Posted after three days at OMR 2026
There was a lot of noise at OMR this year. AI everywhere. Every second talk had “agentic” in the title. But when I filtered through all of it, one thought stuck with me on the plane back to Zurich:
AI search isn’t getting smarter. It’s getting more human.
And that changes things, not just for how we do SEO, but for how we think about growth as a discipline.
SEO vs. GEO: What Is Actually Changing in AI Search
For years, SEO was partly a technical game. You earned rankings through signals that algorithms could measure: backlinks, page speed, structured data, keyword density. Many of those signals were proxies for trust and relevance, but they were proxies. You could game them if you knew how.
GEO, generative engine optimization, the practice of making your brand visible in AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini, works differently. These systems don’t just count links. They read context. They evaluate whether a third-party consumer magazine is more credible than an anonymous review site. They factor in what people actually say about your brand across the web, the sentiment, the specificity, the consistency.
In other words, they make judgments closer to how a human would if you asked them for a recommendation.
Is that fundamentally different from what good SEO always rewarded? Not really. The underlying logic, be genuinely credible, be talked about by the right people, deliver what you promise, hasn’t changed. What changed is that the algorithm now catches up faster with reality. The shortcuts that used to work are closing.
GEO Growth Strategy: 4 Takeaways for Product and Growth Leaders
If you’re responsible for acquisition, retention, or product in a digital business, here’s what I’d take from this:
1. Product information quality is now a direct growth lever. AI systems surface answers based on how well your product data, descriptions, and content answer real user questions. Thin, generic product pages don’t just rank poorly, they get ignored entirely by systems that prioritize the most useful answer. If your team has been treating product content as a task for the content team, it’s time to treat it as a product problem.
2. Brand sentiment is no longer a soft metric. Brand sentiment, how customers talk about you across review sites, forums, and independent publications, is now being read and weighted by ranking systems. This is not marketing fluff. It’s infrastructure. The quality of your customer experience, the way you handle complaints publicly, the consistency between what you promise and what you deliver, all of that is becoming a ranking signal.
3. SEO, content, brand, and product are converging. These disciplines used to operate in separate lanes with separate budgets and separate KPIs. GEO doesn’t respect those lanes. A great product that no one writes about independently will lose to a decent product with strong third-party coverage. A brand with excellent sentiment but poor product data will lose in the answer layer. The teams that win are the ones building a single, coherent signal, not four separate ones pointing in different directions.
4. Agentic commerce is worth watching, but not panicking about. There was a lot of talk about AI agents making purchase decisions on behalf of users. It’s real and it’s coming. But the fundamentals that will make you visible and trusted to an AI agent are the same ones above: quality information, genuine credibility, consistent brand signals. Build those now and you’ll be well-positioned regardless of how the interface evolves.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Durable Growth
Most of what I heard at OMR confirms something I’ve believed for a while: the channels and algorithms change, but what actually builds durable growth doesn’t. Be useful. Be credible. Deliver consistently. Make it easy for people, and now machines, to understand what you do and why you’re worth choosing.
The interesting shift is that AI is raising the floor. The tactics that let you grow despite mediocre fundamentals are getting harder to execute. That’s uncomfortable for teams that built on shortcuts. For teams that built on substance, it’s an opportunity.
I work on acquisition and retention at Brack.Alltron, Switzerland’s largest e-commerce platform. I write about product leadership and growth, occasionally from trains and planes.
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