Brand discovery is pivoting from keywords to context.
Search and discovery have changed. Customers are no longer scrolling through a list of weblinks. Now they’re turning to AI tools and chatbots, asking them direct questions and expecting answers, solutions, and recommendations.
Marketing and creative teams need to tailor their content for AI-powered search and discovery, without sacrificing core SEO principles or human connection. As a CMO, you have the power to lead an AI-first strategy by understanding the shift in how customers interact with your brand and how to successfully audit and adapt your content to capitalize on this new world of discovery.
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The evolution of search — moving from attention to intention.
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The digital space is shifting. Rather than an endless scroll of links and half-answers, customers are looking for personalized responses to specific questions. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Google Gemini are driving this change, and it’s impacting every industry.
AI is becoming the primary gateway to product discovery. Consumers are using it to filter, evaluate, and make recommendations based on individual needs and preferences. For example, instead of searching, “Best hotels in Costa Rica,” people are asking questions like, “Where are good places to stay in Costa Rica for under $200 a night?" — and receiving specific answers in return.
The impact of AI-generated summaries will continue to grow. Brands must now compete in an environment where visibility is tied to traditional rankings, perceived credibility, brand sentiment, and more. Yet 63% of marketers say their company isn't investing time, budget, or staff into optimizing for this new reality. As AI shapes perceptions before the first click, it's imperative that CMOs evolve SEO strategies to include AI-search tactics to protect hard-won visibility and credibility.
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What GEO and SEO mean to your brand.
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Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and SEO share the same goal of connecting your brand’s expertise to customer intent, each giving your brand greater control over its narrative. Individually, each influences different parts of the customer journey, but together, they account for a broader digital ecosystem where customers and AI agents form impressions of your brand and offerings. SEO ensures your content is structured so AI agents can retrieve it, while GEO expands how your brand is consistently represented, in your words and others’, across third-party sites where customers increasingly seek validation for their purchasing considerations.
Essentially, your brand needs both to make your content discoverable and to account for all the places your brand is discussed, cited, and compared. From decision to loyalty, an integrated SEO and GEO approach guides traffic, shapes perception, and reinforces consumer confidence.
Strategic considerations of SEO and GEO.
SEO
GEO
What is the primary objective?
Win visibility by ranking high in search results.
Win influence by being named, cited, and recommended inside AI‑generated answers.
What does success look like?
Traffic growth driven by position on search engine results pages.
Brand inclusion at the moment decisions are formed.
What is the impact?
High rankings increase the chance of a click.
AI inclusion frames the choice set before the click.
How are users engaging?
Evaluating multiple links and sources themselves.
AI evaluates sources and summarizes on their behalf.
What are the most important metrics?
Rankings, impressions, sessions, and bounce rates.
Share of AI answers, citation quality, narrative accuracy.
What is the strategic role in the funnel?
Driving discovery and site visitation.
Shaping brand perception and preference, getting shortlisted in a purchasing decision.
What is the brand differentiation?
How you compete in page rankings.
How AI can describe why you’re different or relevant to user intent.
What is the risk of under-investment?
Reduced web traffic and AI-interpreted credibility.
Brand invisibility or misrepresentation in AI-mediated discovery.
What is the long-term brand value?
Building discoverability over time.
Building authority and availability in AI ecosystems.
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If your brand can utilize both SEO and GEO strategies, you can create a more consistent brand narrative. For example, imagine you're a major hotel brand and someone asks an LLM for a comparison of budget-friendly Costa Rica hotels. AI agents aren't necessarily basing their answers off your blogs and content. They are also searching how your brand is mentioned on Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, TikTok, and more. This changes your brand from being mentioned to being recommended.
If your hotel is repeatedly described as “Clean, affordable, and walkable to major attractions,” LLMs will reuse that language, and the customer will have a positive impression of your brand before visiting your site.
If your website or content mirrors the AI framing — using language like “budget-friendly hotel near the Manuel Antonio National Park,” or an article with the section “What do guests usually praise?” — this consistency reinforces the AI recommendation and builds immediate trust.
Since LLM-powered AI tools monitor customer sentiment and sources across the internet, optimizing for third-party sites is an essential long-term marketing strategy. How your brand responds to feedback influences recommendations and can inform future product descriptions and advertising campaigns.
Your owned channels still play a major role in the discovery stage, but they will need to be revised to be friendly for AI and humans. According to IDC’s “From Gateways to Gatekeepers” report, since AI crawlers ingest structured data and decide what gets cited, brands need to think beyond user interface and consider static rendering, clear architecture, and consistent signalling.
When executed together, SEO and GEO allow your content to serve multiple purposes, so your brand can get the most mileage out of your assets. SEO makes your expertise findable and scannable. GEO makes your expertise relatable and aligned to the phrasing customers actually use. Content written in a Q&A format, with clear and concise answers, satisfies both — improving discoverability and increasing the likelihood that AI will surface and trust your information.
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TAKEAWAY
SEO impacts whether and how LLMs find, surface, and cite your content. A strategy that incorporates both SEO and GEO principles ensures your brand shows up when and where it matters to drive discovery and conversion.
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What CMOs risk by not acting now.
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As AI becomes a default discovery tool, users increasingly resolve their questions inside summaries rather than clicking through the provided links. This means that when customers click through, they’re more prepared to make a purchase or decision, as research shows that visitors who arrive at a website from an LLM-generated response convert over four times better than visitors from traditional search.
Without a GEO strategy to get key messages within AI-generated answers, brands risk a 20-50% decrease in organic traffic because they are not being cited in summaries or referenced by AI at the point of decision. This shortfall forces expensive backfills to your pipeline, like overspending on paid traffic and sponsored content, and increases your overall customer acquisition cost (CAC). Even then, higher spend doesn’t guarantee the same intent quality as traffic earned from AI citations.
Measurement will also get murkier without a clear GEO strategy. As AI reshapes the customer journey, ranking and clicks become weaker demand signals. More specifically, conversational queries and answer-first experiences introduce volatility in how your narrative is told. Since LLMs pull from a wide range of sources beyond your website, your brand position can shift daily, requiring teams to continually monitor forums, social media, and review sites to authentically engage with customer sentiment.
of users rely on AI-generated summaries for at least 40% of their queries.
If CMOs don’t act now, they are ceding narrative control to external voices, weakening brand authority in high-consideration categories where trust, clarity, and expertise drive conversions. Over time, the absence of GEO removes critical feedback loops on how AI interprets your brand, depriving your teams of data that informs personalization, targeting, and future strategies.
GEO restores control and search efficiency to your brand. By shifting KPIs to what gets mentioned and cited in AI, CMOs can allocate budgets to assets that shape decisions, reduce dependence on paid media, move from cost-per-click to cost-per-decision, and turn marketing from a reactive cost into a more capital-efficient growth engine.
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KEY TAKEAWAY
GEO helps brands control their narrative and maximize their spend.
Visitors from LLMs convert 4x better. Focus on the quality of the traffic, not the quantity.
Brands not being cited in AI summaries risk losing up to 50% of their organic traffic.
Without GEO, measurement collapses and brand consistency erodes.
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The CMO action plan for increasing brand authority.
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As AI reshapes how customers research, compare, and choose brands, CMOs can adapt with a structured, cross-functional plan for influencing how their companies show up in AI-directed discovery.
Starting with quick fixes and building towards more long-term strategic reframing, here are some actions CMOs can take to coordinate this shift confidently.
Audit and adjust your content for AI visibility.
If your brand doesn’t know where or how it appears in AI-generated answers, your discovery phase is operating with a blind spot. LLM optimizer tools will scan domains and websites and analyze your content for readability, checking to see if it’s too lengthy or difficult to understand.
Once you’ve identified your top-performing content, you can direct your team to turn blogs into FAQ and explainer hybrids, and spin supporting videos and how-to visuals that can be embedded and cited.
As you review existing content, here are four things to keep in mind and actions you can take towards optimizing for an AI audience.
AI readability and structure.
Add a 40-60 word summary to the top of your long-form content that addresses what it is and who it’s for.
Establish a scannable H2/H3 hierarchy, FAQ blocks, short sections, and consistent product terminology.
Message consistency.
Push the same definitions and positioning to PR, review sites, listings, and partner pages.
Provide approved Q&A blocks to customer experience and social teams for consistent responses on Reddit, YouTube, and forums.
Answer-first format.
Rewrite H2/H3s as question‑style prompts customers actually ask or insert FAQ sections.
Ensure the subject of your content either compares your product to alternatives, highlights use-cases, explains prices, or guides users through how-to-use.
Chunkability.
Break dense paragraphs into subsections (150–200 words) and use bullets, tables, and checklists.
Implement content outlines, jump links, and table of contents and have pages render static, lightweight HTML and minimize JS‑dependent content.
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To sustain momentum, it will help to establish a governance cadence to standardize brief generation, the creative process, and content output. This includes:
Monthly refresh lists of the top 50 assets by revenue intent.
Quarterly deep audits for any remaining content.
Content product requirements documents that include target prompts, answer summaries, FAQs, canonical terminology, and a measurement plan.
Having a clear framework in how to produce and measure content is critical because decisions are increasingly shaped inside AI-generated answers. Brands increase discoverability when they build a durable and repeatable content system where every page is chunkable, offers clear answers, and is consistently phrased. Creating authority and increasing citations and recommendations will reduce your organization’s reliance on paid media, improve conversion efficiency, and give continuous insights into how your brand is described and perceived.
Length and depth are still important, but your content needs to answer your audience’s most pressing questions.
Build a continuous feedback loop.
A forward-thinking GEO strategy turns search and discovery into an integrated and coordinated effort among a variety of teams.
CMOs need to consider how to lead their teams to work together more seamlessly, which can be done in a few ways.
Create a weekly cross-functional huddle that includes SEO, content and creative, PR and comms, social, paid, and developers.
Track priority sources by topic or category, including Subreddits, Wikipedia pages, YouTube channels, TikTok and Instagram, major review sites, key publishers, and affiliates.
Instruct your analytics team to focus on AI share of answer, citation quality, and narrative accuracy.
Route any content, PR, product descriptions, or offer updates through a lightweight approval process that checks for message consistency, answer-first structure, and third-party synchronization.
Establish clear roles by team — content and creative (update content to be AI-friendly), PR and comms (place brand POV in high-trust outlets and respond to top-visibility threads with approved Q&As), paid (amplify authoritative product placements and creator and influencer partnerships), and social (standardize responses to recurring questions).
Establish decision thresholds like triggering fixes when AI share of view drops or activate budget shifts based on content performance.
Operating a cross-functional system helps teams detect, explain, and improve how AI represents your brand. External changes will result in faster narrative corrections, smarter budget allocation, higher AI share-of-answer, and lower blended CAC.
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Cross-collaboration between marketing and creative teams.
When teams operate from the same insights and sources of information, the creative output becomes more strategically focused and backed by data.
A successful GEO implementation rests on creative, SEO, PR/brand, developer, and marketing teams working in sync to build a content production system that focuses on generating assets that can be used for multiple channels. For example, if your PR team conducts a survey on a specific trend, your creative team can leverage the results for your website by creating a long-form blog post based on the insights, or specific consumer phrasing could inspire ideas to be filmed as TikTok videos. This approach reinforces a creative process that’s informed by real-time insights, authentic customer language, current sentiment, and clear narratives.
As a CMO, you have the power to further integrate your creative and marketing teams to capitalize on the AI era.
Require all creative briefs to include top customer questions and search prompts, current sentiment, and priority narratives the brand must own in AI answers.
Create a shared insight-to-asset pipeline by centralizing insights from SEO, PR, social listening, and analytics and then assign a creative to translate those insights into a multi-format content plan (blogs, video, social posts, PR placements).
Build every asset to be repurpose-able (modular scripts, pull quotes, data callouts), scannable (clear headlines, summaries, captions), and AI-friendly (explicit claims, consistent terms, transcript-ready copy).
Align creative output to consumer language by pulling phrases from reviews, search queries, and community discussions, and then standardize this terminology across copy, visuals, captions, and transcripts.
Measure impact across channels by tracking how a single insight performs across web, social, video, and AI mentions.
Building a single operating system will get the most mileage out of your content. The result is higher visibility, stronger brand authority, and a more efficient use of creative and media budgets to create a consistent and relevant customer journey.
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Bring a holistic view to your GEO journey.
As AI discovery continues to overtake traditional search, CMOs will need visibility from different angles. Success in an AI-mediated market is getting GEO and SEO to work together, so your brand is found and chosen. This requires continuous visibility into where your brand appears in AI answers, how it’s described, and which off-site signals are shaping those answers.
Following the CMO action plan and checklist will help your team correct narratives fast, double-down on the assets that move buyers, and establish authority before a click.
Adobe Brand Visibility gives marketing teams a single tool from which your GEO strategy can be built and managed. Rather than juggling disparate tools or scattered insights, marketing teams gain a unified hub that shows how their brand is interpreted, summarized, and recommended across major AI platforms. By providing targeted, prioritized recommendations — from structural fixes to clarity improvements — Brand Visibility empowers marketing leaders to act decisively, focus resources where they matter most, and continually strengthen their brand’s performance within the emerging generative ecosystem.
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Explore capabilities in this Adobe Brand Visibility interactive tour and learn how Adobe is helping brands boost visibility, accuracy, and influence across AI-powered search.
