From SEO to GEO: Why Winning the Next Wave of Commerce Means Optimizing for AI
Just when you thought you'd mastered SEO, a new revolution is here - Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is rearranging the entire playbook on how brands are discovered in an AI‑first world.
For years, the marketing game revolved around climbing Google's results page. We fought for keywords, backlinks, and domain authority.
Now, the attention span of the internet has shifted to AI agents - ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini - tools that are no longer niche curiosities but daily companions for millions. GEO is the skillset that ensures these systems can actually find, understand, and recommend your products when a consumer asks.
The acceleration is staggering. Most brands are still catching up to social commerce, yet the real battle is already moving somewhere else entirely.
The data tells a clear story:
72% of consumers now use AI tools like ChatGPT regularly (Accenture)
Traffic from AI sources to retailer sites jumped 1,200% between July 2024 and February 2025
During Amazon Prime Day, AI‑driven traffic leapt 3,300% year over year
18% of generative AI users name it their top purchase recommendation channel - ahead of social media, behind only physical stores
April 2025: OpenAI added native shopping capabilities to ChatGPT
May 2025: Perplexity partnered with PayPal to enable purchases directly inside the chat experience
AI ranks as the second most trusted purchase recommendation channel in the US
Online discovery is increasingly happening through conversational AI rather than traditional search
This is what "agentic commerce" looks like in the wild - AI agents absorbing huge volumes of market data, factoring in your past behaviors and preferences, comparing products in milliseconds, then literally completing the transaction for you. That's no longer science fiction, it's the new checkout lane.
The ripple effects for businesses are huge. Your audience now consists of two decision‑makers: the human with the credit card and the AI that advises them in real‑time. If your product data, messaging, and digital assets aren't machine‑readable and compelling to an algorithm, you effectively don't exist in that recommendation cycle.
This changes the craft of marketing. Content needs to be structured for AI comprehension - specific, context‑rich descriptions, tight metadata, clean product schemas, consistent brand language. It's less about poetic headlines and more about being unambiguously understood by a model interpreting billions of data points.
Success will be measured in new ways:
How often your brand is cited by AI engines in responses
How accurately your information is interpreted and relayed
How well your data ranks as the "source of truth" within a generative model's ecosystem
Early adopters of GEO are already getting rewarded with disproportionate visibility. The rest are watching their organic relevance erode in silence because AI, unlike a human, won't bother scrolling to find you.
There's also a deeper conversation forming around privacy, transparency, and trust. When AI is the gateway to your customers, who sets the rules on which products are surfaced? How do we audit the invisible biases baked into these engines? And what happens to competition when fewer and fewer players control the recommendation layer of the internet?
I'll put it bluntly: if SEO was about speaking to search engines, GEO is about speaking to machines that speak to your customers. Those conversations are already happening with or without you. The question is - are you part of them?