AI Appreciation Day: Marty Hungerford explains why brands must embrace ‘generative engine optimisation’
By Marty Hungerford (pictured), Chief Innovation Officer, BRX
Ask ChatGPT about the best car brands for families, and you’ll get a curated list. Search for laptop recommendations, and the AI serves up specific models with reasoning. But notice which brands make those lists and which don’t.
This represents more than a technological preference. The rapid transition from traditional search engines to AI-powered language models represents a complete restructuring of the discovery layer between brands and customers. And many businesses haven’t noticed they’re already losing.
This trend has given rise to what is being called generative engine optimisation (GEO), the new discipline of optimising content for AI-powered responses rather than traditional search rankings.
Shift from traditional search to AI-powered search
The shift from traditional search engines to AI-powered language models represents a complete reshaping of how consumers discover, evaluate, and engage with brands. Those that fail to recognise and respond to this shift risk becoming invisible at the moment of decision.
Brands that are not surfaced in LLM-generated responses will see a significant decline in visibility, resulting in downstream impacts on customer acquisition, brand relevance, and market competitiveness.
Importantly, this isn’t a reflection of product quality, but of digital discoverability: if a brand isn’t mentioned, trusted, or properly structured in the sources LLMs rely on, it may simply not exist in the eyes of the AI, or the customer.
This transition marks a new brand-customer dynamic, where visibility is no longer about search engine rankings alone, but about being contextually relevant, credibly cited, and machine-readable.
Brands that embrace this reality early by adapting content, enhancing structured data, and embedding themselves in trusted digital ecosystems, will establish a lasting competitive edge.
Those that delay will not merely fall behind, they risk being excluded from the AI-powered discovery layer entirely.
Which brands face ‘existential risk’?
While the shift toward AI-mediated discovery poses challenges across all industries, the impact won’t be uniform.
The degree to which brands face existential risk from this transition depends largely on the nature of their products, customer relationships, and purchase drivers. Understanding these differences is critical for prioritising response strategies and resource allocation.
Some purchases are driven by emotion or identity rather than logic, price, or features. Luxury fashion and high-end cars fall into this category, and as a result, are less likely to be impacted by shifts in consumer decision-making.
In contrast, products like utilities are essential, broadly interchangeable, and often chosen based on price or promotional offers rather than brand loyalty.
This divide will deepen as AI agents begin to play larger roles in decision-making and action pathways. When decision-making occurs without humans in the loop, brand presence such as mental availability becomes less relevant. Instead, the agent’s choices will be driven primarily by product attributes, features, and consumer reviews.
Consider a future where your AI assistant automatically switches your energy provider based on quarterly rate comparisons, or books travel based on optimal price-to-convenience ratios.
As the way people search and discover products changes, brands that adapt to this new environment will be best placed to succeed. This means actively engaging with how AI systems interpret and present information.
Mastery of tools like prompt engineering, investment in training partnerships, or the development of custom GPTs can all help confirm products and services are accurately and favourably surfaced in AI-mediated environments.
Brands that fail to understand how their audiences now phrase questions, conduct research, or engage with offerings will miss opportunities to evolve. Without these insights, businesses won’t be able to redesign digital experiences, particularly websites, to support discovery and decision-making in an AI-driven world.
Tips for brands to stay ahead of the GEO curve
Where they once poured much marketing effort into search engine optimisation (SEO), brands must now rethink their digital presence for GEO, optimising not just for humans, but for the machines mediating those interactions.
A brand’s digital presence and content need to be more conversational and context-rich, rather than just keyword-dense. At BRX, we specialise in AI-driven marketing and have developed strategies to help drive GEO success:
Audit your brand’s presence across trusted sources. Are you mentioned on CHOICE, Canstar, Reddit, Whirlpool? If not, why not?
Update your structured data. Use schema markup and keep pricing, availability, and product specifications always accurate.
Drive positive reviews. Be a part of brand dialogue that matters to your category like Trustpilot, Google, TripAdvisor.
Optimise for natural language. Rewrite content to reflect how people actually ask questions in LLMs, not keyword-stuffing. Format your language for skim readers and scanners with a “too long; didn’t read.”
Create content that simplifies decisions. Think comparison tables, FAQs, expert explainers, and product fit guides.
These steps form the foundation of AI-ready brand presence, but success requires more than checking boxes. The brands that will really thrive in this environment will also share some common characteristics. At BRX, we think brands that win will be those who:
- Sit outside the dynamic of price and features
- Create conversational content that answers real questions
- Prioritise structured clarity in product and service info
- Maintain consistency across official and third-party sources
- Earn trust through verified experiences, not just promises
- Provide highly specific answers to hyper-individual questions
In this new environment, the marketer’s job is no longer just to shape consumer perception but to influence the AI’s perception of their brand.
To “win” in AI-generated conversations, content flooding is no longer just a visibility tactic, it’s a visibility imperative. Brands that dominate the content space are disproportionately represented in LLM outputs.
Flooding without a customer-centric lens, however, risks damaging the post-click experience. The challenge is balancing volume with quality.
The emerging reality is that websites are increasingly serving LLMs first, customers second. This creates a tension: you may be designing an experience that LLMs find useful, but human users do not.
Maintaining the competitive edge
Given the complexity and rapid evolution of AI systems, partnering with specialists who understand this landscape can accelerate your progress. BRX helps brands navigate GEO with AI-native strategies that deliver measurable improvements in AI visibility and engagement.
The brands that recognise this shift early and master GEO won’t just maintain their market position; they’ll capture market share from competitors who remain focused on traditional search optimisation. In a world where AI increasingly mediates brand discovery, being invisible to artificial intelligence means being invisible to customers.”
This emphasises the value proposition of working with experts who understand the complexity and fast-moving nature of AI, rather than trying to figure it out alone.
