Who owns GEO? That’s the wrong question
Opinion
The IAB UK’s chief strategy officer examines the role each marketing and advertising discipline can play in the GEO land grab.
IAB UK’s latest research shows AI summaries are cutting traffic to advertiser websites. But the traffic that does arrive appears to be converting far better. That tells us something important: getting into AI answers probably isn’t advertising’s fight to win on its own. But advertising does have a very specific role to play, if it can resist the urge to claim the whole territory from PR, SEO and content.
Walk into any room of marketers at the moment, and it won’t take long before someone mentions Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
GEO has quickly become the latest race to win. PR wants it. SEO wants it. Content teams want it.
As IAB Europe’s Chief Economist, Dr Daniel Knapp, has observed, a “cottage industry” is already springing up around GEO, much as it did around mobile, social and commerce. Agencies are building dedicated GEO teams before half the industry has agreed on what “good” even looks like.
Maybe we’re asking the wrong question.
The real question isn’t who owns GEO. It’s what role each discipline actually plays.
AI has changed the value of visibility
Emirates is about a third the size of British Airways in the minds of UK consumers. Ask AI about airlines and data says the two come up just as often. Barclays is three times the brand size of Chase, but it’s getting mentioned about as much as Chase does. Decades of brand-building and millions of pounds in ad spend are being challenged by an AI summary featuring challengers with a fraction of the spend.
Kantar compared brand awareness with what it calls “share of model”: how often brands appear in AI-generated answers. The implication is significant, as traditional strategies and massive budgets no longer guarantee you’ll be part of the conversation when someone asks AI for advice. Smaller brands suddenly have a genuine opportunity to compete if they’re the ones AI has learned to trust.
Naturally, everyone wants to influence that.
AI summaries are a challenge to the open web: there as soon as you Google something and there when you ask ChatGPT a question you used to go to Wikipedia for.
Our latest State of AI in Advertising research found that 74% of advertisers believe AI summaries are cutting traffic to their websites. No surprise there. If ChatGPT, Google or Gemini answers your question directly, you don’t need to click through ten blue links anymore. But, nearly half of advertisers told us they’ve seen a significant increase in website visitors converting into customers over the past year.
Less traffic, but better customers
AI summaries are doing more of the educating up front, so by the time someone clicks through, they’ve already compared options, understood the basics, and decided you’re worth a closer look. Consumers tell us the same thing. About half say AI summaries save them time because they no longer need to visit multiple websites to make a decision.
The traffic may be lower, but the quality appears to be higher. And the brands recommended in AI answers are taking a growing share of ready-to-buy customers. That’s why GEO matters.
Advertising’s role begins before the AI answer
The obvious question, then, becomes: who has the greatest influence?
Right now, the evidence points to PR. Analysis from Muck Rack, covering more than 25m citations across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, found earned media accounts for the vast majority of sources AI models reference. Gartner predicts PR and earned media budgets will double by 2027. That makes sense. AI learns from what the world says about you, not just what you say about yourself.
But before advertisers hand GEO over to PR, there’s another important piece of the puzzle.
Paid ads have arrived in ChatGPT. But our research suggests they aren’t a substitute for earning visibility. Most people are comfortable with ads sitting alongside AI conversations, but not inside them. More than half are uncomfortable with brands paying to appear directly within AI-generated responses.
People increasingly treat AI as somewhere between a search engine and someone they ask for advice. Interrupting that recommendation with paid placement changes the relationship.
So, advertising still has a lane. It just isn’t the one many people expected.
Long before someone opens ChatGPT or Google, they’ve already formed opinions about the brands they know. Nearly half of AI users research products before buying, while 42% compare prices and deals. But people rarely ask AI to compare brands they’ve never heard of. Advertising creates the curiosity that starts the journey.
GEO works best when marketing works together
Then there’s creativity. If earned media is one of the strongest signals for AI visibility, campaigns people genuinely want to talk about become even more valuable.
The best creative doesn’t just draw attention; it earns coverage, starts conversations and creates the credible sources AI models learn from.
And those sources don’t have to be national newspapers. AI appears to care far more about relevance than prestige. A respected trade publication or in-depth sub-Reddit can often matter more than a short-lived national headline.
The final point is consistency. Large language models reward brands that tell the same story everywhere: your advertising, your website, your social channels and your “About us” page. If every touchpoint describes your brand differently, you’re asking AI to connect dots that shouldn’t need connecting.
James Chandler is chief strategy officer at IAB UK and co-host of the AI podcast AI Haven’t a Clue.