GEO Strategy
Every marketing leader I speak to has seen the headlines around GEO by now, and is at the very least wondering how their brands can capitalise on this emerging, exciting opportunity to reach more prospective customers.
But where to start… That is where most teams are stuck. They accept that AI search matters in the abstract. They are far less sure whether it matters for their brand specifically, where it would sit alongside everything they already run, and whether now is the moment to spend real money and attention on it.
I have spent more than a decade in SEO and growth, and I have watched this pattern play out before with mobile, with social, and with video. A new channel arrives, the urgency is real, and the brands that win are rarely the ones that just move fastest.
They are the ones that work out early whether the channel fits them, then commit properly when it does. So this article is not a case for panic, and it is not a how-to. It is about three decisions: where generative engine optimisation belongs in your strategy, whether your brand is a good fit for it, and when to start investing.
What AI search actually means for your mix
Let’s define the terms simply. By “AI search” what we’re describing is the process of someone asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews a question and receiving an answer instead of a list of links. Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the practice of making sure your brand appears, and appears well, inside those answers.
The scale is worth sizing — because that’s where it gets exciting for marketers. McKinsey’s recent consumer research across the UK, Germany and France found that 84% of people now use AI tools in everyday life, and 38% already use them to research products and services or decide what to buy. McKinsey also estimates that agentic commerce, where AI agents help people discover and purchase, could account for three to five trillion dollars globally by 2030. This is not a fringe behaviour waiting to arrive. It is already in your customers’ hands.
The mistake I see leaders make is treating GEO as a replacement for everything that came before. It is not. It is a new surface in the discovery layer, sitting next to SEO, digital PR and content, drawing on many of the same foundations. The brands that adapt well treat it as an addition to the mix, not a wholesale swap.
Where GEO sits in a marketing strategy
Think of GEO as part of how people discover and shortlist you, the same job that organic search and earned media have always done. What changes is the mechanics of that discovery, and one shift in particular matters more than the rest.
In old search, visibility and traffic were close to the same thing. If you ranked, people clicked. In AI search, that link is broken. Pew Research tracked real browsing behaviour and found that when an AI summary appeared, people clicked through to a website only 8% of the time, against 15% when no summary was present. The links inside those summaries were clicked just 1% of the time. Ahrefs, looking across 300,000 keywords, saw clicks to the top result fall by around a third when an AI Overview appeared.
For a marketing leader, the implication is more important than the numbers. The job is no longer only to earn the click. It is to be the answer, and to be named and recommended inside it, whether or not anyone visits your site. That reframes what you measure. Presence in AI answers, share of voice against competitors, and how you are described become the leading indicators, sitting upstream of the traffic and conversion metrics you already track. GEO is both a visibility channel and a measurement discipline, and it needs to be treated as both.
How to tell if your brand has channel-market fit with GEO
Here is the part the headlines skip. AI search does not matter equally for every brand. Before you build a programme, work out whether your brand has genuine channel-market fit with it. I assess that across five dimensions.
- Decision complexity. Do your buyers research before they commit? Considered, high-value, regulated or comparison-heavy purchases are a strong fit, because people ask questions an AI can answer. Pure impulse or habitual purchases are a weaker fit.
- Audience adoption. Are your actual customers already using AI to research your category? This is measurable rather than a matter of opinion, and it is the single most useful thing to establish early.
- Information-shaped demand. Can the answer to “which option is right for me” be written down? Categories built on comparisons, eligibility, suitability and “is this worth it” questions suit answer engines.
- Authority and citation surface. Do you have content and third-party coverage that models can draw on and quote, or are you currently invisible to them?
- Economics. Can you invest a little ahead of perfect attribution? Healthy margins and longer sales cycles make that easier to justify, because the payoff compounds over time.
A simple way to turn those into a decision is to plot two things against each other: how often AI answers already appear for your category’s important questions, and how visible you currently are inside them. That gives you four positions:
- Invest now. AI answers are common in your category, but you are barely present. This is where the biggest opportunity and the biggest risk sit together.
- Defend. Answers are common and you are already visible. Protect the position, and keep an eye on competitors closing the gap.
- Monitor. Answers are rare and you are absent. Keep a cheap watch on the category and put your effort elsewhere for now.
- Maintain. Answers are rare but you are visible. Little to do beyond holding what you already have.
The data shows how unevenly this falls. In B2B, the case is strong: 6sense’s latest study of around 4,000 buyers found that 94% now use large language models during their buying process, and that buying groups settle on a preferred vendor before they ever contact a supplier, then buy from that early favourite roughly 80% of the time. Forrester recorded generative AI adoption among buyers rising from almost nothing at the start of 2024 to 89% within six months. On the consumer side, Adobe’s 2025 holiday data showed AI-referred retail traffic up 693% year on year, but the increase was far from uniform: travel rose 539%, financial services 266%, technology 120% and media 92%. Synchrony found that 56% of shoppers used generative AI over the same season, a third of them to compare products.
The honest conclusion is that some brands should not prioritise GEO yet. If you are a local service business, or you sell on impulse and loyalty rather than research, or your category simply does not surface in AI answers, you are better off monitoring cheaply and putting your effort elsewhere. I would rather tell a client that than sell them a programme they do not need. Knowing where you sit is the point of the exercise.
When to start investing
If you do have fit, timing is the next question. A few signals tell you the moment has arrived. AI answers are already appearing for the queries that matter to your revenue. Competitors are being named in those answers and you are not. AI referrals are starting to show up in your analytics. Your sales or customer teams are hearing from people who arrived already informed, sometimes citing what an assistant told them. Any two of these together is a clear sign to act.
The cost of waiting is easy to underestimate. The 6sense finding is the one I would put in front of any board: buyers lock in a preferred vendor before they make contact, and that vendor wins most of the time. If an AI assistant is shaping the shortlist and your brand is not on it, you are losing the deal before your funnel ever sees it. Given how quickly adoption moved, the window to establish presence is narrower than it looks.
The counterweight matters too. Do not over-invest where fit is low. If your category rarely appears in AI answers, a heavy programme is premature. Watch it, keep your content and reputation in good order, and redirect the budget. Restraint, applied deliberately, is part of the strategy.
What “ready” looks like
Ready does not mean all-in. For most brands it means a sequence. First, measure: get a clear baseline of how visible you are in AI answers today, and how that compares to your competitors. You cannot make the investment call without it, whatever the answer turns out to be. Second, assess fit using the five dimensions above. Third, invest where fit is high and the signals are flashing, and hold where they are not.
That first step, measurement, is the one I would not skip regardless of where you land.
Where AI visibility tracking with reconnAI fits
This is the gap we built reconnAI to close. Most of the decisions in this article depend on something marketing leaders rarely have to hand: a clear, current picture of how their brand actually shows up in AI answers. reconnAI gives you that picture, and it earns its place at three points in the journey.
When you are deciding whether to invest, it turns the fit question into evidence. Rather than guessing whether your audience uses AI in your category, you can see how often AI answers appear for the questions that matter to you, how visible you already are inside them, and where your competitors sit. That is the difference between a hunch and a case you can take to the board.
reconnAI tracks your AI visibility and share of voice across the major answer engines, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, and breaks the picture down by market, so you can see not only whether you are present but where you are winning and losing. It shows which sources are being cited, how your brand is described, and where rivals are pulling ahead while you are still deciding.
And because AI search is largely zero-click, it keeps the investment accountable. You cannot lean on traffic to prove this channel is working, so you need leading indicators: presence, share of voice and citations, tracked over time. Those are what let you report progress with confidence, and turn GEO from an act of faith into a managed channel. Measurement is the part that makes everything else defensible.
When you are ready to act on what you find, the practical build — baselining, mapping the landscape, and working on citations and content — is a separate piece of work. I have written that up in detail in our guide to building a GEO strategy from the ground up, which is the natural next step once this decision is made.
The real question
The brands that get this right are not the ones that panicked at the Gartner stat. They are the ones that asked the harder question first: not whether AI search is coming, but whether it is coming for them, and what they intend to do about it.
Frequently asked questions
Is GEO replacing SEO?
No. It is a new surface in the same discovery layer, and it shares many foundations with SEO. Treat it as an addition to your mix, not a replacement.
Do I need GEO if I run a local business?
Often not as a priority. If your customers rarely turn to AI to find you, monitor the channel cheaply and put your effort where your buyers actually are.
How is GEO different from SEO?
SEO works to earn a click from a results page. GEO works to make your brand the answer, and to be named and recommended inside AI responses, whether or not anyone visits your site.
How do I know if it is working?
The leading indicators are your visibility in AI answers, your share of voice against competitors, and how you are described, measured over time. All of these metrics can be tracked in reconnAI. Traffic and conversion follow from those.
Matt Johnson
Co-founder, reconnAI