrable expertise and recognized, trusted brands. GEO takes this shift to the next stage in our AI journey.
Optimize for the new world of discovery
While SEO will no longer be the main driver for discovery, GEO is far from being in pole position, as it currently makes up a very small proportion of the total search landscape. So, does this mean you need to have both an SEO and a GEO strategy? No, you need to optimize for discoverability. That’s the evolving world of AI discovery and all the places your audience spend their time and seek out recommendations and advice in the ever-expanding digital ecosystem. Optimizing for AI discovery means increasing the supply of contextually relevant information about your brand to maximize its ‘AI availability’.
GEO might sound frighteningly new, but it’s mostly reinforcing existing SEO fundamentals; or put another way, punishing you harder for not having them. Despite what some people – keen to sell you a shiny new toy – might be saying, GEO hasn’t introduced a brand-new set of rules; it’s exposing all the things marketers should have been doing for years. Structured data, fresh content, brand trust, clear storytelling, user validation, demonstrable value/advantage, and consistent authority are more important than ever.
Your products can’t hide anymore
GEO accelerates an ongoing shift: algorithms now auto-compare products on every dimension, leaving brands with far less room to hide weaknesses. With LLMs, all product claims are brutally fact-checked in nanoseconds. Generative answers highlight the best match, making pricing more transparent and exposing even the smallest product gaps.
This means that marketers must make product specs, data, and attributes crystal clear. Value propositions must be grounded in facts and validated by your community of users. And all points of difference must be things the algorithm can see and understand, as well as being super clear for humans.
Your brand is more important than ever
In a world where AI assistants and agents auto-compare every piece of available information, your brand actually becomes more important, not less. Once all the rational differences are normalized, the reputational differentiators grow in relative importance. The algorithm relies on trust signals, which are heavily brand-led. If ChatGPT shows three products with nearly identical specs, the final choice comes down to issues fundamental to brand equity. And this is as much about doing the right digital marketing activities to drive brand preference with humans as it is about serving the algorithm with trust and quality signals. Selling becomes hard, if not impossible, when people don’t know your brand, and a hell of a lot more profitable when they do.
You need a unified approach to content marketing
Consumer insight has always underpinned effective marketing. But with GEO, audience understanding goes deeper into human understanding – anticipating interests, needs, and questions. And as there is nowhere to hide in AI discovery, this understanding must be reflected in a consistent approach across all forms of digital content. Discovery and influence have always worked best when owned, earned, and paid content are strategically aligned. Again, GEO puts a greater spotlight on this.
The issue of paid search is less clear
But this spotlight is not necessarily revealing a clear picture when it comes to paid search. Ads are a critical part of Google’s revenue, so they’re here to stay, even if traditional search is in decline. As click-through dynamics change, we will no doubt see more ads appear in AI Mode. Brands that have built up an effective paid strategy will need to rethink how they appear in the conversational and generative layers of search. What the new paid formats will look like and how bidding and measurement will evolve is still somewhat of an unknown.
What should you do right now?
Much of the discussion about what you do to embrace the new AI discovery has leapt straight into the technical details of GEO best practice. It’s all good stuff, but you first have to assess whether you are really getting the basics of modern SEO and digital marketing right.
It’s understandable to want to chase the shiny newness of GEO, but your time and budget should first be spent sorting out your digital foundations. Getting your brand marketing right is critical. Are you clear on how your brand is perceived, ie how it resonates across digital touchpoints?
AI is now a vital consideration – and will only become more so – but the wider digital ecosystem is cluttered and presents a plethora of touchpoints. To successfully navigate this and AI-driven discovery, you have to know your customers like never before. You have to know where they’re spending their time online and that you’re targeting these places efficiently and effectively, through engaging creative and messaging that resonates.
Take this moment as an important opportunity to review your full digital discoverability. Ensuring strong EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) signals will fundamentally push you to do all the things that will help you get in front of your customers, be that through AI or beyond. If you don’t have the basic foundations of digital best practice, no amount of GEO hacks will improve your brand awareness, trust perceptions, and digital discoverability.
