Photo Credit: Ivy Liu – This story was first published by Digiday sibling ModernRetail
After years of retooling their businesses for search engines, brand and retail leaders say they’re getting ready for a new frontier: GEO.
The term, which means generative engine optimization, refers to optimizing web content to show up in results from AI-driven search platforms, like ChatGPT or Google Gemini. It’s a new way for brands to stand out and reach customers, especially considering that nearly 60% of U.S. consumers have used a generative AI tool for help with online shopping, per an August 2025 survey from Omnisend. If a customer asks an AI engine about buying lip gloss or a T-shirt, the relevant brands want to make sure they show up.
But it’s not an easy journey, executives conceded this week in interviews with Modern Retail and during panels at Shoptalk Fall in Chicago. Brands and retailers have spent decades crafting their SEO playbook, figuring out which keywords to include on product pages, blogs and additional web content to show up in Google or Yahoo. Now, with GEO, platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are pulling and ranking information — oftentimes, in response to hyper-specific inquiries, rather than one-word or two-word requests. This could also have financial consequences for brands, especially as these agents start enabling checkout.
Getting ahead of GEO is a new reality for brands, as Jose Nino, vp of global digital and e-commerce for the U.S. Polo Assn., said during a panel on Wednesday. He mentioned searching for running shoes on Google Search a month ago, and then a week ago, and getting completely different results from the “AI mode” at the top. With GEO, he said, “You can bid all you want, but the Gemini responses are taking over, and you don’t even know exactly what’s pushing that response. … Suddenly, someone is controlling that narrative, and you don’t know how they operate it yet. If anyone says they know exactly what’s driving it, they’re not 100% sure.”
At the same time, GEO is also a big opportunity — a white space where brands are eager to experiment. “If you’re not keeping an eye open and really understanding what’s happening in the GEO space, you are going to miss out,” Erica Randerson, chief digital officer and gm of Edible Brands, said on Thursday.
How companies are gaming GEO
Brands and retailers are taking different steps to get ahead when it comes to agentic AI results, although many acknowledged that there are a lot of unknowns. As Brad Larabell, director of performance marketing at Every Man Jack, told Modern Retail, GEO “is really still in its infancy, compared to SEO.”
Ranjeet Bhosale, vp of digital product management at Target, said…
