ChatGPT has around 800 million weekly users, and a growing share of them are researching your brand there instead of Google. Here's what GEO actually is.
ChatGPT has roughly 800 million weekly active users. Sit with that for a second, because it means a huge and fast-growing chunk of the people researching your brand right now aren't typing a query into Google — they're having a conversation with an AI model instead.
It's not just a change in where people search. It's a change in how. “Starbucks opening hours” is a keyword. “What dairy options does Starbucks have, and which one works best in a latte?” is a real question, asked the way you'd ask a friend who happens to know everything. That shift is the whole reason the old search rules stop fully applying.
GEO — generative engine optimization, sometimes called AI visibility — is the discipline of understanding and shaping how AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude represent your brand. Where SEO was always about ranking on a results page, GEO is about something less visible and arguably more important: what story does the AI actually tell when someone asks about you?
Because the model isn't retrieving a fixed page and ranking it — it's generating a fresh answer each time, and that answer is probabilistic. Two people can type the exact same prompt and get two different responses back. There's no single #1 spot to chase the way there was on a search results page.
That one fact quietly breaks a chunk of the traditional SEO toolkit. Keyword targeting, meta description tweaks, backlink-driven ranking pushes — none of it maps cleanly onto a system generating a new answer on the fly rather than retrieving a ranked list. GEO isn't SEO with a new coat of paint. It's a genuinely different problem, wearing a similar-looking hat.
No — and this is the part that catches people out. A model isn't just reading your website when it forms an opinion of you. It's pulling signal from everywhere: your site, third-party coverage, competitor comparisons, reviews, PR, your LinkedIn presence, whether you've got a Wikipedia page, analyst reports, podcast appearances.
Your AI narrative doesn't live in one place, which means it can't be managed from one place either. “Marketing needs to be joined up” stops being a nice internal slogan and becomes a functional requirement — if your website, PR, and thought leadership are telling three different stories, the AI ends up telling a fourth one, and it's not guaranteed to be the one you'd pick.
I saw this play out with a CMO in hospitality who was shown, for the first time, what ChatGPT actually associated with their brand. Some of it tracked. Some of it didn't — the model was still surfacing a narrative the brand thought it had left behind years ago, quietly sitting somewhere in its digital footprint and getting repeated as if it were current. That's usually the moment it clicks: AI isn't neutral, and it isn't necessarily up to date. It's working from whatever signal it can find.
Two numbers make that call for you. Around 70% of AI users now use tools like ChatGPT to research brands and products before buying. And AI-driven search is converting at roughly five times the rate of traditional Google search.
Put those together and it's hard to shrug off: a growing share of your prospective customers are forming an opinion about you inside a conversation you can't see, based on a narrative you may not have shaped — and that conversation is unusually likely to end in a decision.
Visibility first, then strategy, then ongoing management — in that order. Start by finding out what AI actually says about you today, across the different models, and where that narrative is coming from. Then build a plan to reinforce what's working and correct what isn't. Because the narrative is assembled from your whole digital ecosystem, keeping it healthy is an ongoing job, not a fix-it-once audit.
Related but not the same. SEO targets ranking in a fixed results list; GEO is about shaping the narrative inside a generated, probabilistic AI answer — which depends on ecosystem-wide signal rather than page-level ranking factors alone.
Roughly 70% of AI users now use tools like ChatGPT to research brands or products before deciding, and that share is growing.
By most current estimates, yes — roughly five times the conversion rate of traditional Google search.
Not just your website — your PR coverage, reviews, competitor comparisons, LinkedIn presence, Wikipedia page (or absence of one), analyst reports, and podcast appearances all feed into it.
We'll get into the specific fixes — the technical stuff, the content habits, the ecosystem signals that move the needle — next time. For now, the first move is simple: find out what AI is currently saying about your brand. Most brands haven't looked yet. That's usually where the surprises live.
At Epoch AI Consulting, we help brands see what AI models are actually saying about them, and build a plan to shape that narrative across their whole digital ecosystem.
If you want to find out what AI is saying about your brand, get in touch.