Seeing a drop in your website’s click rates? AI might be the real reason why. As AEO, GEO, and LLM-driven search is taking centre stage, more user queries are being answered directly inside AI summaries. You’re effectively invisible at the exact moment discovery happens if your brand isn’t included in those generated answers.
In our latest Performance+ webinar, AI is the New Search: How Brands Win Discovery Through Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), we explored how discovery works when AI becomes the interface. Lavinea Morris our EMEA Managing Director and Mohammed Faizan our GEO Specialist, dives deep into how AI summaries are built, why traditional SEO signals are no longer enough, and what you can do to influence how your brands show up across GEO, AEO, and LLM-driven results.
Watch the full on-demand webinar here.
Download the full webinar deck here.
1. What Changed in 2025-2026
- AI summaries are now mainstream: AI Overviews appear in more than 21% of Google searches globally, up from about 6.5% a year ago, and are now active across 200+ countries and 40+ languages.
- Clicks drop when AI answers appear: Because of AI summaries, average CTR falls from 15% to 8%, which is a 47% reduction as more users get answers without clicking.
- AI search is becoming the front door: We can expect a major revenue and query share to shift toward AI-led discovery over the next few years.
Decoding the Discovery Problem
The measurement gap: Yes, it’s real. Google Search Console can tell you the website’s visits, but it can’t distinguish if it came from AI Overviews or traditional search results, making it harder to decipher what’s driving your visibility.
Multiple platforms: Platforms like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity uses their own sourcing logic and citation behaviour. When discovery is spread across such multiple AI engines, optimizations must be platform aware.
How to Win the 3 Layers of Discovery
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Your organic rankings on Google and Bing? That’s fundamental. How your website crawls, its content quality, authority signals, and user experience will matter even after these shifts.
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): Google AI Overviews and Bing Copilot giving summaries constitute a big chunk of user searches. So its better to go with clear answers, structured content, and direct questions to get picked by AI.
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Optimizing for AI agents like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini is crucial too. This means that you will need to create credible, well-structured, sourceable content that AI systems can include in their answers.
AI Engines Picks
What’s Accessible: If AI crawlers cannot access your content due to robots.txt blocks or security restrictions, you will not be cited.
What’s Credible: LLMs favour trusted authority clusters that already rank high on Google or Bing.
What’s Clear: Clear structure, and a unique point of view improve both SEO strength and AI selection.
What’s consistent: Your brand, product, and location names must be consistent across sources. Mismatched entities lead to inconsistent or missing citations.
What’s repeating: One mention and several credible third party mentions can increase your chance of getting cited in AI summaries.
The 5-Pillar Playbook for GEO
Pillar 1: Stabilize your brand entity: As mentioned earlier, the very first step in AI discovery involves entity clarity. AI engines struggle to recognize and cite you correctly, if your brand is described differently across sources. For this you can:
- Run an entity audit: Ensure brand and product names are consistent across pages and external sources like LinkedIn, G2, Capterra, Wikipedia, Knowledge Graph entries, and local directories.
- Standardize entity data: Its vital that you create one authoritative brand definition page and then implement organization schema and match external directory listings.
Pillar 2: Build answer clusters: AI engines prefer comprehensive answers, so, you’ll need to create comprehensive content that covers the main question plus key sub-questions.
- The approach: Create related sub-questions to your main question featuring the needs, options, pricing, integrations, security, reviews, and use cases.
Pillar 3: Seed secondary sources: AI engines build answers from a lot of trusted sources, and your citation chances go high as your brand appears on more and more credible places.
- Where? It can be done through any credible product review platforms, industry directories, marketplaces, integration hubs, reputable “top 10” lists, community forums, credible news or analyst coverage.
- How? Map where your competitors are listed, secure similar placements with consistent brand naming and descriptions, link back to your answer-cluster pages, and keep profiles active with updates and responses.
Pillar 4: Optimize for AI answer formats: Your content must be easy for machines to parse and extract. So use clear headings and structured schema such as FAQ, Product, and Organization markup.
- Structure for AI chunking: Use a clear H2/H3 hierarchy, keep each section focused on one idea, and place concise, direct answers under headings so they are easy to lift and cite.
Pillar 5: Monitor and iterate: AI discovery needs new measurement as the focus shifts from rankings and clicks to citations and answer presence. Track AI citations and answer share with external tools.
- AI citation: Keep a close eye on how often your brand appears in AI summaries, on which platforms, and how that compares with competitors.
- Answer share: Track weekly/monthly the percentage of AI answers in your category that include your brand.
- Traffic source: Split your website’s AI-driven visits and traditional organic clicks using tagged links and compare conversion rates by source.
- Visibility score: A score based on crawlability, schema, and citation frequency, can be tracked over time.
And what’s the timeline for all of this to work? Around 12 weeks to see meaningful improvement.
In Summary
SEO, AEO, and GEO are no longer emerging ideas, they are now core to how discovery works. Brands need to think beyond traditional SEO to stay visible in AI driven search. With our 5-pillar playbook brands can grow their presence across AI search platforms and ace the discovery game.
