Molly McClure, Award-winning Marketing Executive & Fractional CMO, DrugScreens.com
Marketing has never met a new acronym it couldn't turn into a strategy deck. SEO. CRO. ABM. AEO. Now make room for GEO.
Generative engine optimization is quickly becoming one of the hottest conversations in marketing as brands figure out how to appear in answers generated by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI-driven discovery platforms. The shift is real, and marketers absolutely need to understand how AI is changing search and discovery.
I'm just hoping we don't ruin it.
You can almost see the familiar marketing machinery warming up. New dashboards, consultants, optimization tools, KPIs and conferences. Somewhere, presumably, someone is already updating their LinkedIn headline to "GEO Thought Leader."
New technology creates legitimate opportunities, but it also creates a temptation to focus on the mechanics before we understand the larger strategic change. GEO is a perfect example.
Marketers are understandably asking, "How do we get ChatGPT to mention our brand?" It's a fair question, but I think there's a better one: How do we become the kind of source that deserves to be mentioned?
That small change in language leads to a very different marketing strategy.
Traditional search gave marketers a fairly understandable objective: rank. AI-generated answers complicate that. There may be no neat list of ten blue links. An AI system can synthesize information from multiple sources and give someone an answer before that person ever reaches your website.
The technology sounds very new. The ingredients required to earn visibility sound surprisingly familiar: expertise, accuracy, useful information, original thinking, third-party validation, credible mentions, strong backlinks and a reputation beyond your own About Us page.
Technology changes quickly. Trust remains annoyingly difficult to automate.
This is where I think AI gets considerably more interesting.
Through my work as Fractional CMO of DrugScreens.com, we recently built a real-time drug-screening news project using Claude. Drug testing is an unusually interesting category for this experiment because developments happen state by state. Legislation changes, workplace-testing rules evolve, new substances emerge and regulatory guidance shifts. An issue developing in Oklahoma may be completely different from one emerging in Maryland or Florida.
Trying to manually keep track of all 50 states is possible. It also sounds like an excellent way to lose an entire afternoon and develop strong feelings about browser tabs.
So we use AI to help watch the landscape. The project alerts us to potentially relevant drug-screening developments state by state. Then the human work begins. We investigate what happened, verify the information, determine whether it matters to our audience and decide whether we actually have something useful to contribute.
That distinction is important. The AI isn't exciting because it can write another article. It's exciting because it helps us notice something sooner.
For years, content marketing has frequently started with the calendar: What are we posting next week? What keyword haven't we covered? What are we going to publish Thursday?
Nothing inspires groundbreaking thought leadership quite like realizing it's Tuesday and the content calendar has an empty square.
AI gives marketers an opportunity to reverse that process. Instead of beginning with the need to create content, begin with the need to understand what is changing. Monitor customer questions, legislation, research, new terminology and emerging problems. Watch what is happening in your industry, and then determine whether your organization has something valuable to add.
Suddenly, the world becomes your content calendar.
That is a much more interesting use of AI than simply increasing production. You're not creating because the calendar says you need another article. You're creating because something happened and your audience could use help understanding it.
This is also why I'm skeptical of treating GEO as an entirely separate marketing discipline. Yes, measure AI visibility. Understand where your brand appears. Pay attention to citations, mentions and the questions customers are asking. But don't mistake measurement for strategy.
If GEO becomes disconnected from SEO, PR, content, brand, subject-matter expertise and reputation, marketers risk optimizing the final mile while ignoring everything that made the brand worth discovering in the first place.
A backlink is more interesting when someone linked to you because your information was genuinely valuable. A citation is more meaningful when you produced something worth citing. And a brand mention becomes more defensible when expertise exists across the broader digital ecosystem instead of exclusively on pages the company wrote about itself.
You can tell the internet you're an authority all day. It gets considerably more persuasive when the internet starts agreeing with you.
That may be the bigger opportunity hiding underneath GEO. AI has dramatically increased our capacity to create, but it can also dramatically increase our capacity to learn. Those are not the same thing.
Marketing teams can use AI to monitor enormous amounts of information, identify patterns, spot changes and surface developments humans might otherwise miss. The advantage doesn't have to be producing 50 articles instead of five. It might be knowing which five are actually worth producing.
And that still requires human judgment. Someone has to determine whether the information is credible, whether the development matters, whether the company has expertise to contribute and whether anyone will actually care.
Perhaps the smartest GEO strategy isn't obsessing over how to make machines notice us. It's using those machines to help us become more knowledgeable, useful and credible to people, then giving AI something worth finding.
GEO may be new. Becoming worth citing isn't.