By Ali Donaldson
Publication Date: 2025-12-17 19:21:00
A change in acronym does not mean a change in strategy. A Google executive has confirmed what founders have figured out on their own through first-hand experience. GEO is just SEO by another name.
Optimizing for AI search—or learning how to ensure large language models, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, namecheck certain brands—has become the most pressing and existential issue for chief marketing officers this year, as more consumers shift their browsing habits from search engines to AI models. As three-time Inc. 5000 honoree Orbit Media Studios co-founder and chief marketing officer Andy Crestodina put it to Inc. last month, “Marketers are losing their minds because organic traffic from search is down.”
That sense of dread is pervasive industry-wide. When Mercury, a San Francisco-based financial technology company that provides banking services to more than 200,000 startups, surveyed 750 leaders of e-commerce businesses this fall, it found that 77 percent of…
