 |
Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital StrategyExploring Emerging Trends in E-commerce and Digital Strategy for Marketing and Business Leaders Author: Tim Peter
A weekly podcast exploring how e-commerce and digital trends shape your business and marketing strategy Language: en-us Genres: Business, Management, Marketing Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
Listen Now...
SEO vs. GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge (Episode 485)
Monday, 23 February, 2026
There is a lot of mixed information out there regarding how to rank in the age of AI. In this episode of Digital Reset with Tim Peter, Tim cuts through the noise to explain the transition from traditional Search Engine Optimization to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). While the tools are changing rapidly, the core mission remains the same: ensuring that your customers’ “digital concierge” knows exactly who you are and why you’re the right choice for your customer. Key Insights for Strategic Leaders ”Do No Harm": Before chasing new AI trends, ensure you aren’t breaking what already works. Traditional SEO still drives the majority of traffic for many businesses and, more importantly, often provides the foundational data that AI models use to understand your brand. The Reality of GEO: Whether you call it AEO, AIO, or GEO, the practice of appearing in AI answer agents is still maturing. Recent data shows that even major players like LinkedIn are seeing significant shifts in traffic patterns, making it essential to track your visibility in AI Overviews and agents. Your Brand is the Prompt: In the "Age of the Concierge," AI doesn’t just look for links; it looks for brand consensus and context. If the AI gets your brand details wrong, it’s a sign your digital signal is weak. Your goal is to build a brand so distinct that customers ask for it by name — effectively making your brand the search prompt itself. The Toolset for 2026: Showing up requires measurement. Tools like Peec AI and seoClarity are becoming the new standard for measuring "share of model" and visibility within generative engines. Customer Experience is Queen: AI agents are becoming more efficient at converting traffic than traditional search. This means your website must be optimized for "the handoff" — providing clear, structured information that an AI agent can easily digest and present to a human being… otherwise known as your customer. SEO vs. GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links GEO vs. AEO vs. AIO vs. SEO on Google Trends Rand Fishkin proved AI recommendations are inconsistent – here’s why and how to fix it Are Citations in AI Search Affected by Google Organic Visibility Changes? AEO And GEO: Google’s Outbound Traffic Down 33%: The GEO Revolution Is Here Airbnb says traffic from AI chatbots converts better than Google LinkedIn abandons traditional SEO as 60% traffic loss forces radical strategy shift The House Always Wins: Lessons from Google’s 2025 Earnings (Podcast Episode 484) Why AI Won’t Kill Search—It’s Doing Something Much Bigger (Episode 483) What Brand Tattoos Tell Us in the Age of AI (Podcast 482) AI Is Changing How Customers Choose — Here’s How Brands Win in 2026 (Best of the Show: Revisiting Episode 478) What ‘The Brand Is the Prompt’ Really Means for Your Business (Episode 474) Rethinking Your Website in the Age of AI (Episode 473) 7 Best AI Search Visibility Tools for Enterprises (2026) Tools mentioned in this episode: Peec AI – AI Search Analytics for Marketing Teams seoClarity – AI Search Optimization Platform Finseo – AI-Powered SEO Tools for Next-Gen Search Optimization SE Ranking – AI SEO Software Profound – Optimize Brand Visibility in AI Search AI Search Monitoring Tool – Track ChatGPT, Perplexity & Google AIO Buy the Book — Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today. Past Appearances Rutgers Business School MSDM Speaker: Series: a Conversation with Tim Peter, Author of "Digital Reset" Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it. The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface and edited in Ableton Live 12 Suite. Running time: 20m 29s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: SEO vs. GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge Welcome back to Digital Reset with Tim Peter. There is so much mixed information about what’s going on with AI tools and most importantly, what you need to do to show up in AI answer engines. That’s "mixed information," by the way, not "mis-information". I don’t think people are lying. OK, mostly nobody’s lying. I bet somebody is though. The truth, though is that we’re still in the very early days for so much of what is going on with artificial intelligence. And so it’s hard to authoritatively state that this is the absolute one and only possible truth about the way that AI works and that AI answer engines work. As you might imagine, I’m somewhat skeptical about that framing that there’s only one possible answer here. First, up until recently, most digital marketers couldn’t even agree on what to call the practice of showing up in AI answer engines. Some called it GEO, some called it AEO, some called it AIO. Oy! If you don’t know what your practice is called, if you don’t know what you’re actually working on, that’s a damned fine sign that the practice itself isn’t very mature. For now, I’m calling it GEO. At least judging by Google Trends data, GEO appears to be the winning term. It looks like a pretty clear winner. If I’m being honest, I don’t really love the term GEO. I fully admit to thinking that doing right by search engines generally benefits AI and that it’s all SEO in the end. I appear to be losing that argument though. Such is life. More importantly, these tools are evolving and fast. What’s true today may be less true weeks or even days from now. You can’t go a day or more without some new change being made or some new change being announced by the big players around these tools. What is most important is making sure that AI answer engines and AI assistants and AI agents know about your brand and your business. It’s why I’m so keen on this concept that your brand is the prompt. It’s easiest to ensure you show up if your customers and their AI assistants and agents ask for you by name. Regardless, you want, and need, these tools to surface your brand and recommend you to their users. That’s even more critical as we move towards agentic interfaces, which are coming. Your brand has to appear as an option or else you simply don’t exist. We’ve moved past an age of card catalogs into an age of concierges. As I talked about last week, I think that Google’s AI Overviews are the biggest single AI that most customers interact with regularly. And I expect that growth to continue. So there’s a ton of overlap, not only between your SEO and GEO goals and efforts, but also in terms of how your customers might find and experience your brand in the immediate term to midterm. My goal today for this episode isn’t to tell you how you show up. Instead, I want to talk about some foundational elements that matter as you work to show up, that ensure your brand and your business benefit, no matter how these tools evolve and change over time. I want to make sure you can tell where it’s important to focus your energies and where it’s not as you help your customers find you. This is episode 485 of The Big Show. Today we’re talking about SEO and GEO in the age of AI. Let’s dive in. So I think we all agree it’s unbelievably important that you show up in AI answer engines. What I’m not sure we completely agree upon is the fact that you need to show up in SEO still too, in traditional search. I want to give full credit to SEO expert Lily Ray for this idea, but we want to think about the fact that first, “do no harm.” Forget for a moment how you show up in AI answer engines. Of course you want to do that. I also suspect, and see this with my own clients, that for most businesses, even in a world of zero-click searches, Google still represents a significant, and probably your largest, single source of traffic. So the first thing you want is don’t do anything that screws up what Google gives you. This isn’t an SEO versus GEO question. It’s SEO plus GEO. Remember, you don’t get the plus if you mess up one side of the equation or other. As you read GEO advice, as you listen to GEO experts, as you listen to people talk about this, you need to ask yourself, “does this have the potential to hurt our current organic situation?” If the answer is no, go ahead and do it. Do it immediately even. If the answer is yes, well, don’t ignore it outright. Instead, then ask, “okay, how do we gain the benefits of this recommendation while also keeping our existing SEO position — or better yet, improving that existing SEO position?” Again, it’s not either SEO or GEO. It’s SEO and GEO, SEO plus GEO. Second, and you’ve heard me say this many times that customer experience is queen. I’m kind of bundling the first two portions of our royal court of brand building here. You’ve heard me say many times in the book, Digital Reset, that content is king and customer experience is queen. Those are still true. What’s also true, is that your content has always included what others say about you. You have a secret sales force working for you — or for your competitors — based on what your customers’ experiences are and what they say about those experiences in social and in ratings and reviews. They’re telling their friends and family and fans and followers all about what they think about your products and services and your brand more broadly. If you’re in a category like hospitality or travel or any kind of B2C, what others say about you in public ratings and reviews plays a massive role here. You’re undoubtedly familiar. In B2B, the same is still true. It just tends to happen in private. It could be text or LinkedIn messages. It could be email. It could be on Slack or Teams channels or phone calls. But folks ask other folks, “Hey, what do you know about this company? What do you know about their products and services? Do they work well for you?” Your content has always included what others say about your brand and business. Well, the data seems pretty clear that those discussions influence whether or not you show up in AI responses. That’s something we just have to keep top of mind. You also want to keep do no harm in mind, too, because what people say about you, whether it’s public or private, drives awareness, interest and action among your potential customers. Ideally, that’s to your business’s benefit. But even a poor customer experience creates a narrative around your brand and one that you’ll fight against for a long time to come, especially in GEO. If “the concierge” is reading all kinds of bad things about your brand, guess what it’s going to know about your brand? We want to move to an era where your brand is the prompt. And if somebody types in your brand and the answer engine says, “Man, I don’t know about that brand…” that’s really, really, really bad for your business. Not just now, but over the long term. Making sure that when your brand is the prompt that the concierge has great things to say about you, about your brand, about your business, is a clear component of why customer experience is queen now more than ever. So seriously, take care of the queen. This really matters. Finally, if you had have some exposure to our Royal Court framework that I’ve talked about many times, you’ll know that I say data is the crown jewels. And I want to talk for a minute about what that means in this case. I’m seeing many businesses experience a big lift in branded traffic or conversions that don’t have an obvious source. Folks are just coming to your website or opening your app or reaching out to your sales team or sending you an email without starting on your site. They just kind of appear. And if they’re not doing that, well, you want them to, regardless of whether they’re doing that today or not. Listen to my prior points from a moment ago if you need more help on how you can do that. The question we want to be thinking about then is if people just show up, what metrics matter to your business? We can’t rely on the metrics we’ve used for a long time. Now is the time to get your KPIs and your metrics in order so that you can actually determine what is our current state and are we moving forward in a direction that we want to. Again, data is the crown jewels. They help you make better business decisions and take better care of your customers so that they actually have a better experience, so that you actually have a better shot of showing up more often. Clearly, we’re going to lose some visibility into what’s happening compared to what we’ve had for years. You might not get the same level of tracking or the same level of insights you’ve had in the past. That’s okay. We just need to keep track of the metrics that genuinely matter and help you make better business decisions. Now the first one should be obvious, it’s revenue, right? Are you seeing more revenue or less revenue? Ultimately, that is the final determinant of whether or not any of this is working for your business. If your revenue is going up, that’s probably a good sign that you’re doing the right thing. If your revenue is declining, that’s probably a clear sign that you need to do something different than what you’ve been doing up till now. So that’s a huge one you want to pay attention to. Of course revenue is a trailing indicator. It only tells you what happened in the past. It’s not necessarily all that predictive of what’s going to happen in the future. So another key performance indicator you want to watch is lead volume. That could include actual leads in a B2B context. It could also include the number of people who put items in their shopping carts in B2C or enter your booking engine in a hospitality context. Are people showing interest in engaging with your brand and your business in a commercial way? Do they want to talk to you? Do they want to hear from you? Pay super close attention to whether they are signing up for your email lists. Are they giving you their information for SMS? Are they saying, “I want to have a conversation with you, not just now, but in the future and want to hear from you directly?” Again, that’s a super, super huge sign about where your business is going to go in the future. We do a bunch of work with hospitality clients and we’ve determined that for your typical set of hotels, every new email address you collect is worth somewhere between five and thirty-five dollars in future revenue. So if that data isn’t showing up, if you weren’t collecting that data from your customers, it’s a pretty good sign that your future revenues are going to have some real problems. Again, data is the crown jewels here. It points to real future revenue. Another metric that matters a ton are brand searches. Are the number of searches for your brand in organic traffic shrinking or growing? If it’s shrinking, you’re likely not showing up in AI or traditional search near as much as you’d like to or need to. People aren’t finding you. They then aren’t then going to Google and ask for you. Again, review my prior points for what you can do about that. If you see those numbers rising though, it’s a pretty good sign that AI is likely surfacing you more often. AI is talking about you and people are learning about you to then come over to your website by searching you by name. That’s a really clear use case that we’ve seen customers do where they learn about you and then they go ask traditional search to help them find you and find your website. Hugely important. A more recent and more sophisticated way to watch this is something called prompt brand equity. This is a term that we’ve talked about a bunch; it’s something that I think matters a lot as we go forward. And of course, I’ll link to in the show notes other times we’ve talked about this. Now, prompt brand equity is not about where you rank in AI search results. It’s how often you show up at all. There’s some great research from Rand Fishkin that shows where you appear in AI answers is not at all predictable. You could be number one in one chat, number two in another chat, and number three in a third chat, even though you’re an equally good answer for all three chats, even if the prompt was precisely the same. It’s not predictable. And it’s not predictive of what’s going to happen with your business. The thing you want to keep in mind here is it’s not about where you rank. It’s does your brand appear at all? Do you ever show up? Don’t worry about tracking where you rank, but absolutely pay attention to whether or not you appear. There are a bunch of pretty good tools for measuring this metric right at the moment. Tools like Peec AI, seoClarity, FinSEO, SE Ranking, Profound, and Otterly all seem to get good reviews and good feedback for how well they measure the frequency of how often your brand appears. It’s probably worth checking out each of those to see what might work best for you. My point here isn’t to recommend one tool or another. Your specific needs may lean you towards one versus the other. My point is to strongly recommend that you keep track of whether or not your brand appears at all. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing whether in fact your brand is the prompt… or isn’t. Tracking how frequently your brand appears is a great way to learn whether or not your content marketing and GEO efforts work. If you’re showing up, that’s a good signpost that your content is being used by AI answer engines. And if not, well, then your content pretty likely isn’t doing its job. It’s critical to understand what’s working here and what isn’t. As I mentioned last week, we’ve moved from a world where you just needed to show up in a card catalog to a world where you need to convince a concierge that you’re the right choice. That’s why taking care of both traditional search and GEO matters. Your successful digital reset isn’t about fighting with machines. It’s about ensuring your brand signal is clear enough for those machines to find you. Because in this new era, your brand isn’t just a logo or a label… not that it ever was. It’s that your brand is the prompt — or it needs to be if customers will consistently find you no matter where they go looking. If this episode helped you make sense of some of the noise around SEO and GEO and about digital more broadly, do me a favor, send it to one of your colleagues who is currently staring at their 2026 budget and wondering what they should do next. You can find the links to the GEO tracking tools we discussed, the show notes for this episode, and the full archive of all past episodes at TimPeter.com/podcast. And if you’re ready to move beyond big tech for your business, my book, Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech, provides the roadmap to reclaim your demand. You’ll find a link in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening today. I genuinely appreciate you. Until next time, please be well, be safe, and be excellent to each other. I’ll see you soon. Take Your Next Step Toward a Digital Reset “Digital Reset with Tim Peter” helps you look beyond the "shiny objects" to build a business that lasts. How can we help you today? The Brief: Get the weekly email that turns these strategic ideas into actionable demand. Subscribe to The Digital Reset Brief The Book: Master the framework with Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. Buy the Book The Experience: Need a bespoke digital strategy for your hotel, resort, SaaS firm, or financial services firm? Tim Peter & Associates can help you. Work with Tim The post SEO vs. GEO: How to Show Up When AI is the Concierge (Episode 485) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.
