5 Reasons Your Brand Marketing Team Need to Understand SEO & GEO

AI and search platforms are becoming increasingly sophisticated at evaluating the digital signals that determine whether a brand is trusted, authoritative, and relevant enough to recommend to users. In many ways, this is simply the next evolution of what search engines have always done - calculating a vast range of signals to decide which brands deserve visibility.

Understanding where your brand sits within that landscape is now essential. Some brands aim to become recognised industry leaders across broad topics, while others may dominate within specific areas or niche audiences. The key is understanding how AI platforms interpret your authority, expertise, sentiment, and relevance - and where your brand is most likely to surface in recommendations.

From managing off-site sentiment to leveraging PR and multimedia assets, here are five critical reasons why SEO and GEO need to take centre stage in your broader marketing strategy.

Key Takeaways

• AI search platforms are reshaping traditional web attribution, reducing direct web traffic and forcing a shift toward measuring overall brand demand.
• Web-wide brand sentiment determines your AI visibility, as algorithms scrape third-party sites and exclude poorly rated brands from recommendations.
• Social media content acts as a primary AI training source, requiring SEO alignment to ensure your posts are structured for algorithm retrieval.
• Visual assets now directly dictate targeting and context, because AI reads text within images and analyses graphics for sentiment and relevance.
• PR and off-site consensus fuel modern search authority, since AI relies on independent third-party validation rather than your own website's claims.

How AI is Changing the Search Landscape

Platforms including Google’s AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are fundamentally reshaping the user journey. At the same time, they are increasingly obscuring the true source of conversions and reducing direct website traffic.

Research highlights the scale of this shift:

• Google search results featuring AI Overviews significantly reduce click-through rates across both paid and organic listings - with websites appearing in both traditional organic rankings and AI Overviews still seeing a 38% lower click-through rate compared to searches without AI Overviews (Seer Interactive, 2026).
• ChatGPT has been shown to generate a 96% lower click-through rate than traditional Google Search (Ahrefs, 2026).
• Google AI Mode has a 63% lower click-through-rate than traditional Google search results, sending far fewer users to third-party websites (Semrush, 2026).

With these zero-click searches becoming more and more common, and AI algorithms acting as the ultimate brand gatekeepers, visibility now requires a highly unified approach.

1. Brand Demand & Sentiment

The Loss of Attribution and the Importance of Brand Demand

So, how do we measure what triggers a customer to convert when clicks and traditional Google Analytics attribution are both gone?

For smaller brands and for SEO & GEO teams, brand demand and brand searches have entered the scene as one of the key ways to measure the impact of improved visibility in AI platforms. This is because AI platforms are not sending clicks out to websites like Google Search has traditionally always done, as the Internet’s largest referrer of traffic.

Now, SEO & GEO teams are having to lean on more traditional, less concrete methods of measuring performance. Where an AI walled garden is recommending brands, with no click-through or attribution, when the time comes for the AI users to make their choice and visit the brand website, they can often come via a brand search or direct website visit.

The journey before that point has become invisible; the user consumes your content and learns about your brand without ever touching your website, when it comes to AI.

SEO & GEO teams are going to have to start learning about surveys, brand lift, media mix modelling, incrementality, beyond just brand search demand, direct, organic traffic, share of search, AI mentions, AI citations, AI referrals and rankings.

Brand Sentiment

For some brands, brand sentiment might have strictly been a customer service issue to resolve, or just about making sure star ratings and review scores were high. Now the problem has expanded from being an SEO reputation management issue that is confined to specific search terms and third-party platforms.

AI platforms use sentiment from everywhere possible across the web, whether that’s review platforms, Reddit, social media or elsewhere, easily providing AI prompters a clear understanding of the legitimacy and reputation of a brand without them even asking.

Brands that have a negative reputation across the web are at risk of being excluded from AI responses and demoted in search.

2. Social Media’s Expanding Role in Search and AI Visibility

Social has long since become a hugely influential channel within a marketing context, with users spending a significant amount of time each day in social apps on their phones. Searching within social platforms is becoming more commonplace, and social platforms like Meta are investing heavily in AI.

Social platform & other UGC platforms are influential when it comes to AI and search. Social and UGC platforms are some of the most commonly cited websites within AI platforms, such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, as well as UGC websites such as Reddit, Quora and Medium.

Social platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook and others have been making improvements over time to optimise their posts for search and retrieval using AI themselves, with automatically generated optimised titles, keywords and more.

Google and other platforms have been able to crawl social platforms and posts for a long time now, but brand teams need to understand how to capitalise on brand and influencer posts, how these influence their brand’s AI visibility.

SEO & GEO teams have the unique expertise to ensure social posts are used in ways that maximise your brand’s discoverability across search and AI surfaces.

They understand the content types most likely to be cited by AI, which platforms and formats serve as primary AI training sources that increase the likelihood of your brand being recommended, and the video attributes and formats that help your content surface in video search results.

3. The Importance of Photography and Imagery

I recently read a fantastic article shared by Myriam Jessier on image optimisation for multimodal AI, and it really got me thinking: the importance of photography now extends far beyond the remit of just the design and brand teams.

Imagery is undoubtedly far more critical than SEOs historically gave it credit for. We have moved well past the basics of user engagement, alt text, filenames, accessibility, page load speed, and traditional image search. Here is why:

• Multimodal understanding: AI and Google now read text directly within images using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and accurately recognise objects. In fact, AI actually uses your alt text as a grounding mechanism to double-check its own visual comprehension.
• Sentiment: Google apparently assigns sentiment (like joy or sadness) to images.
• Relevance: Imagery was already important when it comes to ranking factors in Google Shopping & Merchant Centre and other shopping feed platforms, but product performance can actually decrease if you feature irrelevant objects in your product shots.
• E-E-A-T and originality: We already knew original images were vital for content quality and E-E-A-T, but they carry even more weight in the AI era.
• Social influence: The social posts influencing AI are predominantly video and image-based. They do not even need transcripts anymore - the text within social videos contributes directly to targeting and contextual understanding.

It is an exciting time for search and AI marketers. We can no longer leave imagery entirely to the brand-focused teams.

Some local SEO experts are increasingly recommending uploading images with text overlays into Google Business Profiles (GBP), social channels, and even images on product pages, for search context and to aid AI extraction.

It’s funny to look back and think how resistant SEOs once were to the idea of text within images, especially given how critical it is today.

4. Paid Media Creatives and Targeting

Images, video and creative are not just becoming more instrumental for SEO and AI retrieval. Creative has always been incredibly important for paid media, but Meta's Andromeda update, as well as Google’s Performance Max, has increased this exponentially.

Both Performance Max and Meta now learn and base their targeting more significantly on image and video assets, decreasing the need and the importance of manual targeting, but increasing the need for a wide range of high-quality, carefully considered multimedia assets.

This is a clear directional signal that images and video are becoming core to SEO and GEO performance. Images have always played a huge role in marketing; they are central to what humans enjoy engaging with, and this engagement is exactly the type of user behaviour that AI and search platforms seek to understand and reward.

It will be essential that brand teams understand how creative, photography, and video impact each channel, and work closely with SEO and performance marketing teams to maximise ad performance, landing page experience, as well as AI & search visibility.

5. PR, Brand Mentions and Consensus

This is an obvious one, but an important one.

To put it simply, SEO and GEO teams need PR because earned media and off-site consensus are the fuel that powers both traditional SEO authority and AI visibility. While SEO has always relied on links, AI visibility depends heavily on consensus and corroboration.

ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode do not just take your website's word for it. They scan independent news, aggregator platforms, niche forums, and wider third-party directories to verify your business information and offering. This extends beyond traditional press - ensuring your brand details are consistently accurate across these wider third-party platforms is fundamental to how AI maps and understands your business.

By now, it is also well documented that ‘best X’ or ‘top X’ listicles have become influential for featuring in responses across certain AI models. So much so that alongside an increasingly long list of other AI hacks, it has been abused, and subsequently called out as inauthentic brand mentions in Google's recently punished GEO guidance, with other tactics briefly increasing visibility in AI LLMs, such as comparison articles, actually getting punished by Google.

However, legitimate features from renowned publishers still feature heavily in citations and build AI’s trust in your brand, because when it comes to high authority publishers, this is still a reliable indication that you are a noteworthy brand in your market. If you appear across multiple 'best X' roundups, this is validation AI needs to confidently recommend you to their users.

PR, if not social teams, often also have influencers within their remit, too, and their first-person and recommendation-style video content and posts can carry more weight when it comes to AI citations and independent brand mentions than a brand’s own social does, or at least more free rein to post conversational content with more depth, that some brands just won’t do.

And that is before getting started on the need for press and editorial best practices when it comes to maximising AI retrieval, and the importance of research stats, unique marketing claims, and structuring content in a way that pleases users and readers beyond increasingly outdated traditional SEO content best practices.

PR have also always utilised first-person quotes and commentary from internal and external experts, the types of E-E-A-T content that AI loves.

The Future of Search is Collaborative

Ultimately, securing visibility in an AI-first world is no longer just about technical tweaks and keyword targeting; it is about building a cohesive, authoritative brand presence across the entire web.

When SEO, PR, social, and brand teams break down their silos and collaborate, they create the undeniable consensus and demand that AI algorithms (and your customers’) trust.

If your SEO and GEO experts are still operating in isolation, you are missing out on the most powerful growth levers in modern marketing.