What’s In Your Search? Why Generative AI Is The New Front Door

Search is changing. Gen AI is creating a new way to find information.

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Not long ago, Google, not Generative AI, was the front door to every business. If you were not on page one, you were invisible. That door is moving.

Today, more people start with generative AI. They ask ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, or Claude what to buy, where to go, and who to trust. Pew Research found that more than half of U.S. adults have already tried AI tools for discovery instead of Google.

The shift feels like Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Tickets sold out in minutes, social feeds overflowed, and even non-fans wanted in just to be part of the moment. That is the power of Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO. Some people call this AEO, short for Answer Engine Optimization. Whatever the label, it is not a side trend. It is becoming the main stage for brand discovery.

I spent years as a CMO perfecting SEO with keywords, backlinks, and content calendars. Then I saw the change: people were not just Googling anymore. They were asking AI. That is where GEO comes in.

Whether in blockchain, commerce, or consumer tech, the rules are shifting. CMOTech reports that 33 percent of Gen Z now begin product research on AI platforms instead of search engines or social media.

Early lessons stood out. A Wikipedia page is critical. Reddit drives surprising influence, so we launched our own subreddit to feed the discovery engines. These steps worked, but they were only the start. GEO does not replace SEO. It complements it. SEO still matters for Google. GEO ensures your brand shows up where the new conversations happen.

And GEO itself? It is like writing a song. The chords and rhythm are science. The melody that moves people is art. You cannot predict it fully, but you cannot afford to ignore it.

Why Gen AI And GEO Matter Now

The shift is obvious once you experience it as a customer. Recently I searched for a CRM tool. On Google, I would get dozens of sites to explore. But when I asked Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, or even Google’s own Gemini, I got a neatly organized table of the top five CRM tools to consider, personalized to the reasons I gave for my search. It was easier for me as the buyer, but if I were a CRM company not listed, it would have been devastating.

People are doing this more and more. Instead of scrolling through search pages, they ask a generative AI tool for the best restaurant in a city, the best software tool to use, or a great TV show to watch. And if your company does not appear in those answers, you might as well be invisible.

Have you used a GenAI tool to search your own company? If you have, you already know how varied the results can be. One platform may showcase your strengths while another pulls outdated or inaccurate information.

If you look at the data, it makes sense why platforms like Reddit and Wikipedia appear so often in AI outputs. Reddit thrives because people share practical solutions in plain language. Wikipedia shows up because it has spent decades compiling trusted, consistent content. Interestingly, business and service sites now account for nearly half of citations, which means the door is open for any company that invests in being genuinely useful.

At the end of the day, AI is amplifying the strongest signals it can find. If your brand consistently shows up in reliable, human-centered ways across channels, that becomes the signal. If your presence is thin, inconsistent, or self-promotional, that is noise. Buyers do not want tricks. They want to trust that you can solve their problem. GEO is about establishing that trust in the new discovery landscape.

I have been exploring AI tools to help with GEO optimization because it is becoming so important and I wanted to share a few with you. While I looked at over 12 companies and demos, I wanted to share some of the most interesting to me.

Bospar’s Audit*E: Announced September 25th For Generative AI Searches

Bospar, the “politely pushy” PR and marketing firm, is announcing today the launch of Audit*E, a tool built to address a challenge most businesses do not even realize they face. I got an early sneak preview.

AuditE was inspired by a client project. During the launch of RealSense, Bospar secured more than 500 media stories, quadrupled website traffic, and generated a surge in social activity. By traditional measures it was a success.

But when people asked ChatGPT about RealSense, the answers were outdated and often wrong. Bospar recognized that no tool existed to systematically evaluate how AI engines presented a brand. AuditE was created to fill that gap.

The tool evaluates visibility, prominence, and accuracy across eight major AI platforms. It offers company-specific dashboards that track changes over time, identify competitive benchmarks, and flag sentiment shifts. Users can schedule recurring audits weekly, monthly, or quarterly to monitor their AI footprint. Analyst Rob Enderle calls Audit*E a critical strategic asset because it not only detects problems but also provides correction paths to fix them.

Josh Constine, a venture partner at SignalFire and former editor-at-large at TechCrunch, underscored the opportunity. “If you don’t know how your business shows up in results on ChatGPT and other LLMs, you’re missing a massive opportunity to influence customers,” he said. “We’re advising portfolio companies that Generative Engine Optimization is the new SEO, and should be a core goal of any PR or content campaign.”

He added, “Bospar’s Audit*E helps businesses establish a baseline of their GEO presence, suggests ways to improve how they appear, and measures the impact of their media efforts.”

What makes AuditE different is its link between PR and GEO.

Curtis Sparrer, Bospar principal, explained that AI platforms learn about companies through earned media in authoritative outlets. “We created Audit*E based on a real situation happening to one of our clients. An erroneous, runaway report had given some people, and some AI, the wrong impression that the company was no longer alive. We needed forensic software to determine what was the problem and what solution could fix it. This is battle-tested technology out on the front-lines of AI.

But taking a step back, this is the bigger challenge with AI.

Because it’s based on human beings it still gets things wrong. The challenge: correcting these sorts of problems isn’t like sending a correction to an editorial department in a newsroom. Rather, it’s algorithmic and takes time to cycle through permutations. Now, let’s take that situation that happened to my client, and multiply it by the millions of other scenarios that could happen to any person or any company. Our thought is that we didn’t want to invent the wheel each time a problem like this happened. Rather, we wanted to have a ready-made solution that we could deploy that would find the problem and tell us how to fix it as quickly as possible.”

The launch of Audit*E signals a new way for PR to power visibility in the AI age.

WriteSonic GEO: AI Native Automation

Writesonic tackles the blind spot most marketers face: knowing how their brand appears in AI search results. The platform tracks visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and 10+ AI platforms, showing exactly where competitors get mentioned while you don’t. But Writesonic goes beyond monitoring. It identifies the specific fixes needed to boost visibility: which Reddit threads to join, what TechRadar articles to pitch, and which content needs updating to get cited by AI.

In chatting with Samanyou Garg, Founder and CEO of WriteSonic, he explained that “89% of B2B buyers now use AI for research. They’re making decisions inside ChatGPT before ever clicking to a website. If your brand isn’t in those AI responses, you’re not even in the conversation. That’s why we built Writesonic: to help brands see where they’re losing to competitors and fix it fast.”

The platform’s strength lies in understanding real search behavior. Writesonic analyzes 120M+ actual AI conversations to track what users really ask (“best project management for remote startup with 15 people”) rather than generic keywords. When gaps are identified, the AI Visibility Action Center provides actionable next steps. Find that competitors dominate “CRM for small teams” queries? Writesonic shows which high-authority sites AI trusts, helps create comparison content AI prefers, and tracks whether your efforts drive results.

Writesonic streamlines the entire GEO workflow through smart automation. AI agents help identify opportunities, generate optimized content drafts, and detect technical issues blocking crawlers. Teams stay in control while the platform handles the heavy lifting of research, analysis, and initial content creation. This blend of automation and human oversight makes it possible for lean marketing teams to compete in AI search without expanding headcount.

Sam concluded with the following insight. “AI search is fundamentally different from traditional SEO. Google sends you traffic; AI platforms give answers without clicks. The brands winning today understand this shift: they’re optimizing for citations and mentions, not just rankings”

Peec AI: GEO From the Ground Up

The third tool I explored was Peec AI, a platform built specifically for Generative Engine Optimization rather than retrofitted from SEO. Unlike legacy tools, Peec didn’t start with keywords and backlinks. It started with the question of how brands show up in AI-generated answers.

Peec tracks how large language models reference your company, products, and competitors across different prompts, then suggests optimizations to increase authority and visibility. It’s less about climbing Google rankings and more about becoming a trusted citation in the knowledge base of AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

For businesses already familiar with SEO, Peec offers a fresh but complementary lens. It shows where your SEO efforts still matter, but also highlights the gaps where AI engines may miss or misrepresent your brand. That duality is critical, because discovery today happens in both search engines and AI-driven conversations.

Peec exemplifies the new wave of GEO-native tools. Rather than adapting SEO practices, it represents the next chapter: ensuring your brand has a seat at the AI table where customer decisions increasingly begin.

DropLinked for Gen AI Searching: Onchain and Commerce Focused

And finally, I had to try a tool that combined Gen AI searching with Blockchain.

Generative engines are evolving from presenting information to surfacing actionable commerce. Droplinked (a partner in another area of the business with my employer) shows how GEO can expand into commerce by making products discoverable, distributable, and transactable in a generative context.

Droplinked’s AI crawls a full product catalogue and tokenizes, or places on the blockchain, each item so it becomes indexable and distributable across co-seller networks. In a GEO setting this means that when a user queries a generative engine for “eco friendly running gear,” a product tokenized via Droplinked can surface, whether on a niche blog, a social influencer’s site, or another audience channel.

Because attribution is onchain, Droplinked ensures every sale routed via generative recommendations is tracked transparently, so creators and co-sellers get proper credit. Payouts happen immediately (with commission deducted automatically), but funds are held in conditional escrow until the return period expires.

Ali Sammour, Chief Executive Officer of Droplinked, told me: “We envision a world where generative systems don’t just show answers, they show you or an authenticated agent a product you can buy—with full trust, attribution, and instant settlement built in from the companies providing the product.”

Droplinked is thus a living proof of commerce becoming a native wing of GEO: products made discoverable, partners paired, attribution enforced, and transactions executed seamlessly in generative environments.

GEO in Practice With the Gen AI Tools

The RealSense example from Bospar shows why GEO cannot be ignored. Even a successful PR launch backed by SEO strength does not guarantee accurate AI answers. Without GEO, customers, investors, and journalists may encounter old or misleading information. With GEO, companies can see how they appear across AI platforms, measure their prominence, and correct inaccuracies.

A Bospar study found that nearly 70% of Fortune 500 comms teams are testing “GEO audits” to measure how their brands show up in AI results.

The advantages of GEO are clear. It ensures accurate representation across AI engines, provides competitive benchmarks, and highlights visibility gaps. It allows companies to be proactive rather than reactive in shaping their brand narrative in the AI-first economy.

What Do You Do Next WIth Generative AI and GEO?

SEO is not going away. It remains essential for Google, which still dominates billions of daily searches. But SEO alone no longer guarantees discoverability. GEO is the complement that ensures your brand appears in generative AI answers, social feeds, and recommendation engines.

Companies like Bospar, WriteSonic, DropLinked and Peec are each tackling GEO from different directions. Bospar brings a PR-driven audit approach. WriteSonic applies AI-native automation. DropLinked represents commerce, onchain, and searching. Peec built GEO from the ground up. Together they illustrate the toolkit every modern business will need.

And a toolkit is needed as more and more executives are using Generative AI for their decision making capability.

The lesson from SEO’s early days still applies. The companies that experimented first and invested early dominated the first page of Google.

In the AI age, the companies that embrace GEO now will dominate the first answers from AI.