The Intermediary – March 2026 - Flipbook - Page 85
T E C H N O L O GY
Opinion
longer a search engine...
Ranking well in
traditional search does
not guarantee visibility
in AI search”
or how your visibility compares to
competitors. The answer is delivered,
the user moves on, and nothing is
recorded on your end.
This is what’s known as zero-click
search – someone gets the answer they
need without ever visiting a website.
Pew Research Center published
findings in July 2025 showing that
Google users are less likely to click
on result links when an AI summary
appears on the page, and that 58% of
US Google users encountered at least
one AI-generated summary during a
single month of browsing.
Google’s AI Overviews have had
a measurable impact on publisher
traffic as a result. McKinsey estimates
that unprepared brands could see
traditional search traffic decline by
anywhere from 20% to 50%. The
answer arrives before the link.
For marketing teams, this creates
a genuine boardroom problem. You
might be mentioned in dozens of AI
responses every day and have no idea.
Or you might be invisible entirely,
with a competitor being cited instead.
The user journey is fragmented.
Aribution is broken. And the usual
metrics – sessions, rankings, clickthrough rates – tell you less and less
about what’s actually influencing
your customer.
McKinsey found that just 16% of
brands today systematically track AI
search performance. This is exactly
why my co-founder Mike Logue and I
built Obsero.
What moves the needle
For smaller businesses and sole
traders, GEO doesn’t require an
enterprise budget. It requires focus.
Here’s what works:
Content creation. Clear, factual,
structured content that answers
specific questions your customers
are actually asking. FAQs, explainer
guides, direct answers. Understand
your ideal customer profile and write
for the questions they bring to a
chatbot, not just the keywords they’d
historically put into Google.
McKinsey’s research shows that
more than 70% of AI-powered search
queries are at the top of the funnel –
people trying to understand a category,
a brand, or a product. That’s where
you need to be present.
Content structure. Break content
into digestible chunks. Use headers,
short paragraphs, direct statements.
Put the answer at the top, AI models
don’t reward buried conclusions.
Editorial citations. Traditional
PR still maers enormously.
McKinsey found that in industries
like consumer-packaged goods and
financial services, more than 65% of
sources across AI-powered searches
are publishers, user-generated
content, and affiliate sites – not brandowned content.
Citations from editorial sources
carry real authority. A mention in a
trade publication is exactly the kind of
signal AI models weight most heavily.
Forum and community presence.
Reddit is a significant data source for
several AI platforms. Industry forums,
review sites, and community spaces
where your audience congregates are
worth investing in – not to promote,
but to be genuinely useful. AI can tell
the difference.
Third-party mentions and
consistent data. Directories,
aggregators, review platforms.
Consistent, accurate brand
information across multiple sources
increases the likelihood of AI citation.
A brand’s own website oen accounts
for only 5% to 10% of the sources
AI search references, according to
McKinsey’s analysis. The rest comes
from everywhere else.
The mindset shi is simple to state,
harder to internalise: stop optimising
for clicks, start optimising for
presence. The goal is to be the answer,
not just a link that might get clicked.
Start your strategy
For a smaller business with limited
resources, the starting point is
understanding who your customer is
and what they’re asking. If you have
call transcripts or customer service
data, drop them into an LLM and look
for the question paerns.
Ask your sales team what they hear.
That gives you the prompts worth
tracking. Run those prompts across
the major AI platforms – ChatGPT,
Perplexity, Gemini – and see what
comes back. Are you mentioned? Are
competitors? What sources are cited?
From there, identify where the
gaps are. Are there editorial sources
covering your category that you’re not
being mentioned in? Are there forums
or communities where your audience
is active that you’re absent from? Are
there aggregator or directory sites that
appear regularly in AI citations where
you don’t have a presence?
Platforms like Obsero can automate
this tracking over time, but even
without a tool, the manual audit is a
useful first step. Most businesses doing
it for the first time are surprised by
what they find.
The window is open
Brands that invested in strong SEO
over the years – holistic strategies
around brand authority, quality
content, and genuine online presence
– are well positioned for what comes
next. That work wasn’t wasted.
For those who haven’t started, the
window is still open. AI search is not
yet saturated. Most SMEs haven’t
engaged with it seriously. The early
movers will win visibility in a space
that is only going to grow, and that
will not be reversed.
AI is here to stay. It will get more
powerful. Your customers will
increasingly use it to make decisions.
The question is simple: are you visible
when they ask? ●
March 2026 | The Intermediary
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