The news: Despite consumers’ rising use of AI agents for search, shopping, and discovery, brands are falling behind on generative engine optimization (GEO) strategies.

• 47% of brands have no deliberate GEO strategy or have no idea if they appear at all in AI agent responses, per a new report from Cordial.
• Another 47% have only just begun optimizing content for AI discovery.

Why it matters: AI engines index content differently from search engines, prioritizing semantic relevance and authority, not just keyword density or backlinks.

Failing to adapt content and campaigns for AI agents leaves possible discovery, engagement, and visibility on the table, especially as trust in AI responses grows.

• Two-thirds of US adults occasionally, frequently, or primarily find and interact with brands through AI agents like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, or Perplexity.
• And while search still leads, 13% of consumers now start their shopping journeys with chatbots and AI tools, per Walmart.

Zooming out: Ignoring GEO isn’t just a missed visibility play—it’s a missed revenue stream.

Amazon’s Rufus, Perplexity’s agentic Comet browser, and others are positioning their products not just as discovery tools but as personal shoppers, with embedded options to directly purchase within the chat.

That shift turns AI agents into emerging commerce channels with a frictionless way for users to immediately act on interest and complete purchases.

Our take: To boost visibility, brands should optimize for conversational context and create structured, machine-readable content that AI can index, like clear website FAQs, TL;DR summaries, and detailed product specs.

Expanding presence across social platforms that feed AI training models, such as Reddit, Quora, and YouTube, can also improve chances of surfacing in AI-generated responses.