Brands are scrambling to control how they appear in AI search, and it's given rise to a whole new 'GEO' industry (www.businessinsider.com)

AI search is reshaping brand discovery and has spawned a new cottage industry of “GEO” (generative engine optimization) and “AEO” consultants as companies race to control how they appear in chat‑based answer engines. The problem is already tangible: PR firm Bospar found major LLMs mistakenly reporting that RealSense had shut down just as the company prepared a major spin‑out and funding announcement. With roughly half of US consumers using AI search and Google still dominating traditional queries, brands worry that incorrect or stale training data can prescriptively surface false narratives — and there’s growing demand for services that can influence what synthesized answers cite. Technically, GEO borrows SEO fundamentals (fresh, trustworthy content, site hygiene) but faces new constraints: AI systems return synthesized answers rather than ranked link lists, training data and model updates are opaque and frequently retrained, and personalization makes outputs variable and hard to reproduce. Practical guidance from Google, Microsoft and Perplexity converges on durable tactics — machine‑readable cues (schema, sitemaps, Q&A sections), IndexNow notifications, concise structured content, and richer multimedia — while warning against short‑term “hack” strategies. Experts caution gains may be fleeting, measurement noisy (some visibility tools have already shuttered), and long‑term success will still depend heavily on traditional brand building and PR rather than gimmicky optimization.