Updated: Jul 23, 2025
Author: Vivienne Wang
Over the last couple of months, a lot of our clients have come to us with an important question: “How will AI impact my search visibility?”
Google is (and still is) the dominant platform to capture the attention of high-intent customers. That has not changed (yet), but how your name comes up in the search results has been undergoing fundamental paradigm shift. For example, Google’s AI overview has already launched in the US and is coming to us soon.
Another sea change I have observed in our dataset is in how people change. We’re facing a new world where ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and many other AI agents are becoming the first stop for people exploring products / services, looking for recommendations, and making decisions.
What do all these changes mean? At the very basic level, we need to take a fresh look at the traditional theories in customer journey, conversion funnel, and acquisition channels. The way your name shows up in the AI-powered search models could become just as important as paid ads or traditional SEO are to your online marketing success.
Summary:
What is GEO?
We asked the same question to ChatGPT, and this is what we got: “GEO is a new branch of SEO that enriches content so AI engines preferentially cite your pages, amplifying brand visibility.”
What does this mean?
Geographic, demographic, and behavioural signals are shaping how LLMs personalise results. What used to work in SEO won’t cut it anymore.
Search behaviour is changing. People used to Google short phrases (avg. 4 words; e.g. best SEO agency NZ), but now they’re asking full-sentence questions with a lot of context (avg. 23 words; e.g. I run a pet product ecommerce business and I want honest and effective SEO advice, what is the best SEO agency in Auckland?). The shift is massive. Potential customers see a few summarised lines in Google AI Overview before going to your homepage.
And here’s the important point: most of the quoted lines do not come from your website. They come from review snippets, niche blogs, UGC forums, and… Bing-indexed pages! Perplexity and ChatGPT rely heavily on Bing.
Enough with the changes. Is there anything in traditional good SEO practices that remain true? Yes:
Clean product / service data, reviews, authoritative content, and social proof give brands an edge when LLMs decide what to surface. And remember that since LLMs reuse your copy, you would want to make sure you write clearly and quote-ready on your site.
Note: Adhesion clients need not worry about this as we always use sustainable SEO techniques :)
But just in case you are curious, these SEO practices are probably not going to last:
Smart strategy (as we do at Adhesion. Sorry not to brag…): Create useful content that visitors and bots both benefit from. In other words, honest hard work.
At I/O, Google rolled out “agentic checkout,” a flow that lets you complete a purchase directly from the search results page. No product page. No cart. Just “yes” and it’s done. Google killed the checkout.
We’ve been talking to our clients about the AI age. Some are already adapting; many are guessing. As we’ve been doing in the past 18 years, Adhesion is staying at the forefront of digital marketing, and we’re here to make sure you do too.
GEO is still a black box; just like every new technology (e.g. Google in the early 00s). We’ll keep watching the space and share our learnings with you.
Stay tuned for our next edition.
References:
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