We’ve all been seduced by the little AI-driven boxes that now appear whenever we search on Google. A neat little summary tied up in a pretty bow, to shortcut the answer to our question, with a few links thrown in. Easy peasy. Using AI without even having to open an LLM. But what does the advent of GEO mean for insights companies? How do we get ourselves into that neat little box? Well, it’s not business as usual, if that’s what you were hoping.

A bit of background: GEO stands for generative engine optimisation; the practice of making sure AI tools (like AI Overviews, ChatGPT, or Perplexity) find, trust, and mention your company when they answer someone’s question. Google AI Overviews now reach 2.5bn monthly users – that’s bigger than ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity combined (according to SEMrush’s April 2026 analysis). In the same study, AI Overviews showed up in 86% of 500,000 prompts analysed [ 1 ].

This means that even those companies in insights that have caught up with SEO (not many in my experience) need to sit up. And if you have not been using SEO and are unsure about how GEO comes in, now is a fine time to pay attention.

Success at GEO isn't about cracking a chatbot. It’s about being recognised, trusted and cited by whatever system is synthesising an answer on your buyer’s behalf. And right now, that’s happening quietly, inside a Google search they were already doing.

Same game, different scoreboard

The old SEO logic was to win the keyword, win the click. Rank for the query, and the traffic follows.

GEO doesn't work like that, because there’s no ranked list to win. There’s just one answer, built from multiple touchpoints and based on whatever the model already believes about you – the press coverage, the reviews, the award wins, the Wikipedia entry, the LinkedIn posts your competitors’ customers wrote about you last year. Although still important, your own website is just one voice in a much noisier room.

You no longer have a simple content problem. You have a reputation problem. And reputation is PR and brand’s job, not SEO's.

Why the 95% matters more than ever

As I am fond of quoting (repeatedly!), Professor John Dawes’ work for the Ehrenberg-Bass B2B Institute makes a simple point: up to 95% of B2B buyers aren't in the market to buy from you at any given moment [ 2 ]. Most corporate purchases happen infrequently. So, the sales email you sent, the LinkedIn post you sponsored or the product content you self-published mostly landed on people who weren't buying and weren't going to for a long while.

As we know, marketing works by building memory in the mind of future prospects. It plants a link between your brand and the situations that will eventually bring someone into the market. Then, when the 5% moment finally arrives, that memory link fires, and you're the brand that comes to mind.

Now put that next to GEO. When a buyer types "who are the best providers of X" into an AI Overview, that’s their 5% moment. The AI’s answer isn't created fresh in that instant; it comes from everything the model has already absorbed about who’s credible in that category. In other words, that’s mental availability, it’s just being recalled by a machine, instead of a person.

Which means the brands that show up in AI Overviews are ones that spent the other 95% of the time building a credible reputation and presence, so that when the moment came, there was something to retrieve.

Where PR and brand do the work

So how does this affect how insights companies should spend their time and marketing budget?

Here are some of the ways to ensure you feed the memory of GEO as well as your potential clients:

1.  ‘Earned’ coverage (as in that earned by a PR pitch to the media or press release outreach) beats owned copy. Models weigh third-party mentions, such as press, reviews and analyst notes, far more heavily than your own site – as do readers. Any endorsed coverage on a third-party media platform will outscore self-published copy, consistently.

2. The great news for insights companies is that original research is your best citable asset. Proprietary data and studies are what gets used, quoted and referenced by journalists, and by AI systems synthesising an answer. For an insights business, thought leadership grounded in your brand difference, with a meaningful message, should lead your marketing strategy.
   
   
3. Keep going… As our research through the Insights Awareness Pulse [ 3 ] found, building brand recognition is hard. Many participants cited brands that had been removed years ago – Millward Brown for ad research, for example [ 3 ]. As Dawes warns, many well-established brands achieve no higher than 20-30% recognition even after sustained effort [ 2 ]. So, your presence across channels, including press, has to be consistent and repeated over time (that means years, not months) to register as trustworthy to an AI model as much as to a buyer.

As we know, most research company sites say pretty much the same thing. A competitor can copy your homepage overnight, but they can't copy five years of earned mentions, thought leadership and proprietary studies.

In the new world of GEO, the rewards go to the companies that were already there, building reputation through the work of PR and brand. And if you have not already, the best time to start that work is right now.

Lucy Davison is chief executive and founder, Keen as Mustard Marketing 

Reference:

[ 1 ] SEMrush analysis, April 2026, referenced at Google I/O 2026

[ 2 ] Dawes, J. "Advertising effectiveness and the 95-5 rule: most B2B buyers are not in the market right now," The B2B Institute / Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science: https://marketingscience.info/news-and-insights/ehrenberg-bass-95-of-b2b-buyers-are-not-in-the-market-for-your-products

[ 3 ] https://mustardmarketing.com/learning/insights-awareness-pulse-report-2024/#publication-item