When AI shops, will it choose your brand?

Forget the smart fridge and its auto-ordering feature. The real story is this: when an AI assistant auto-reorders supplies, procures a vendor, or answers “what’s the best option?”, it’s already choosing without you in the room. It doesn’t ask for a list. It doesn’t compare side by side. It picks. And what it picks comes down to structure, clarity, and machine-readability. The most understandable brand, not the loudest and not the prettiest, is the one that gets through.

Welcome to GEO, Generative Engine Optimization

Traditional SEO got you found. GEO gets you chosen. It’s not about climbing rankings or earning clicks. It’s about inclusion, being selected in an AI-generated answer. That might mean a product suggestion in ChatGPT, a service summary in Gemini, or a mention in Alexa’s response. The terms vary - GEO, AIO, AEO - but the principle is the same: if AI is shaping consumer choices, your brand needs to be part of the data that informs those choices. Because when a user asks “what’s the best air purifier” or “which running shoes are good for flat feet,” the machine doesn’t return a list of links. It returns a recommendation. When it serves up one brand, will it be yours?

Search is now a conversation, not a list

The old search model rewarded technical SEO, keywords, metadata, backlinks, etc. You optimized to climb the rankings. But every behavioral shift has changed the rules: mobile-first indexing, local intent, voice search, snippets. The latest shift is the biggest yet. Users no longer want pages, they want answers. Summaries. Context. Direction. And AI tools are doing the interpreting. That means your job as a marketer isn’t just to make content that ranks, it’s to make content that informs the models, earns their trust, and makes your offering understandable and usable in the flow of a conversation. GEO isn’t a channel. It’s the terrain.

Why structure still matters

AI systems are trained on the open web. That means the structure, clarity, and semantics of your content still matter, but now for different reasons. Schema markup, clear headings, Q&A formats, labeled visuals, these aren’t just SEO best practices anymore. They’re the signals AI uses to understand and interpret what your brand does. The same content you once wrote for crawlers is now informing models.

This is already happening, and the numbers prove it

We recently helped a major global brand uncover over 2,000 visits in a single month that originated from AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. That’s just the visible tip of a much larger pattern. With AI click-through rates estimated around 1–5%, it means there were tens of thousands of conversations happening inside AI interfaces, conversations where their name came up, even if no one clicked through.

But GEO isn’t just about tracking. It’s about shaping those outcomes. We’re working with this client to identify long-term opportunities and quick wins, from introducing structured data at scale across product pages to unlocking previously invisible formats like PDFs, FAQs, and support content.

For another brand, we focused on a full content overhaul: rewrite core copy, introducing new content tracks, and launching large-scale FAQ strategy designed to align with how AI tools parse and respond to user questions.

We're not just optimizing pages, we’re making them indexable, interpretable, and AI-ready. Some of those changes drive immediate visibility gains. Others, like transforming their content ecosystem for machine readability, lay the foundation for future AI integrations like branded chatbots. The result? A presence that’s not just findable, but selectable, understandable, and recommendation-ready.

When AI makes a recommendation, it isn’t looking at your brand colors or your homepage video. It’s parsing for clarity: well-structured product info, logical relationships between topics, clear claims, trustworthy tone. It favors content that reads like it was written by an expert for a curious reader, and it tends to ignore content that’s vague, overly salesy, or hard to parse. The brands that win are the ones that communicate simply, directly, and thoroughly. Not the ones with the biggest ad budget.

Where to start with GEO

There’s no magic tag or instant fix, but there is a playbook. Start by making your content machine-readable: use structured data,. embrace Q&A formats that mirror how people ask (and how AI responds), use citations, show depth, sound like a subject-matter expert. Link related topics and define clear entities. Treat every page like something an AI might learn from, because it will. And most importantly, start tracking how, where, and if AI is mentioning your brand. Tools are emerging to help, and early movers already have an advantage.

GEO is not optional.

This isn’t a marketing fad. It’s the next evolution of digital visibility. GEO isn’t a channel you invest in for performance metrics, it’s an environment your brand either lives in or doesn’t. AI assistants, search companions, chatbots, they’re already shaping decisions. If your brand isn’t clearly represented, it’s not part of the choice set. And unlike traditional marketing, this isn’t about being loud. It’s about being clear. Machine-readable. Trustworthy. Answer-ready.