The New Rules of Brand Visibility in AI Search

The article examines new rules for brand visibility in AI search, with senior marketing and digital leaders highlighting three key challenges. First, there are major blind spots in AI visibility metrics. Second, organizations struggle with inertia in adapting established SEO workflows, and third, there is an underestimation of how quickly AI can amplify inaccurate brand information.

The authors studied a case involving a regulated investment provider, which worked with an agency to trace AI-generated inaccurate information back to specific URLs and correct the content.

One example is a New Zealand-based investment platform where ChatGPT generated roughly 700 referral sessions to their site each month by midyear, with lower bounce rates and more pages per visit than other referral sources. However, conventional SEO measures couldn't answer critical questions about what AI systems were telling customers about the business.

The article introduces the concept of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), also known as answer engine optimization (AEO). GEO introduces two strategic challenges: visibility and accuracy. GEO requires brands to optimize for what AI systems say about them in responses that cannot be seen, in addition to ranking well in conventional search.

While strong SEO helps a company be found online, GEO shapes what AI systems actually say about the brand. This requires content to be structured, semantically clear, contextually authoritative, and genuinely useful to the person asking the question, as well as easy for AI systems to parse.