For the last 20 years, every marketer on the planet has been playing the same game: make Google love you. SEO was the holy grail - a predictable, measurable way to capture intent, earn visibility, and convert attention into revenue. The entire content economy was built around that equation. But in 2025, the equation broke.
When a user can research, evaluate, and even transact inside ChatGPT or Perplexity - without ever visiting your website - the rules of discovery have been rewritten. We’ve officially entered the age of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): the practice of influencing how large language models recall, cite, and recommend your brand in AI-generated answers.
From Ranking to Relevance: A New Discovery Paradigm
In the old world, visibility meant ranking high.
In the new world, it means being remembered right.
Generative engines no longer ‘rank’ web pages - they synthesise answers. That means the competition isn’t for position on a results page; it’s for inclusion in the model’s memory and reasoning loop. Whether your brand shows up in an AI answer depends on one question: does the model recall and trust you enough to reference you?
Traditional SEO rewarded precision and repetition. GEO rewards clarity and credibility. The brands that survive this shift will be those that evolve from optimising for clicks to optimising for citations.
The Collapse - and Reinvention - of the Funnel
AI search collapses the marketing funnel. When the model can deliver a full, contextual answer - aggregating research, comparison, and recommendation into one conversational response - the user’s journey compresses, and discovery, consideration, and decision all happen inside a single prompt. That rewires how we think about awareness: you don’t ‘rank’ your way into a customer’s radar anymore, you teach the model to mention you when intent appears. At Pepper, we call this the Visibility–Citability–Retrievability Flywheel: Visibility lets the model see you through structured data and credible sources, Citability helps it quote you via modular, verifiable content, and Retrievability enables recall through consistent brand facts across the AI memory graph. Together, these elements form the new growth engine for organic marketing in the AI era—Visibility gets you discovered, Citability earns authority, and Retrievability keeps you alive.
The Data Is Unmistakable
Recent research validates what CMOs are already sensing. BrightEdge found that 68% of organisations have begun shifting their search strategy for AI, yet most admit their teams aren’t built for it. First Page Sage’s 2025 study of 11,000+ commercial queries shows ChatGPT’s recommendations are driven 41% by authoritative list mentions, 18% by awards and accreditations, and 16% by reviews. Valuates Reports estimates the global GEO services market will reach $7.3 billion by 2031, growing at 34% annually. The pattern is clear: trust signals are the new backlinks. For two decades, we optimised for algorithms; now we’re optimising for AI cognition. Brands aren’t discovered because they shout the loudest, but because credible sources collectively confirm their existence and expertise.
What This Means for CMOs
This shift forces every marketing leader to think like an AI architect. Tomorrow’s CMOs will need to map not just customer journeys, but model journeys - understanding how an LLM moves from retrieval to reasoning to generation, and ensuring their brand’s data appears in each step.
Tomorrow’s CMOs must think like AI architects—engineering entity presence across knowledge graphs and high-authority nodes, orchestrating authority signals through awards, reviews, and trusted third-party mentions, and designing schema-rich, structured content that LLMs can easily parse and cite. The future of measurement will shift from web traffic to model traffic—how often AI engines reference your brand as the answer.
The future of marketing measurement won’t be about web traffic. It’ll be about model traffic - how often AI engines reference your brand as the answer.
Why GEO Is the Wedge Into the AI Marketing Stack
Every disruptive era in marketing has had its wedge. In the 2000s, it was Google Ads. In the 2010s, Facebook targeting. In this decade, GEO is that wedge - the entry point through which the entire AI marketing stack will evolve. Because once you can influence how AI engines describe your brand, you can influence how they recommend, transact, and personalize. GEO is not just the future of search; it’s the foundation for every future growth channel built on AI agents and assistants. The brands that act early will own this layer of cognition - the same way early SEO adopters owned the web.
The Bottom Line
We are standing at a once-in-a-generation inflection point. Search as we know it is dissolving into conversation. Discovery is moving from the open web to the AI layer. And visibility is no longer earned through keywords - it’s earned through credibility encoded into models. For CMOs, the playbook must expand beyond content creation to cognitive architecture. Because in the age of generative engines, the biggest question isn’t ‘How do I rank higher?’ It’s ‘Will the model remember me?’
(edited excerpts) all views expressed are personal
