ORGANIC SEARCH WILL BELONG TO BRAND MARKETERS

Answers are:

1. Dynamic

2. Probabilistic

3. Personalized

4. Full of sentiment

These qualities require an evolution beyond SEO’s technical optimization playbooks and PageRank reporting.

It’s actually the emerging measurement frameworks that will anchor search as a core, front-of-house, strategic driver - mainly because GEO measurement shares a lot of DNA with brand lift studies.

With some minimal squinting, the parallels are strong:

• Brand lift studies are the output of a large set of individuals being asked a series of standardized questions.

• GEO measurement is the output of a high volume of standardized queries being run through an LLM, all while simulating a variety of personas.

Sure - brand lift studies provide the answers of real people while GEO measurement provides the answers of a ‘machine’ that is guessing what real people want to hear. But, since we’re all outsourcing our questions to the ‘machine’, marketers will recognize that its answers contain valuable intel.

GEO measurement even offers some appealing improvements vs. brand lift studies because it is generally:

• Industry-standard vs. company-specific

• Quicker and cheaper to run

• Testable by your CEO who can just ask the LLM a question themselves (maybe in an incognito window if they’re feeling clever)

  
  

These qualities create a gravitational pull for GEO measurement to sit at the center of brand dashboards, making it something that brand marketers will need to influence.

The levers to do so are much broader, and include a deeper strategic integration across channels, such as social.

According to GEO measurement unicorn Profound, around 10% of all queries with a linked-source contain a citation from social networks. GEO can synthesize the sentiment that was previously locked within social platforms while also connecting users to those that they want to hear from.

This is something Google is clearly leaning into with their Head of Search, Liz Reid, recently noting:

“…if you were someone who was spending a lot of time engaging with influencers in the [fashion space], you have not decided to replace that with a chatbot, right? You’re still going to want to hear from those fashion tastemakers. So there’s an opportunity with AI overviews to help you get started and then make it easy for you to dig in and connect. I think people’s interest in connecting with other people is just as strong these days in many ways.”

Beyond social, Reid also noted that user queries are becoming much more specific.

In the legacy search paradigm, a user would typically search ‘shoes’. Now, the same user is more likely to say ‘I need waterproof trail running shoes in a wide fit for a trip next month.’

The enhanced querying capabilities will force marketers to consider the search moment through a deeper, journey-centric lens.

For some products/users, search may be the end-point. For others, it could be the beginning.

Or, a reconsideration moment.

Or, it’s skipped entirely.

“Consumers think they ask all the questions [that come to their mind]. But that’s not true.You actually make a calculation [prior to asking a question] - is it even worth spending any time to figure out the answer to this question?

If the answer is no, then you just don’t ask...” -Liz Reid, Google’s Head of Search

Will the average soap buyer spend time asking an LLM about their purchase or do they just grab whatever comes to mind?

On the other hand, the parents of a newborn are likely to be higher propensity soap searchers given potential health concerns.

Can their query be pre-empted with the better packaging or branding?

If it can’t, a brand is faced with a near infinite range of questions that may be asked:

• what is the saffest soap for my baby

• What are bad ingredients in soap??

• didn’t Johnson & Johnson get sued for a billion dollars bc it gave babies cancer?was that about this shampoo

• Does babyinfluencer47 recommend this soap?

And so on…

That spectrum of possibilities require marketers to push towards a higher level of abstraction to understand the broader behavior of their shopper cohorts. That’s familiar territory for brand marketers, although they’ll now be forced to confront direct trade-offs across their positioning in ways they didn’t previously have to.

The personalized nature of answers will make it impossible to appeal to every searcher with the same product, and instead marketers will need to consider the long and short term impact of appealing to some over others.

Brand marketers will be forced to understand their customers in search and will need to pre-emptively anchor around their behavior up stream or risk displacement downstream.

Now quick:

• this article was too wordy, shorten it + explain

• Does this article even make sense? Google said all the SEO strategies apply to GEO.

• Make this a LinkedIn post in my voice and use wording that maximizes engagement

• should i send this article in my work slack or is that too try hard

And so on…