Every jump forward in technology changes the consumer journey — sometimes in subtle ways, other times more dramatically. Online searches and interactions are changing fast, and ignoring this shift could hurt your brand. Whether it’s Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode, Perplexity, models like ChatGPT o3 and o4-mini or one of a dozen other options, AI’s popularity significantly impacts how consumers seek solutions.
The path of discovery, comparison, engagement and conversion is being fundamentally reshaped. As a result, tried-and-true brand influence models will not remain as effective as they once were. Brands face challenges connecting with their consumers as the digital landscape fragments, a situation exacerbated by AI evolution and user adoption.
AI platforms, rather than the brands themselves, are playing a larger role in defining brand stories for global companies, usurping narrative control and eroding reputations.
The stakes are higher in complex sales
In high-consideration industries (healthcare, finance, insurance, etc.), brands must achieve and maintain trust and provide accurate, nuanced narratives to win customers. They have to weather long sales cycles, complex decision-making, high cost-per-acquisition and regulatory scrutiny.
They now have to consider what AI models are telling millions of people about their offerings and brands. When AI gets it wrong or generates brand-damaging narratives, building trust, validation, proof and assurance becomes a harder challenge.
When large language models misrepresent your position, misquote brand facts or cite a competitor’s assets above your own, you lose influence before a human even visits your site. And in industries with already sky-high customer acquisition costs, this could mean major marketing loss.
In the vast and complicated content ecosystems of high-consideration industries, brands need to achieve clarity and empower discovery to navigate the pitfalls of AI. Brands need a strategy to take back control.
Dig deeper: Guardrails and governance — How to protect your brand while using AI
The GEO opportunity
How can brands manage the newest narrative threat? AI optimization. Also known as generative engine optimization or GEO, AI optimization strategies rapidly emerged along with AI search. And because AI has heated up so fast, GEO is no longer a nice-to-have but an imperative.
In the marketing mix, generative engine optimization is at the intersection of SEO, content strategy, customer experience and data science disciplines. This is a unique value of GEO, as many brands lack this convergence.
GEO and other AI optimization strategies differ from traditional performance marketing. It’s not about hitting a bunch of targets, it’s about brand credibility in a landscape that is increasingly AI-dominated. GEO centers around things like presence, brand impressions, sentiment, trust and share of voice.
Dig deeper: How marketers can succeed with generative engine optimization
Leveraging GEO is the process of making your brand’s assets and digital properties accessible, intelligible and valuable to AI tools. It aims to give AI what it needs to deliver the right value to the human audience. With GEO in place, AI search platforms like Google Gemini can serve as a “messenger” between brand and audience, instead of a rival that degrades the brand narrative. Here’s an abbreviated tour of some GEO aspects.
Content optimization
Optimizing existing content and developing and distributing new digital content about your brand designed to offer the LLMs that power AI search the right value and narrative. The end goal is to get pulled into AI as a source to establish brand visibility and influence the narrative consumers see.
Semantic alignment
Building assets across your entire brand space that offer similar content and context to the questions consumers are asking AI tools. This alignment is another method of informing AI tools with answers humans are actually searching for.
Narrative clarity
Optimizing your brand story across your assets to create one unified, consistent narrative that isn’t hindered by noise, duplication or staleness.
Measurement and iteration
Evolving your strategy and tools to keep up with the constant flux of the AI search landscape using GEO’s real-time insights. This allows you to influence AI tools, achieving brand visibility and growth through the AI-driven transformation.
Dig deeper: GenAI is already telling your brand’s story — are you guiding it?
GEO: The key to brand trust and discovery
The old rules no longer apply when the digital marketing field has changed. It happened so fast that many are still catching up. For high-consideration industries, this spells trouble unless you’re ready to manage your brand within genAI. Wherever you are in the process of dealing with AI, generative engine optimization is the answer to achieving control and influence across the increasingly fractured digital landscape.
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