This week\u2019s edition isn\u2019t your typical story of one campaign, one client, one result. It\u2019s the blueprint for surviving the next era of search<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A new discipline will define how brands get discovered in the age of AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and it\u2019s still early. But the four experts I spoke to are already deep in the trenches \ud83e\ude96<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Daniel Espejo Malag\u00f3n <\/a>(ex-Klarna) spotted the blind spot in traditional SEO and built Omnia<\/a>, the first tool to track AI recommendations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Olivier Filloux<\/a>, one of Europe\u2019s first GEO specialists at international SEO agency Eskimoz.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Germain Deflandre<\/a>, founder of SEO agency Elocos <\/a>who\u2019s building some of the first tools to reverse-engineer visibility in ChatGPT and Perplexity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Ayoub Rhillane<\/a>, founder of international marketing agency Rhillane Digital<\/a>, brings the sharp eye of a generalist and the clarity of a realist cutting through the AI hype.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Together they let me in on the data and insights driving their GEO success. This is their playbook<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s dive in \ud83d\udc47<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Is ChatGPT important? Is SEO dead?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Every day, 1 billion<\/strong> questions hit ChatGPT. Google\u2019s market share just dipped below 90%<\/strong> for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before you panic, SEO isn\u2019t dead. ChatGPT has 1% of the search market (Microsoft\u2019s Bing has 4%).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Google is also going AI-first:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Gemini<\/li>\n\n\n\n
AI Overviews<\/li>\n\n\n\n
AI Mode<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
AI features dominate Google’s search results. And that\u2019s after featured snippets, maps, shopping results\u2026 all are designed to offer answers right in the browser without leaving Google. Just like ChatGPT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That means only 36% of Google searches<\/strong> send traffic to other websites. And that number shrinks every day as Google\u2019s AI answers grow.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Even more revealing? Almost half of these searches are branded<\/strong>: featuring specific brands and products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Buyers are finding information and inspiration elsewhere: on social, in email inboxes, and through conversational queries on AI chatbots. Google is increasingly used for the last step to purchase only.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Websites and companies that just offer information online are taking a big hit, and it\u2019s only going to get worse. <\/em>– Ayoub Rhillane.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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At Eskimoz, according to Olivier Filloux, they’re planning for a 25% decrease in traditional search by the end of 2026<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you\u2019re not generating influence on those channels that come first, you\u2019ll struggle for success on Google too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\ud83d\udd25 Want your brand recommended by ChatGPT?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is already reshaping how customers discover, compare, and buy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The right SEO agency won\u2019t just help you rank on Google, they\u2019ll help you show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and whatever comes next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\ud83d\udd17 Browse vetted SEO agencies on Sortlist ><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Inside the black box: how ChatGPT picks your business<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
ChatGPT, Gemini, Google\u2019s AI Overviews, Claude and other LLMs all work in the same way. Optimizing for one means optimizing for the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To keep it (very) simple: LLMs are a high-tech predictive text<\/strong>. Each has read billions of pages. And its job is to predict what word would most commonly come next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To recommend your company, it pulls either from this huge memory (static retrieval) or fresh from the internet (RAG).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Static retrieval: ChatGPT\u2019s digital memory<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
ChatGPT\u2019s base knowledge. It’s a library of everything it read (training data) before its last update (model training).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s used to answer questions whose answers don\u2019t change month-to-month<\/strong> – so it doesn\u2019t matter if the information isn\u2019t totally up to date.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Examples<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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“What exactly is influencer marketing for industrial products?”
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“Why should my business use cloud accounting?”
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Strategic role:<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This kind of query is normally about education: top-of-funnel. Answers are hard-to-influence as the models have been trained on the majority of the written word. Adding to that is a drop in the ocean: most businesses shouldn\u2019t focus here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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