“What’s fascinating to me is, if we’re building beyond SEO into a GEO-type space, a lot of the things that it’s pulling from to figure out authority actually ends up being whether or not you’re part of culture,” Foster said. “They’re pulling from the conversations on Reddit, and so if you’re not top of mind, top of conversation, the GEO piece isn’t going to pull through.”
Rethinking brand discovery and consumer journeys
Brand discovery is increasingly happening through direct chats with AI agents, and marketers are trying to crack the code to earn their endorsements.
“You’ve got a brand ambassador sitting between yourself and the customer, which is the chatbot,” said Kyle Monson, founding partner of Codeword. “Word of mouth is powerful. Word of bot is going to become very powerful,” he added.
Third-party platforms like Pinterest are another avenue for brand discovery, where billions of searches take place monthly, said Stacy Malone, VP, global business of marketing at Pinterest.
“It’s literally turning into Gen Z’s search engine,” she said.
But what’s interesting, Malone noted, is that only about half of those searches have commercial intent.
“Many times, they’re not looking for the answer, which is what a lot of the AI platforms are giving people. They want to explore, discover, which is a great place for a brand to be,” she said. “We hear a lot of consumers say, ‘I don’t know what I want yet, but I’ll know it when I see it.’”
Richard Case, VP of growth marketing at GoodRx, acknowledged that while brand discovery acquisition is becoming more challenging, things do get easier for brands if they can win customers over during that first interaction.
“I still think that in-person or user product experience just becomes that much more tangible and creates a certain feeling to make you want to go back,” Case said.
