To win at GEO, B2B brands must think big

"But AI has intensified this fragmentation, reshaping how people discover, evaluate, and engage with brands. Increasingly, people are delegating discovery and decision-making to AI chatbots, overviews, and multimodal search tools because of the effortlessness and superior experiences these conversational engines offer, with responses that are: Faster: no need to search and retrieve information yourself. Smarter: 82% find AI-powered search more helpful than traditional SERPs. Dynamic: no static search results, but contextual, personalized conversations."

"As a result, we're seeing 165 times faster growth for AI-driven traffic compared with traditional organic search. And it's of a higher quality too, with a 4.4 times higher conversion rate. B2B brands have been hit hard by this shift. They've seen clicks vanish (even as impressions rise) and a widespread drop in engagement and organic traffic. Many invested years in growing this traffic, building entire marketing strategies on the foundation of educational content optimized for SERP visibility and measuring its value in rankings and traffic."

"Much of this was never 'good' practice in the first place. But now there's nowhere to hide. In a zero-click world where organic traffic is hard won, attention must be earned, and where AI can spit out 'me too' informational content faster than you can ask 'should I use ChatGPT 4o, 4.5, o3-mini or 5?', brands must fundamentally change how they think about content."

Search and discovery are fragmenting as AI-driven tools and multimodal chatbots reshape how people find, evaluate, and engage with brands. People increasingly delegate discovery and decisions to conversational engines because they deliver faster, smarter, and dynamic personalized responses. AI-driven traffic is growing 165 times faster than traditional organic search and converts 4.4 times better, while 82% find AI-powered search more helpful than SERPs. B2B brands are losing clicks and organic engagement despite rising impressions, undermining years of SEO-based educational content strategies. Non-unique informational content is increasingly ineffective. Brands must prioritize influence, authority, earned attention, and differentiated content beyond traditional SEO.

Read at The Drum