GEO's choice: Why brand visibility now depends on what AI recommends

In the AI era, brand visibility is about being the one AI chooses to recommend. That explains the rise of generative engine optimisation

Looking for a new phone with inbuilt artificial intelligence (AI) features, sharp camera, and battery that lasts more than a day? Or an electric vehicle (EV) as you plan to shift from petrol? It’s likely the search and comparisons will start on an AI platform.  Instead of 10 blue weblinks in a traditional search, you will get an answer — likely from CoPilot, Anthropic, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google’s AI mode. 

For businesses, this change is creating a new contest for digital visibility. It is no longer enough to appear high in search results. Companies want their brands to appear as part of the answer itself. Making this happen is generative engine optimisation, or GEO, sometimes called answer engine optimisation, or AEO.  What search engine optimisation (SEO) was to the web era, to ensure that the brand appears right on top of the users search results, GEO is to AI, an evolution of SEO. GEO marks a fundamental shift in how information is being discovered on AI. 

“SEO helps brands win the click; GEO will help brands win the answer,” said Vamshi Krishna, managing partner, media solutions at Omnicom Global Solutions (OGS). He described the changing consumer journey as a move from ‘Search-Site-Action’ to ‘Prompt-Answer-Action’. In other words, discovery is moving from a traditional web search to 

seeking answers on AI platforms. 

GEO leads search shift 

The explosive adoption of conversational AI platforms such as ChatGPT, and Google’s integration of generative AI directly into search-AI mode are pushing GEO into the mainstream. 

Amaresh Godbole, CEO, PDX (Publicis Digital Experience) India and chief of AI experiences & solutions, Publicis Groupe India, said, “The shift became hard to ignore as AI platforms moved from experimentation to mainstream consumer behaviour, with ChatGPT rapidly scaling its user base in India beyond the 100 million mark.” Globally it has over 1 billion users. Google’s introduction of AI mode in search in June 2025 has accelerated that transition further. 

For brands, Godbole said, “This signals a fundamental change: Discovery is no longer limited to traditional search engines. It is increasingly happening through AI conversations and answers.” Publicis Groupe, which focuses on marketing, communication and digital transformation works with more than 700 clients in India including Nestlé India, Bharti Airtel, Amazon, Dabur, ITC and Hero Motocorp. 

The questions people ask are changing, too. According to Google, average queries on AI mode globally are three times longer than traditional search queries. Instead of typing ‘best SUV India’, a buyer might ask which SUV under a certain price is safest for highway driving, has comfortable seats for elderly parents and is inexpensive to maintain. 

In India, Google data shows 84 per cent of people using AI mode report making decisions faster, while 87 per cent say it helps them make decisions more confidently. 

That has implications for brands. If a brand previously worried about whether it ranked first or fifth on a search engine, it must now confront a different question: When an AI platform delivers answers from multiple sources, does the company appear at all? And, perhaps more importantly, what does AI say about it? 

Traditional SEO revolved around measures like rankings, impressions, click-through rates and organic traffic. GEO introduces a different scoreboard. Marketers are beginning to monitor their ‘AI share of voice’ across Large Language Models (LLMs), brand mentions — how often a brand appears in answers to prompts — along with citations and the attributes AI systems associate with the company. 

“The question is, does your brand appear, how is it positioned, and what attributes are being associated with it?” said Godbole.

That matters because the consumer may never visit the manufacturer’s website. Research, comparison and even preference formation is increasingly taking place within the AI interface. A company controls what it says on its own website. It doesn’t control what an AI system concludes after reading the company’s website alongside reviews, retailer listings, news reports, social conversations, discussion forums and competing brands’ claims. 

Praneet Dutta, co-founder and CEO, POMO, an AI market-intelligence platform, and a former Google DeepMind researcher, said this makes GEO’s modus operandi far broader than just tinkering with a corporate website.  

“For SEO, the website was often the destination. An AI answer can draw from the brand’s site, retailer pages, reviews, publishers, social discussions, videos and even competitors,” said Dutta.  

A brand can therefore rank strongly on a conventional search and still be poorly represented—or absent—when somebody asks an AI assistant for a recommendation. 

This is particularly important in categories such as automobiles, finance and electronics, where buyers typically conduct extensive research before spending money. A prospective car buyer, for example, might previously have searched for ‘SUVs under ₹20 lakh’, opened half a dozen websites, watched reviews and compared specifications. Now, the same person can describe budget, family size, driving habits and priorities in a single conversational query and ask an AI assistant to narrow the field. By the time that consumer reaches an automaker’s website, several brands may already have been eliminated.

According to a spokesperson for OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, “For brands this increases the importance of making 

information clear, factual, detailed, and current. GEO is particularly significant in a market like India.”  

That’s because users are increasingly seeking answers via voice interfaces, in their own language. So to get into the AI answers that users see, brands have to ensure that the quality of the underlying information is relevant and springs up when a user enters a prompt. 

For brands, GEO content strategy, according to the OpenAI spokesperson, “starts with writing for usefulness and understanding. And making sure the answers have clear, factual and current information about what they sell, costs, availability, specifications and the problems it solves.” 

Swagat Sarangi, co-founder, Smytten (a product discovery and trial platform), described the SEO-GEO distinction as, “SEO helps users find the right webpage; GEO focuses on helping AI engines find, understand and cite information.” Brands including Mamaearth, Sugar Cosmetics, Plum, Cetaphil, Maybelline, L'Oréal, Minimalist, Swiss Beauty and Lakmé are featured on its platform. 

Optimising for AI 

For Bengaluru-based Smytten, GEO “means answering consumer questions clearly while making our expertise products and propositions easy for AI systems to understand,” Sarangi said. The goal is to make information useful enough for consumers and credible enough for AI systems to cite. That requires changes behind the scenes too. Sites must be easy for AI search systems to crawl and interpret. 

OpenAI, for instance, advises businesses that want their public information discoverable in a ChatGPT search to ensure that its search crawler isn’t blocked from relevant content. While Google says websites do not need special AI markup or AI-specific files, retailers can provide structured product information that makes the product data more usable by AI agents. 

This will make AI systems meet five basic tests, according to Dutta of POMO. These are: Can AI systems discover the information? Is it consistent? Are important claims supported by credible evidence? Is it current? And can the company measure how the information is being used? The last question is proving tricky to answer. A brand may notice traffic changing but not know which AI answer replaced the click, which sources shaped it or why a competitor appeared instead. A search marketer can see where a page ranks and how many people clicked it. AI answers are more fluid. They can vary by platform, prompt and sometimes from one day to another. 

New GEO tools therefore run sets of consumer questions through different AI systems, recording which companies appear, how they are described and what sources are cited. Brands can then identify “citation gaps”—questions where a rival repeatedly appears but they don't. 

Enabling AI-led commerce 

To stay relevant, Krishna of OGS said, “Brands must shift from keywords (dominant in SEO) to answers (GEO). Content strategies must evolve from targeting search rankings to addressing consumer questions in ways that AI engines can understand, summarize and recommend.” 

GEO will play a bigger role as users get comfortable with AI Agents and platforms doing their daily chores, like ordering groceries, placing an order for a new air con or buying anniversary gifts within the buyers’ budget. GEO will actually become closer to enabling commerce. A retailer's information must not merely be readable – eventually it may need to be actionable by letting AI take decisions. 

 

 

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The writer is a New Delhi-based independent journalist