The old search playbook is in free fall in the age of AI. Marketers aren’t cutting their search budgets — at least not yet. They’re just shifting how search dollars are spent.
As generative AI upends how people search and shop, marketers are funneling more dollars into the industry’s latest buzzword de jour: generative engine optimization, or GEO. It’s less about abandoning tried and true SEO strategies and more navigating a new, messy reality: LLM bot crawlers pull press releases, news articles and social posts to generate responses. Now, brand visibility means everything from structured website data to Reddit threads.
“We’re seeing increased testing and experimentation within search budgets — specifically allocation to GEO,” Brian Yamada, global chief innovation officer at VML, said in an email to Digiday. Client budgets are also increasing to understand where agentic AI fits into the workflow, he added. Yamada did not provide specific ad spend figures.
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