January 6, 2026
Over the last few decades, the digital marketing industry has revolved around the standard ten blue links - a static list of search results which everyone fought to get to the top of. However, the rise of answer engines has caused a shift in the industry.
When a potential customer asks an AI assistant for a recommendation or some information, they’re no longer looking for a list of websites to browse - they want a definitive answer or a short list of options from which they can research within the app.
This shift is known as Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), and it represents a fairly important change in how your brand exists online. That being said, it doesn’t mean that the traditional digital marketing playbook has been torn up. It simply means that it’s evolving. So let’s take a look at how you can progress with it.
Recent industry reports suggest that up to 60% of searches generally now result in zero clicks. This doesn't mean people have stopped searching, it just means Google’s AI Overviews and other platforms are providing the necessary information directly on the results page or in-app. This comes alongside projections that suggest search engine volume could drop by 25% this year, as users migrate to more conversational interfaces including apps like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok.
Ultimately this means that the old strategy of solely focusing on ranking for keywords is no longer the right one. Although that won’t go away any time soon!
Now, you need to be more than just a destination that you hope users will be recommended and instead, you need to become a primary source. If an LLM cannot fully understand your business or trust your authority, your brand effectively ceases to exist in what’s being called the ‘conversational web’.
LLMs don’t give users a long list of sites to visit like search engines do. Because of this, it’s going to be much more competitive being cited for even basic top-level keyword searches like ‘digital marketing agency Leeds’. On the flip side, users are more conversational when it comes to GEO, so if they’re chatting with an LLM they’re more likely to be thinking long-tail, which gives businesses the opportunity to really explain what they’re about.
As a result, GEO requires a more sophisticated approach. It’s important to be clear about who you are as an entity and this involves ensuring that every piece of content you produce is structured so an AI can easily identify facts, relationships, and expertise.
Rather than hiding your expertise deep within blog posts or portfolio pages, and suggesting it indirectly, you need to lead with key points. This answer-first structure allows an AI to scrape the relevant data points it needs to form its summary with ease.
Alongside this, it’s also important to lean heavily on quality schema markup. This technical language helps search engines understand your web content, telling it things like what a product costs or who wrote an article. While the jury is still out on whether schema actually aids LLMs understanding of content, search engines are a primary source of information for them.
Link building is one of the more interesting sides of this change. One of the core functions of most digital agencies or in-house teams has been to secure do follow links to demonstrate trust and authority to Google. This won’t be going away anytime soon either but for an LLM that can understand context, even just positive mentions with no link at all have regained a lot of value. This means that digital PR is now more important than ever before.
Measuring progress in this new landscape is more complex than it used to be. Standard rank tracking, i.e. watching a keyword move from position five to position three, won’t work here because there aren’t readily available and standardised metrics to keep an eye on.
It’s essential to get a good idea of the amount of traffic coming from places like ChatGPT and what that traffic is doing. But if users aren’t always clicking, you won’t know whether you appeared in a conversion. Although it can be tricky and expensive, there are ways to get an idea of these metrics with the help of additional tools.
Specialised sentiment trackers will become increasingly useful, and can be used to monitor what is now known as ‘share of model’. This means looking at how often a brand is cited in a LLM response and, more importantly, the context of that mention.
It’s not entirely clear how effective these tools really are yet, but they are likely to improve as tracking becomes essential. We also hope that as the LLM developers look to monetise their models, they will introduce tools to help businesses understand how they’re being referenced.
Essentially, we’re going to have to use multiple tools and multiple metrics to keep an eye on things.
In 2025, AI chatbots went mainstream, but in 2026, AI assistants will be used to handle things like transactions and direct bookings.
To prepare for this, businesses will need to adjust their approach. When an AI is asked for the best provider in your space, your brand is the one it needs to cite with confidence. And it will only do this if it’s fully able to understand your business, and compare it against the market.
If you need expert guidance navigating this new landscape, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us today.
