Marketing Procurement

GEO: What procurement experts need to know

Hiding in plain site

Only 16% said they systematically track AI search performance. That figure is the procurement question hiding in plain sight.

Every few years, marketing acquires a new acronym and procurement teams are expected to evaluate agencies on it overnight. GEO is the latest. Generative Engine Optimisation is the work of getting brands into the answers AI systems produce when consumers research and buy.

McKinsey’s August 2025 AI Discovery Survey found that around half of US consumers intentionally use AI-powered search, and 44% of those users now treat it as their primary source of information, ahead of traditional search at 31%.

McKinsey separately projects $750bn of US revenue routed through AI search by 2028, with 20-50% of traditional search traffic at risk. And in a September 2025 survey of roughly 30 Fortune 500 consumer brand CMOs, only 16% said they systematically track AI search performance. That last figure is the procurement question hiding in plain sight.

Five points worth holding agencies to.

1. GEO is an extension of SEO, not a replacement for it.

The discipline rewards what good SEO has always rewarded. Technical hygiene, content depth, domain authority, internal linking. What changes is the surface. AI systems retrieve and synthesise rather than rank ten blue links. Any agency pitching GEO as a separate workstream is selling you the same capability twice.

2. Visibility now sits across retrieval and training.

Some AI tools pull live information through retrieval. Others rely on patterns baked in during model training, which moves at a different pace. Brands need a position in both. That means earned media, structured data and entity recognition matter alongside on-site content. The question for agencies is whether they can do digital PR, technical SEO and content strategy under one roof, or whether they will subcontract half of it.

3. Authority signals are doing the heavy lifting.

In the same October 2025 analysis, McKinsey estimates a brand’s own sites typically account for only 5-10% of the sources AI search references. The rest comes from publishers, affiliates, user-generated content and review platforms. That puts digital PR, expert commentary, Wikipedia and Wikidata presence, and review-site coverage at the centre of the brief. Brands that have spent a decade optimising their own domain and ignoring everything else are exposed.

4. Web infrastructure has to be readable by machines.

AI crawlers favour content that is fast and semantically structured, without heavy JavaScript dependencies. Schema markup, clean HTML, and answer-led content design all help. The product detail page that takes three seconds to render for a human takes longer to parse for a model, and may be skipped entirely.

5. Measurement is where procurement should press hardest.

If only 16% of Fortune 500 CMOs can answer this question today, the rest are reporting on instinct. Ask agencies how they measure brand presence across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek and Google AI Overviews. Ask how many competitors they benchmark against, how often they sample, what sources are driving citations, and how they track changes over time.

The category is moving fast enough that several agencies, ours included with Brand Insights AI, have built dedicated platforms to close the gap. The procurement question is not which tool, it is whether the methodology behind the numbers holds up under scrutiny across the LLMs your customers actually use.

On agency selection. The temptation will be to hire a specialist GEO shop. The better question is whether your current agency has the breadth to absorb this work. SEO, content, digital PR, paid media and analytics already need to be integrated for GEO to function. Splitting it out tends to produce a fifth silo and a sixth invoice.

This is not a new frontier. It is the same commercial question every channel shift produces. Where are your customers, how are they making decisions, and is your brand visible at the point of choice. Traffic was always a proxy for that. AI search is a reminder that the proxy is not the thing.

Alex Walker is Managing Director, Havas Market UK.

 Reference:

Silliman, E., Boudet, J., Robinson, K., Oppong, D. and Shah, N. (2025) New front door to the internet: Winning in the age of AI search. McKinsey & Company, Growth, Marketing & Sales Practice, 16 October. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/new-front-door-to-the-internet-winning-in-the-age-of-ai-search