Last week, we talked about how traditional search engine optimization (SEO) can feel incredibly uphill when you’ve launched a product that’s so new, people don’t even know it exists—let alone what keywords to type into a search box.
But as search behavior shifts toward Generative Engine Optimization (GEO—or "SEO for AI"), the playbook changes. In fact, solving the "unknown unknown" problem is precisely where GEO shines.
Think about the user behavior. If a procurement manager is looking for a marketing partner, a traditional Google search might be rigid: "marketing firm for logistics." But when they open an AI tool, they get conversational: "Are there any boutique marketing firms that specialize specifically in complex supply chain tech?"
By their very nature, Large Language Models (LLMs) synthesize information rather than just spitting out a list of direct links. This is the ultimate equalizer for companies suffering from the "early mover disadvantage." AI allows you to capture prospects who are looking for the concept of your solution, even if they don’t know its name yet.
Here is how you optimize for the AI search era.
Step Back to See the Forest
In startup life, it’s easy to drink your own Kool-Aid. Founders tend to view every industry pain point strictly through the lens of their proprietary solution. If you’re a drayage carrier, you expect your prospects to search for "drayage."
But reality check: many procurement professionals entering the logistics space today are relatively new to the industry. They might not know the exact vernacular yet. They aren’t searching for "drayage"—they are asking an AI, "How do I find a reliable port trucking company in Los Angeles?"
If your content is buried in hyper-specific industry jargon, the LLM won't map it to the user's broad query.
This is where many executives stumble. They force every blog post, LinkedIn article, and press release through their own highly technical worldview. To win at GEO, you have to step back, understand the baseline knowledge of your customer, and write content that answers the questions they actually have.
Prioritize Fresh Consensus over Historical Data
This is an oversimplification, but legacy SEO has historically relied on two main pillars: relevant keywords and a mountain of historical backlinks. For decades, the older and more linked-to a page was, the more Google trusted it.
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LLMs operate on a different frequency. They don't just look at who accumulated the most links over the last ten years; they look for current context and up-to-date consensus.
Look at it this way: humanity believed the Earth was flat for centuries. Had the internet existed in the Middle Ages, there would have been millions of backlinks pointing to "flat earth" articles. A legacy search engine would have ranked it #1 based on pure historical authority.
An LLM, however, is trained to synthesize shifting data. It looks at the evolving landscape to recognize that upstarts like Pythagoras and Aristotle actually discovered something new. In the AI era, a massive historical "moat" matters less than being the current, definitive voice on a topic.
Earned Media Just Became Your Secret Weapon
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If step one is thinking like your prospect and step two is keeping content fresh, step three is the logical conclusion: you need a robust PR strategy. Recent studies show that an overwhelming majority of the citations LLMs generate come from "earned media"—the independent stories, interviews, and expert commentary companies secure in trusted trade publications.
It makes perfect sense. AI inherently devalues AI-generated content. If LLMs were only trained on web-scraped AI articles, the internet would become a shallow, repeating echo chamber. AI engines actively look for human-vetted, third-party journalism to validate their answers.
This means you have to change how you approach media training and press submissions. When you speak to journalists at trades like FreightWaves or Supply Chain Dive, you aren't just pitching the readers. You are feeding Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT the exact trusted data they prefer to synthesize.
SEO and GEO are different practices, but they share the exact same destination: meeting your prospects precisely where they are, and guiding them home.
