Generative Engine Optimization: How to Get Found in AI Search
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I want to tell you about a critical shift in online marketing. It's the moment your customers started deciding inside AI.
Here's the shift most business leaders haven't fully processed yet. For a long time, ChatGPT was where people got answers. It was used by many just like a search engine. You'd ask a question and get a response before moving on.
That has now changed. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Cloud, Copilot, Gemini, and others is becoming a place where people make decisions. They're comparing options, weighing choices, and working their way toward a purchase. And when someone is that close to a decision, whoever shows up in that moment has an enormous advantage.
Think about what that means for how customers find you. For decades, being found followed a familiar path. You needed a presence on Google. Google sent people to your website.
Then social media became a requirement too. If you were visible across those channels, customers could find you. Then generative AI added a new requirement almost overnight, AI answers. Suddenly it mattered whether cat GPT or Claude or Gemini or perplexity even knew who you were when someone asked.
And just a few short years later, AI answers have turned into AI recommendations. Recommendations are turning into commercial discovery, and commercial discovery is starting to turn into AI assisted transactions. The whole buying journey is compressing and a lot of it is happening inside a single conversation. So let me ask you the question that actually matters.
When a customer asks an AI tool, what software should I buy? Or which consultant should I hire? Or what's the best product for this problem? Does the AI understand your company well enough to surface you?
Does it know what you do, who you serve, and why you're the right answer? Because if it doesn't, you're absent when the decision gets made, and you may never even know you were even left out. Here's why this is urgent, and here's why your strategy has to change. The old game was search engine optimization.
Optimize your web pages, rank on Google, get the click. That still has a place, but now it's insufficient on its own. Now you also need what people are calling AEO and GEO, or Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization. which is really a simple idea.
You need the right content and the right digital signals out in the world so that AI systems accurately understand who you are, what you do, and why you're relevant. And here's the honest problem. Most companies have no idea how AI currently understands them. They've never even checked.
They don't know if they're being surfaced, misrepresented, or ignored entirely when a customer asks a question that should point straight to them. That's the gap you need to close, and you need to start now, before your competitors do. A company called Brandpoint has figured out this exact problem. Go to www.brandpoint.com and you'll see what I mean.
For full transparency, I have been on Brandpoint's board of directors for years, and that's part of how he's learned what I'm sharing with you and why it's so critical. What Bradpoint does well is two things that fit together. First, they measure AEO and GEO. They can actually show you where your brand appears in AI-generated answers and give you a real AI visibility score, so you stop guessing.
Second, they help you fix it, by getting your story out there through credible, human-written editorial content placed across publications that both audiences and AI systems trust. And that credibility piece is the whole point, because AI learns what to say about you from what it finds across the credible web. Consistent, trusted, authoritative signals are what teach it to recommend you. Go take a look at what they're doing at brandpoint.com.
Now, let me bring this back to something I talk about constantly. Authentic insight. Actionable intelligence. And it fits this moment almost perfectly.
Authentic insight means genuinely understanding what your customers care about. But they're actually trying to decide. Actionable intelligence means understanding how you're being seen, surfaced, and ultimately chosen in an AI-driven world, and then doing something about it. That's the work.
Understand your customer, understand how AI understands you, and then close the gap between the two. Because the real story here is that AI is becoming the place where your customers decide. The businesses that figure out their AEO and GEO strategy early on are going to get surfaced, recommended, and chosen. The ones who wait are going to wonder why their leads have dried up.
Start now. Find out how AI sees you today. and go build the credible, consistent story that teaches AI to recommend you tomorrow.