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Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is quickly becoming one of the most talked-about topics in comms and, as such, businesses everywhere are rightly concerned about whether their brand shows up well in an AI response to a relevant prompt.
However, at the recent Brands2Life AI Hub panel discussion, marketing and comms leaders from Hitachi, LinkedIn, Vitality and Brands2Life explained why that thinking is becoming too narrow:
GEO isn’t simply changing how a brand appear in search, but on ensuring that AI positions it in the right way. And, where appropriate, is recommending it above other brands based on its understanding and interpretation.
So, as AI-generated answers increasingly shape customer perception, the stakes are becoming much bigger than visibility and rankings alone.
Here are six of the biggest takeaways from that discussion.
Traditional SEO focuses on rankings, keywords, clicks and traffic. GEO shifts the focus towards authority, trust, citations and narrative consistency.
‘SEO optimises for rankings. GEO optimises for answers.’
That distinction matters because AI systems don’t simply retrieve information; they synthesise it. This means that instead of directing users towards a list of links, LLMs increasingly create their own summaries and recommendations based on multiple sources.
Nice and convenient for the user, but not so useful for the brand, as they are no longer just competing for visibility: they’re competing to shape the narrative AI constructs about them.
One of the most urgent issues discussed centred around how AI is fundamentally changing customer behaviour and, as a result, has the potential for having the largest impact on brands.
Historically, online, buyers searched, browsed, compared and researched across multiple websites, which they’d back up with peer and customer recommendations, demonstrations at events, social media and forum research etc before making a decision.
Now, much of that journey is happening inside AI environments:
So, there is the potential that brands may only enter consideration much later in the process, when – or if, even – a user decides to actually click through and check out their website and owned channels, dependent on whether the AI has recommended to them.
One panellist shared that while impressions remain relatively stable, clicks have almost halved year-on-year. But the users who do arrive tend to be more informed, higher intent and closer to conversion, concluding that:
‘The audience journey is becoming compressed.’
That has major implications for marketers, particularly as websites may increasingly need to evolve from destinations for users into structured information sources feeding AI systems, in direct contrast to the ‘typical’ marketing funnel, where users are guided through carefully designed digital experiences to help them make their mind up.
In other words, a website may soon be designed as much for machines as it is for people.
One of the biggest shifts GEO introduces is that brands no longer fully control their own positioning.
AI systems pull together information from a variety of sources, such as media coverage, reviews, forums, thought leadership, social content, comparison sites and executive commentary; combining it into simplified summaries that shape perception instantly.
In effect, this means every brand is at risk of becoming an AI-generated consensus.
That creates huge opportunities for organisations with strong authority and consistent messaging, but it also introduces reputational risk, because external viewpoints now play a much bigger role in influencing how brands are represented.
‘What you have is a synthesis representation of your brand. So, all those beautifully curated brand messaging houses that we’ve done and everything else that we want to do, doesn’t necessarily find its way into the AI generated response.’
One of the clearest themes from the panel was that AI systems increasingly reward recognised expertise over polished corporate messaging alone.
LinkedIn shared research conducted with Meltwater analysing 9.5 million LLM citations, with one finding standing out above all others: 75% of LinkedIn citations came from individual profiles rather than company pages.
That has major implications for how organisations think about visibility in an AI-driven world.
Executive thought leadership, employee advocacy and visible subject matter expertise are no longer simply brand-building exercises; they are becoming part of discoverability itself. AI systems appear to place growing value on trusted individuals, authentic expertise and active participation across the wider information ecosystem.
In other words, the people behind the brand may increasingly become just as important as the brand itself, so brands need to lean into this and ensure a regular cadence of informed, authoritative, thought leadership and points of view from their executives and spokespeople.
‘Thought leadership needs to come from leaders within the C-suite, because it’s what you’re talking about on platforms like LinkedIn that are getting cited by these large language companies’.
The panel also shared practical observations about the types of owned content AI systems appear to favour.
LLMs increasingly respond well to:
This matters because AI systems don’t consume content in the same way humans do: they edit, summarise and recombine information before presenting it as ‘fact’ to the user.
This means that clarity, structure, consistency and a regular cadence are becoming increasingly important parts of content strategy.
‘With specific keywords, we could really own a space. We could own a question that someone might put into a large language model. And then our citations would come up in those contexts. It could have been the smallest citation as part of a bigger response. But that has enabled us to really start owning that space.’
Perhaps one of the biggest organisational challenges discussed was the fact that most businesses simply aren’t perfectly structured for GEO yet.
The teams that contribute towards brand narrative and visibility in LLMs (PR, SEO, social, marketing, content and executive comms), typically aren’t wholly aligned and joined up. If we accept that AI systems reward consistency across the wider information ecosystem, then fragmented messaging weakens that authority.
Therefore, the organisations best positioned for GEO success will likely be the ones able to align narrative, expertise and messaging across every channel and touchpoint.
‘GEO requires you to not think in silos, to not think in channels, to not think in narrow ways. You succeed in GEO by demonstrating, experience, expertise, or authority, and trustworthiness.’
While GEO is still evolving rapidly, the panel made one thing very clear:
This isn’t simply a technical optimisation challenge: it’s a broader shift in how brands are discovered, understood and trusted in an AI-driven world and that, increasingly, the brands that win may not be the ones producing the most content or generating the most clicks, but will simply be the ones whose content AI decides to ‘trust’ most.
Authored by Kate Smith, Deputy MD, Business & Technology
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