How winning brands struggle to turn GEO into measurable ROI as AI reshapes digital strategy

"“These are the conversations I have to have: They're like, 'Well, where's the money, where's the numbers,' and I'm like, 'They don't exist right now,'” said Jennifer Mennes, vice president and global head of digital marketing and strategy at Mondelez International, during EMARKETER's Ad Buyer Strategies Summit. “For someone who's been in media for almost 30 years to say 'I can't tell you what the ROI is,' it's a very difficult conversation.”"

"“Oreo, the number one cookie globally by sales and market share, doesn't rank first when consumers ask LLMs for cookie recommendations,” Mennes said. “According to her, the issue stems from how brands have prioritized content.” “The LLMs are definitely looking for more organic, the influencer, the recipe content, and the website content,” she said. “We've de-prioritized that for more brand advertising and commerce advertising.”"

"Wil Reynolds, founder and CEO of Seer Interactive, noted that LLMs show a 26x bias toward US results in his firm's research. “If the training models are learning about your brand on US data, US dosage levels, what ingredients you use from country to country, then your people in those countries could get wrong answers,” he said."

Major brands are optimizing for large language models, but traditional measurement and ROI frameworks do not map cleanly to LLM performance. Marketing leaders describe difficulty answering demands for “where’s the money” and “where’s the numbers” because ROI metrics are not available in current measurement systems. Established brands can still fail to rank in LLM responses despite strong sales and market share. Oreo does not rank first for cookie recommendations in LLMs, linked to how content has been prioritized. LLMs favor organic, influencer, recipe, and website content, while some brands have deprioritized those in favor of brand and commerce advertising. Research also shows strong geographic bias, which can produce incorrect answers for audiences outside the training data’s region.

Read at EMARKETER