When Discovery Moves Inside Machines, Digital Strategy Breaks

For years, brands and strategists like me treated digital strategy as something customers used: websites, apps, content, channels.

Last year as we were deep in client work that stopped being true and we started to think about a new approach. Even working with our amazing tech teams to create a tool which aids AI Visibility.

I didn’t want the great websites and content we carefully researched, created and built ignored, with a career tracking the digital revolution I found my next knotty problem to solve. Increasingly, customers started swerving the meticulously designed digital surface, encountering brands through a machine‑generated answer. Summarising, interpreting, and comparing before a real human ever clicked -if they clicked at all.

AI had made the first cut. Consideration created, before a customer ever “considers” also framing the product or service against competitors in the answers before a person even researched.

Often this was being articulated in a way our clients’ wouldn’t choose. Businesses with strong brands for now benefit from branded asks from customers but as Ai becomes the bridge to your business that strong brand reputation could also wain.

I realised if consideration has moved inside machines we needed to find a way to help our clients still be seen. At first many saw GEO as “SEO but with robots” but through actively tracking, optimising and delving into this world for both b2b and b2c clients the complexity and holistic nature became apparent.

GEO isn’t adding a new channel to the digital mix, like we had done so many times before adding social, video etc etc, we’ve learnt through doing, this needs rethinking of digital strategy.

The new customer journey – is AI re routing customers round you?

You don’t get an angry customer complaint. You don’t see a dramatic drop in rankings. You just… stop being mentioned.

You can have a lovely web experience, mapped your digital and phygital journeys and still be absent from where decisions are being shaped. The “customer journey” has routed around you.

Although we do one off assessments to help companies see what is happening GEO as a one‑off project is a false start. If you’re not tracking your presence across answer engines, its basically your 2026 digital strategy with the insight turned off.

AI interfaces don’t give you the nice, clean referral story we’re used to so measurement frameworks needed to be revised. To get the data we needed new tools with a curious team willing to go deep, which has now turned into our Ai Visibility service. The tool reflects the journey, shows you where and who and how you can turn up and be really relevant in what is being called the “age of intent”.

Ecosystem thinking – do you’re product, content and communications collide?

Here’s the part that tends to make teams uncomfortable, and all of us who work in agencies have seen it happen feeling uncomfortable.

Most organisations are set up as if product, marketing, comms and customer success operate in parallel. Different rooms. Different tools. Sometimes even different success measures. Different deadlines. That separation used to be survivable and many of us have worked out how to work round it..

But AI doesn’t care who created something, which budget it came from, or whether it was meant for sales enablement, onboarding, PR or support. When someone asks AI about your category or your product, all of it gets pulled into the same space.

A product page.  Documentation.  A pricing explainer from three years ago.  A review thread.  Your CEO’s quote in a trade publication.  That PDF spec sheet no one’s opened since 2021. (we’ve seen AI surface lots of old stuff people have forgotten)

To an AI system “content” is evidence. Evidence of what your product is, who it’s for, how it compares, and whether it can be trusted. And it doesn’t sadly reconcile inconsistencies on your behalf.

This is where teams get caught out.

Products are built with one set of assumptions. Marketing tells a slightly different story. Sales emphasises a third angle. Customer success reinforces what actually works in the field. AI doesn’t treat those differences as nuance — it collapses them into a single narrative, whether you like the result or not.

That’s how brands become framed as “the cheaper version of X” or “similar to Y” in AI‑generated answers even when that was never the intention. We’ve seen this being particularly tiresome in multi brand clients.

This is why GEO isn’t a bolt‑on marketing exercise. It forces alignment on things many businesses already know are messy but haven’t fully addressed:  what you call things,  how your offerings relate to each other,  what you emphasise (and what you de‑emphasise),  how you explain value to new customers,  and what customers consistently repeat about you once they’re live.

Our work often looks less like “optimising content” and more like helping teams tidy up, and communicate internally strategy. The goal isn’t to strip out emotion or creativity it’s to make sure that, behind the creativity, there is enough shared clarity that a machine can understand what the product is, who it’s for, and how it genuinely compares.

I’ve learnt to think when I see AI bring me back rubbish answers on things I know about be it a when I am looking for flights or researching a clients problem its not always the engine that’s to blame the messy strategy of so many businesses.

From clicks to “share of consideration” are you still measuring what matters?

Most new clients come to us with reporting based on metrics that are fading in importance even though : sessions, rankings, CTR, and a funnel built on the assumption that attention lands on a brands site.

So we look to new KPI’s and track- presence in answers, answer description accuracy, competitive framing, reflection of customer need and pain point, in some ways closer to the brand metrics I am used to running studies on. Looking at presence ,even when clicks don’t happen, is important just like tracking brand perceptions. Using data we can go deep by prompts related to funnel stages as well as audience segments and competitive share which is really useful when you are trying to prioritise what to fix first. GEO as a continuous discipline, not a quarterly sprint and like with brand tracking If you’re not tracked, you can’t be managed, If you can’t be managed, you’ll be outcompeted but If you’re outcompeted in AI discovery, you will look fine on legacy metrics… right until you don’t.

So what can businesses do to stay visible

How we are doing it is by helping our client focus on four things

• continuous monitoring of how AI systems represent businesses

• a structured integrated approach to improving that presence

• cross‑functional alignment and ownership (because no single team controls the inputs)

• and structures and governance (because inconsistency kills machine trust).

Getting in quickly matters. A March 2026 market report analysing over 10,000 websites claims only 34% have “mature” GEO programmes, but those that do see materially higher AI visibility and stronger downstream impact. A separate report indicates 94% of enterprise brands plan to increase GEO investment in 2026 - leaders know they need to address this and we are seeing it sitting within multiple different teams budgets to sort this out. One thing is clear though is if you aren’t looking at it now your competitors are. As we track clients we can often see when their competitors turn this on and start experimenting even if they are not doing it with the same rigour.

The most brutal part is that you may still be busy writing and researching your strategy, building digital products, running campaigns, updating the site, posting content, polishing the funnel whilst the customers first impression of you is being formed elsewhere.

The brands that win will have started early and are taking the digital strategy not a new channel view. Working now on a digital strategy that creates a consistently credible ecosystems which ultimately make businesses consistently present. Sometimes we all want Harry Potters Invisibility cloak but at this AI moments let your brand take it off and be seen.