When generative AI search hit the mainstream a few years ago, Alex Sherman, CEO and co-founder of AI marketing platform Bluefish, quickly adopted the ChatGPTs and Perplexities of the world.
Not surprising considering the nature of his startup, which measures and analyzes how brands show up in generative AI search results.
What is surprising, though, is how quickly his behavior shifted away from traditional search. At first, he’d still supplement with Google searches. But when Google rolled out Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode, traditional search suddenly felt old school.
“If I’m on Google and I still get those 10 blue links before the AI Overview, there’s almost a new muscle memory where I don’t quite want to go poking through all of those links,” Sherman says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
“There’s a sort of new expectation of an instantaneous synthesized answer,” he says, “and I don’t think I’m alone in that experience.”
This paradigm shift in the way people find information has major implications for the entire marketing organization beyond just SEO. (Or is it GEO now?) If brands want control over how they appear in AI search results, they must think about the content they feed to large language models.
“If LLMs are trained on the internet, then the team that’s writing copy for your brand.com or for your retailer [product detail page] needs to start to optimize and tune that content for LLMs,” Sherman says.
The same goes for PR and corporate comms teams, whose job it is to track brand safety and reputational risk. Going forward, every time they issue a press release, they should consider how an LLM might ingest that information and present it.
Likewise for paid editorial, content produced by influencers and social media posts.
“We think pretty holistically about GEO beyond just the next chapter of search,” Sherman says. “We think of it as a fundamental rebuilding of the mar tech stack.”
Also in this episode: Swapping AI hallucination stories, what it was like selling PromoteIQ – which Sherman founded in 2012 – to Microsoft just seven years later and how Sherman went from a European history major to one of the first employees of MediaMath in 2008. Plus: Sherman muses on why Microsoft decided to shut down PromoteIQ last year.
For more articles featuring Alex Sherman, click here.
