But in 2025, search has been shifting away from traditional browsers toward LLM platforms. With Apple’s announcement that AI-native search engines like Perplexity and Claude will be built into Safari, Google’s distribution chokehold is in question. The foundation of the $80 billion+ SEO market just cracked.
Today, with LLMs like GPT-4o, Gemini, and Claude acting as the interface for how people find information, visibility means showing up directly in the answer itself, rather than ranking high on the results page.
Traditional SEO rewards precision and repetition; generative engines prioritize content that is well-organized, easy to parse, and dense with meaning (not just keywords). Phrases like “in summary” or bullet-point formatting help LLMs extract and reproduce content effectively**.**
It’s no longer just about click-through rates, it’s about reference rates: how often your brand or content is cited or used as a source in model-generated answers. In a world of AI-generated outputs, GEO means optimizing for what the model chooses to reference, not just whether or where you appear in traditional search. That shift is revamping how we define and measure brand visibility and performance.
Tools like Ahrefs’ Brand Radar now track brand mentions in AI Overviews, helping companies understand how they’re framed and remembered by generative engines.
We’re seeing the emergence of a new kind of brand strategy: one that accounts not just for perception in the public, but perception in the model. How you’re encoded into the AI layer is the new competitive advantage.