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A fervent believer in the promise of human powered growth, Russ leads CMG in partnering with companies to help them become aligned, agile, customer-driven enterprises that unleash the potential of their organizations with sustainable improvements in focus, teams, culture, and process our clients.
Mark leads CMG in partnering with Telecom companies to help them increase customers and accelerate revenue. His 25+ years of experience in growth, strategy and execution includes B2C and B2B multi-channel acquisition programs, customer experiences that surprise and delight, pricing that optimizes customer value, and innovative product development.
Blog by Zach Washburn
For most of my career, digital marketing has revolved around search. Someone types a question into Google, gets a list of links, and clicks their way toward an answer. SEO, paid search, and content strategy all grew up around that flow.
What’s changing is not that search disappears. It’s that people are increasingly skipping the step where they sort through links themselves. They’re asking AI tools to do that work for them. The result is no longer a list of options. It’s a single, synthesized response.
That shift is what people are starting to call Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO.
GEO is not about ranking. It’s about whether your company shows up inside an AI-generated answer at all, and how it’s described when it does.
When someone asks an AI tool to explain a market, compare vendors, or recommend approaches, the system pulls from many sources and compresses them into a short explanation. There is no page one to compete for position on. There is no scrolling. There is just the answer.
If the AI understands what you do clearly enough, you might be included. If it doesn’t, you won’t be.
SEO gets people to your site. GEO determines what gets said about you beyond the language you’ve chosen to publish.
AI tools don’t experience your content the way a human does. They distill it to a short explanation. The question GEO raises is whether that explanation still sounds like you and still makes sense.
Teams that have invested in solid SEO often start from a better place because their content is structured, consistent, and grounded in real customer questions. That doesn’t guarantee inclusion, but it does make it easier for AI systems to understand what the company actually does.
GEO exposes weak positioning quickly.
Marketing language that sounds fine on a website often falls apart when an AI tries to summarize it. Broad claims and vague differentiation don’t translate well. The system has nothing concrete to anchor to, so those messages get flattened or ignored.
What does survive is specificity.Clear statements about who you serve, what problem you solve, and how you are different in practice. Consistency matters just as much. If your marketing, product, and sales narratives don’t line up, AI won’t reconcile them for you. It will quietly remove the noise.
OpenAI’s move toward advertising points in the same direction, even if the mechanics are still evolving.
In many ways, AI ads look like the next iteration of paid search. Instead of bidding on keywords tied to links, businesses are competing to be included in answers tied to intent. The objective is not just a click. It’s relevance at the moment a decision is being shaped.
As this develops, paid and organic strategies are likely to blur together. Companies with clear positioning and credible messaging will benefit more from AI-driven advertising because their story already holds together when summarized.
The response to GEO and AI-native advertising should not start with tools or tactics. It should start with clarity.
That means tightening how you describe your business, ensuring the story is consistent across marketing, product, and sales, and focusing content on answering real customer questions rather than just driving traffic.
This is a go-to-market issue, not just a marketing one. The companies that show up well in AI-generated answers tend to be the ones that already operate with strong internal alignment.
At CMG Consulting, we help organizations navigate these shifts in digital go-to-market. That includes traditional SEO and paid media, but increasingly, it means helping teams prepare for GEO and AI-influenced advertising.
The work is less about chasing algorithms and more about aligning the business. When positioning is clear and teams are aligned around the same story, both organic and paid strategies perform better, whether they appear as links or inside AI-generated answers.
AI is already shaping how buyers learn and decide. The advantage goes to companies that make it easy to be understood, not just easy to find.
