Is Your Brand Showing Up Where Buyers Are Actually Looking?

AEO and GEO are some the hottest topics in marketing right now – here’s what they mean for your brand and your affiliate program.

If you’ve been in any marketing conversation lately – at a conference, on a call with your agency, scrolling LinkedIn – you’ve probably noticed that AEO and GEO keep coming up. And if you’re not entirely sure what they mean yet, you’re not alone. It’s one of those topics that’s exploded almost overnight, and the industry is still figuring out the language, let alone the playbook.

So let’s break it down – what AEO and GEO actually are, why they matter for your business, and why your affiliate program is more relevant to this than you might think.

First – what are we actually talking about?

You might have seen GEO, AEO, GSO, or LLMO used interchangeably. Honestly, the terminology hasn’t really settled yet, even at industry level, people are using different acronyms to mean roughly the same thing. Don’t let that put you off.

Here’s the clearest way to think about it:

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is about making sure your content is structured in a way that AI-powered search tools – Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, Bing Copilot – can pull from it and present it as a direct answer to someone’s question.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) goes a step further. It’s about making sure that when an AI model generates a response about your category – “what’s the best travel insurance for someone with a pre-existing condition?” – your brand is one of the sources it draws on and recommends.

The key difference from traditional SEO? Google ranked your pages. AI cites your content. That’s a meaningful shift in what “showing up” actually means.

Why does this matter right now?

Because the way people search is genuinely changing, and it’s happening faster than most brand teams have had time to respond to.

A growing number of your potential customers aren’t starting their research on Google anymore. They’re opening ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overview and asking a proper question – not three keywords, but a full sentence. The AI synthesises content from across the web, picks its sources, and gives them an answer. No scrolling. No clicking through to a comparison site. Just a recommendation.

If your brand is in that answer, you’ve been considered. If you’re not, you missed the moment — regardless of how strong your SEO is or how many affiliate partners you have.

This is what the industry is calling the zero-click era – and it’s something we’ve been tracking for a while. Earlier this year we sat down with Alex Springer from OpenAttribution.org to dig into exactly this, and the conversation is worth a read if you want the fuller picture. The short version: people are still researching and still buying, but more of that journey is now happening inside AI layers that don’t always send traffic back to websites. The influence is there. The click often isn’t.

The numbers are hard to ignore. Around a third of the US population is now using generative AI for search. The average ChatGPT prompt is 23 words long, versus 3 words for a traditional Google search. People aren’t browsing anymore. They’re asking for conclusions.

And here’s the part that really matters for performance marketers: the buying decision can happen inside the AI answer, before your customer visits a single website. That makes AI visibility an earlier and more influential touchpoint than anything your last-click model has ever been able to see.

What AI engines are actually looking for

This is where it gets practical. Understanding what gets cited helps you spot the gaps in most brand strategies.

AI models tend to favour content that is authoritative – expert quotes, real statistics, properly attributed data. Research from Princeton found that content with expert quotes improved AI citation probability by 41%, and content with statistics improved it by 30%. Thin product descriptions don’t get a look in.

They also favour content that’s structured and easy to extract – clear headings, FAQ formats, specific factual answers. A page that meanders doesn’t get cited.

Freshness matters too. Content that hasn’t been updated in a couple of weeks starts to lose citation frequency. Brands that keep publishing and refreshing maintain their presence.

And this is the bit most brand teams underestimate – AI doesn’t just cite your own website. It pulls from the whole web. Reviews, editorial coverage, comparison pieces, forum discussions. Your AI visibility is a reflection of how broadly and credibly your brand appears across the internet, not just how polished your homepage is.

That last point is where your affiliate program becomes really relevant.

Your affiliate program is already your GEO strategy – it just might not be set up to do that job

This is the thing we keep coming back to in conversations with brands.

Your affiliate partners – the publishers, content creators, and comparison sites in your network are producing exactly the kind of content AI engines are built to trust. Long-form reviews, “best X for Y” comparisons, expert opinion pieces, side-by-side product analysis. When that content is genuinely good, it gets cited. When it gets cited, your brand is in the answer.

The problem is that most affiliate programs were built around rewarding the last click – the coupon site, the retargeting partner, whoever was there at the end of the journey. Those placements are easy to attribute, but they don’t produce the kind of substantive content that AI engines care about. They’re optimised for a moment in the customer journey that AI is increasingly bypassing altogether.

Your content-first partners – the ones producing genuinely useful, expert-driven editorial are already doing the GEO work. They’re just not getting recognised for it in your attribution model, which usually means they’re not being compensated for it either.

The brands we’re seeing win in AI search are the ones who’ve started treating their affiliate program as a content authority strategy: recruiting for quality over volume, giving publishers access to first-party product data and real expertise, and building compensation models that reward influence, not just the final click.

What measurement looks like in this world

If your program is built entirely on last-click CPA, GEO performance is largely invisible to you. That’s not a reason to write it off – it’s a reason to expand how you measure.

The metrics worth tracking for AI visibility are different from your standard performance KPIs:

• Citation frequency – how often your brand appears in AI answers for the queries that matter in your category
• Share of voice – how your citation rate compares to competitors across a consistent set of prompts
• Source attribution – which publishers and content types are being cited when your brand appears
• AI referral traffic quality – conversion rates from users who arrive via AI-cited sources tend to be higher than average, which is worth knowing

Platforms like Profound and Evertune can track this across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and more. But you don’t need enterprise tooling to start getting a picture. Running your own category queries in the major AI platforms regularly, and noting which publishers show up in the sources, gives you a useful read on where you stand today.

If you want to understand where you actually stand right now, the first step is knowing how AI engines are already talking about your brand, and whether what they’re saying is accurate, favourable, or even relevant. We explored exactly this with the team at Cloudfind.AI – the technology behind Publisher Discovery, in a webinar focused on how brands can identify their visibility across LLMs and spot the gaps before competitors do. It’s worth a look if you want to see what this looks like in practice.

So what do you actually do?

For performance marketing teams, a good starting point is auditing your publisher mix through a GEO lens. Which of your current partners are producing content that could realistically be cited by an AI engine? Which are purely transactional? Are you recruiting based on conversion history alone – and if so, are you systematically filtering out the partners who matter most for AI visibility?

For senior marketing leaders and CMOs, the bigger question is whether AI visibility is on your radar as a channel at all. The brands building presence in AI search now are creating a compounding advantage – citations reinforce domain authority, which reinforces future citations. Waiting for clean attribution data before shifting your approach is the same mistake that delayed SEO investment a decade ago.

The honest truth is that the commercial infrastructure around all of this is still being built. Nobody has a perfect playbook yet. But the brands who are in these conversations, experimenting, and making smart bets on content quality and publisher relationships? They’re the ones who’ll have the advantage when the dust settles.

How we can help

There’s no single fix here, and honestly, where you start depends on where you are.

Some brands come to us knowing their program exists but not really knowing if it’s working – in which case an audit gives you the clear, honest picture you need before making any bigger decisions. Others already know something’s off and need hands-on management to actually turn it around. And some are further back – still figuring out the strategy, what kind of partners to recruit, how to structure commissions, how to make the case internally for investing in content-quality over volume.

We work across all of it. Program audits, full program management, and strategy – whether that’s a one-off call to pressure-test your thinking or ongoing support as you rebuild your partner mix for a world where AI visibility matters as much as last-click attribution.

We’ll be straight with you: the tooling around AI citation and LLM visibility is still evolving fast, and for most brands, the bigger and more immediate win is getting the fundamentals right. Know what’s in your program, know which partners are actually driving value, and make sure your strategy is built for how the customer journey works today – not how it worked three years ago.

If any of this resonates, let’s have a conversation. Even a single call can help you work out where to focus first.

The way buyers discover brands is being rewritten. Your affiliate program can be one of your strongest tools for staying visible – if it’s built to do that work.