Brands vs. bots: CMOs, ad agencies tell all about what they’ve learned marketing to our new AI overlords

Let’s get one thing straight: I love my 2015 Toyota Sienna minivan. But after a decade of navigating dirty dog paws, diaper changes, puking toddlers, cross-country road trips, dystopian Maritime Canadian winters, and more, it might be time to consider a succession plan. 

So, like reportedly half of American consumers using LLM search today, I recently opened up a chatbot and asked it to help me find a new car. My opening prompt was simple: What is the best vehicle for a family of four, that has to deal with daily commutes, winter weather, all in the $50,000 price range?

According to ChatGPT:

• Best overall: Mazda CX-90 Hybrid
• Best for reliability and resale: Toyota Highlander Hybrid
• Best for commuting and family size: Toyota RAV4 Hybrid / Honda CR-V Hybrid
• Best for space and comfort: Toyota Sienna AWD Hybrid (Wouldn’t you know it?)

According to Claude:

Top pick: 2026 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid AWD

Plus, four “strong alternatives”:

• 2026 Kia Telluride
• 2026 Hyundai Palisade XRT
• 2026 Subaru Forester
• 2026 Honda Passport

From the same prompt, two LLMs came up with 10 vehicle suggestions and only a single model in common. That, in a nutshell, is one of the newest, most compelling challenges facing major brands and marketers right now. 

Those LLMs’ results didn’t happen just naturally. They’re the result of everything the brands did, intentionally or unintentionally, and what was written about them online. And each LLM interprets and prioritizes all of that information in its own special way, so figuring out how to get to the top of every list—and knowing what each LLM is saying about your brand—is now a key task for every brand’s marketing department.

Welcome to the GEO speedwagon. 

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and overall LLM visibility are in the midst of a gargantuan hype cycle. According to an October 2025 McKinsey report, 50% of Google searches already have AI summaries, and that’s expected to rise to more than 75% by 2028. At that point, $750 billion in U.S. revenue will funnel through AI-powered search. The McKinsey report says brands that are unprepared could see a decline in traffic from the traditional search channels by as much as 50%.

Gaggles of startups are pitching AI slop factories as a solution: promising to quickly create hundreds of pieces of content with key information about brands that will get picked up by LLMs and regurgitated in their responses. What’s proving more useful, however, are tools—like Profound, Bluefish, Scrunch, and Emberos—that help marketers monitor, track, manage, and influence how LLMs find their brands. Profound announced a $96 million investment in February at a $1 billion valuation. 

Brands and marketers who may be feeling a bit behind on all of this need not panic . . . yet. Sources I’ve talked to describe this moment in GEO as 1998 for search, or 2006 for social media—the very beginning stages of a transformational moment. The biggest difference is the pace of both technological development and audience adoption. Now is the time to be building the foundations onto which a bigger part of your business will be built. 

Brand executives and CMOs are on a sliding scale of acceptance of this messy new world of AI discoverability, ranging from diving in headfirst to dipping their toes to going full Lloyd Christmas and trying to ignore the whole thing. GEO and the services and tools surrounding it have been labeled everything from snake oil to THE FUTURE. 

The reality is, of course, somewhere in the messy middle. 

For this story, Fast Company spoke to major brand executives, leading ad agencies, and startup founders to detangle the hype from what really matters. Here we’ll break down:

• The unexpected power move that will make your brand more visible on LLMs 
• Why GEO is a racket, and the reasons it’s not
• How major brands and agencies are approaching GEO right now (and their plans for the future)

Consider this your no-BS guide to GEO.

First up: Your foundation matters

From talking to executives across brands, agencies, and startups, it’s clear that GEO is not a short-term game you can win. The brands that will dominate LLMs are the brands that are already owning their paid, owned, and earned media. These are brands with consistency and clarity across their brand content, website, and social channels, not to mention their outside media coverage. 

Public relations veteran Jim Prosser recently argued in a piece titled “GEO is a Racket,” that GEO is really just about having a good overall communications strategy while monitoring how your brand is showing up in LLMs. And he’s right. That old chestnut of everything your company does is a brand action has never been more true. Except now, all of these brand actions aren’t simply spread across the internet but distilled down to answer a single LLM prompt. All the good, the bad, and the ugly is right there, in an instant. 

When you ask an LLM about a product or brand, it sources material from everywhere it can, prioritizing the most credible and most high-profile sources. It utilizes what your execs say on LinkedIn, what your customers and employees say on Reddit, what major publications and meaningful influencers say about you, and what you say about yourself in your own advertising and content. These have always been important factors in a brand’s overall identity. What LLM search does is make everything accessible all at once. 

“There’s a lot of hype around it, but at the same time, it has basically confirmed marketing fundamentals,” says Meghan Signalness, global head of media, marketing planning and operations, and agency leadership for Philips’s $4 billion personal health consumer business. “In some ways it’s just SEO sped up.”

Signalness says her team has done plenty of GEO audits, and that the biggest thing that moves the needle is simply showing up consistently. “LLMs are looking at what words are most associated with your brand. That’s old-school marketing,” she says.

Set up your content for success

Chris Neff, global chief AI officer at award-winning ad agency Anomaly, says brands must optimize their own digital assets—particularly their websites—since roughly 60% to 65% of AI citations can derive from the brand’s own content. This has led to a resurgence in value of brand landing pages because they have the citable assets and structured architecture that bots require to reference a campaign. 

This extends to a brand’s FAQs, says Brad Nunn, vice president of media at ad agency Gale, noting that clear, factual, one-sentence answers are the single most effective way to ensure LLMs do not make incorrect assumptions about a product. “You’re not creating vagueness,” he says. “You’re mentioning the brand up front, and you’re saying exactly what it’s solving. You could add more after the fact if you want to be cute but you want the first sentence to be super clear, super tight, and factual.”

According to James Cadwallader, cofounder and CEO of AI-native marketing platform Profound, owned content gives LLMs the best opportunity to talk thoughtfully about what your brand does. “You’re trying to give AI the opportunity to understand your business better,” he says. 

To make sure all of this content is working, Ally Financial CMO Andrea Brimmer says her team is constantly auditing and correcting how the brand shows up online. They use a tool called Scrunch to look at where and how the brand is showing up in LLMs. They analyze the findings with what Brimmer calls weekly “scrums” of multidisciplinary teams made up of PR, tech, HR, and a dedicated AI team within the marketing organization. 

From there, they work to build and maintain the brand’s presence through new content that shows up in the right places. When they find that LLMs are citing outdated or incorrect information, they intentionally create new content and work with PR to correct the original sources being cited by the bots. 

Then comes the more intangible art of making sure all the ways a customer sees, hears, and experiences the content are aligned in order to make your brand’s online presence as clear and consistent as possible for the LLMs to find and understand. 

“We’ve come to realize really quickly that brand has never been more important than it is now,” Brimmer says. “And when I say brand, I don’t mean just the marketing part of the brand. You better have really damn good customer experience and PR around your products, you better have a strong reputation in the marketplace, you better show up as a good citizen of the world, and you better treat your employees really well because all of those elements of what makes a great brand are more important now than ever before.”

Build a spiderweb of authority

For now, LLM search still prioritizes sources high in expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. But things can be complicated when one of those sources has wrong information. Brimmer describes this moment in marketing as a “Wild, Wild West” phase where brands must engage in “hand-to-hand combat” to ensure they show up accurately on probabilistic LLM chatbots. Her team has experienced the unpredictability of LLM search firsthand. 

When Ally announced in December that its customers could now deposit cash into their Ally checking accounts in person at Walmart, it was a big deal for one of the largest online-only banks in the U.S. But the brand had a problem: Major LLMs were still telling users the bank didn’t offer this feature. Fixing that misinformation was a long-term content play. The brand began creating more specific content to highlight the feature on its own site and elsewhere, as well as trying to correct sites where there was information saying it wasn’t a feature. 

Google, Meta, TikTok, and other major search and social media companies have robust brand liaison departments to help marketers better utilize their platforms. So far, AI companies don’t seem to be following that model, leaving brands to chart their own paths. This will undoubtedly change once there is advertising of some kind integrated into LLMs. But for now, companies must fend for themselves in making sure the source information is accurate.

Getting the correct brand information into the world means showing up where people—and LLMs—are looking for information. On Reddit, for example, Philips conducted an “Ask Me Anything” event with credible engineers and doctors to provide high-authority, factual content on a platform AI models heavily scrape to see how providing credentialed human expertise there would impact the brand’s visibility in LLM models. 

The results were encouraging, but Signalness is quick to acknowledge that it’s far from an exact science. The rules can change suddenly, as when Reddit began limiting AI companies’ ability to scrape comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial purposes. Philips has done similar LLM visibility testing with its influencer strategy. 

“While we know there’s a role for influencers, in the context of an LLM there’s not as much of a role for that 20-year-old with a cellphone as there is for a doctor, a dentist, or another professional,” Signalness says. “So it’s stripping away a lot of noise, which is really refreshing.”

Make a human fingerprint

Forget churning out never-ending content to feed the algorithm. Quality still beats quantity. All of my sources said brands should avoid using anything resembling AI slop, because people are increasingly seeing that as (shocker!) creepy and inauthentic. Taryn Crouthers, CEO of agency Big Spaceship, highlights a significant “trust gap” between marketers and consumers. Marketers may be all in because they see the value of how AI can help make work more efficient, and more personalized at scale and all of that, but when consumers hear AI, they tend to tune out or get actively repulsed. 

“So now brands need human fingerprints or evidence of effort,” Crouthers says. “You can make something using AI and make sure that the GEO attributions are all there, but you need to also show the human side of that storytelling, how hard it was to make it, why you made it, how you made it. That helps people be more comfortable with it and more open to the message.”

Ndidiamaka “Ndidi” Oteh, CEO of Accenture Song, says that if strong SEO was rooted in product attributes and specific description, LLM visibility goes beyond that by its conversational nature. “Take a black crewneck sweater,” she says. “We are now moving to the attributes that are connected beyond just that it is a black crewneck. It is about the flow, it’s about how it’s perfect for an afternoon ski trip—things you would never have had as part of your traditional attribute criteria because it’s not specific to the product.”

What’s next

After search comes agentic commerce, which will revolutionize e-commerce and require seamless integration between all aspects of a business. But we’re not there yet. Oteh says that link between commerce and LLM search, for example, where you’d find something you like and buy it right then and there within the LLM, is not quite ready for prime time in new agentic channels. 

“Even in rudimentary examples where the tech can sort of do it but not at scale, we’re finding that a lot of companies’ supply chains and order management systems just aren’t set up in a way where they can take signals from anywhere,” she says. 

Signalness also points to LLMs’ lack of readiness for providing the data brands need in order to responsibly utilize their platforms and justify the investment. “We know this is the step we need to take, but ‘Dear LLMs, let’s partner to take the step,’” Signalness says. “Some of us in the brands are saying, ‘Okay, let’s go start testing, but here’s our list of questions.’ And the answers to those questions aren’t coming back clearly.”

Healthy brands will be healthy with just a few moves, primarily around monitoring. According to McKinsey, only 16% of brands currently track AI search performance systematically, which is key to identifying misinformation or visibility gaps. So while there is snake oil in the hype around how to build, grow, and maintain LLM visibility, for many major marketers its importance is very real. 

“This is the direction of travel,” Signalness says. “So get comfortable.” 

Just like a ride in a brand-new minivan.

---

View the full article