TL;DR
- Search is rapidly shifting from traditional search engines to AI tools. Visibility now depends on whether AI systems cite your brand in their responses.
- Third-party sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, and the press increasingly shape brand perception in AI outputs.
- Winning means balancing emotion-driven engagement for humans with structured content for AI agents.
AI has rewritten the rules of internet search.
For years, search engine optimization (SEO) was one of the cornerstones of digital marketing. Mastering keywords, backlinks, and rankings was enough to gain visibility. Not anymore.
Today, consumers increasingly turn to AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others for answers. AI-powered search is scaling at a remarkable speed. As of June 2025, 5.6% of U.S. search traffic on desktop browsers went to an AI-powered large language model—double the share from a year earlier and more than four times that of January 2024. Among early adopters, nearly 40% of their desktop searches now flow through AI models. One forecast suggests ChatGPT could surpass Google in traffic by 2030 if current growth trends continue.
This shift matters—for founders, investors, and enterprises. If your brand’s content isn’t cited in an AI engine, you risk being invisible. But if you learn how to influence the answers delivered by AI, you can compete and win.
At LIFT Labs, we’ve been tracking the trend with our portfolio companies. Their perspective is clear: SEO is giving way to AI-driven discovery, and ignoring the change could be increasingly detrimental.
Entering the GEO Era
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of shaping your online presence to influence AI-generated answers.
Behind every AI response lies a layered process. The large language models (LLMs) powering AI search engines like ChatGPT ingest vast amounts of data from a variety of sources, weigh credibility, and synthesize a reply—often without surfacing your website at all. These systems favor content that is structured, factual, and easily parsed. If your brand isn’t cited, it’s excluded—not just from rankings, but from the entire conversation.
To complicate things further, AI answers are probabilistic and personalized. The same query can generate different outputs depending on phrasing, context, or user history. That makes consistent visibility harder to guarantee—and more important to secure.
How to Start Optimizing for GEO
The next 12–18 months will bring major changes in how consumers and businesses interact through AI. To understand how companies can best optimize for AI search, we spoke with Josh Blyskal who leads Answer Engine Optimization Strategy and Research for Profound and Tobey Van Santvoord, Head of Sales at Bluefish. Both LIFT Labs portfolio companies analyze brand mentions in generative outputs and deliver actionable insights to optimize exposure and measure performance.
Here is some of their advice for brands to stand out in an increasingly GEO world:
- Structure content for SEO and GEO: Blyskal says companies should view GEO not as an SEO replacement, but as an expansion of brand strategy into a new medium. SEO still matters: it ensures your content is crawlable and discoverable. But GEO determines whether AI actually uses it. A site that isn’t structured for machines is less likely to be cited, regardless of its search rank.
- Consider what third-party sources AI models cite for consensus: AI systems often cite neutral or community-driven platforms like Wikipedia, Reddit, or news coverage – sometimes over official brand websites. That means your narrative isn’t only what you publish; it’s how third parties describe you. Brands must consider how they’re represented on community-driven platforms—by maintaining verified Wikipedia entries, engaging thoughtfully on Reddit, and collaborating with credible media sources.
- Measure visibility across the AI journey: Success is no longer just about clicks. It’s about citations, indexing, and presence throughout the AI-mediated path. Emerging KPIs include citation frequency, AI bot crawl activity, and influence on generated answers, even when the brand isn’t explicitly named. Performance tools now log ChatGPT-to-site referrals and crawler activity as new indicators of brand health.
- Expect brand-to-consumer interactions to fade: Van Santvoord urges brands to prepare for AI to automate repeatable processes like content discovery and comparisons, while humans handle more high-value consultations. This means brand should expect consumers to offload entire categories of buying decisions to personal AI bots. These agents won’t be swayed by packaging, slogans, or emotional advertising. Instead, they’ll optimize for price, performance, and reliability, neutralizing many of the classic levers marketers have long relied on. In this world, visibility in AI systems becomes the new proxy for shelf space.
- Build internal alignment for AI optimization: As GEO becomes a cross-functional priority, marketing, communications, PR, and web development teams must work together. Some organizations are already experimenting with embedded AI consultant models to bridge these silos. Starting small can help. For example: test a single URL or prompt interaction, measure how AI systems interpret it, and scale learnings from there.
The Takeaway
SEO gets you indexed. GEO gets you cited. In an internet where people are increasingly turning to AI for answers, GEO will determine whether your brand earns visibility, trust, and influence. The companies that adapt early will hold a disproportionate advantage. Those who wait may not show up at all.
