As AEO Gains Traction, Companies Looks for Geographic Clues

For over a quarter century, marketing executives hired experts and spent millions on search engine optimization (SEO), aiming to outrank competitors when would-be customers searched the internet for goods and services.

Now, as consumers increasingly ask AI search tools and chatbots for information, marketing teams are investing in a new form of competitive positioning called answer engine optimization (AEO).

As many as 40 percent of US web searches now receive an AI-generated summary, according to one study. These interactions happen through tools like Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Perplexity—and businesses know how much is riding on the answers. If their brand isn’t in the AI conversation, it isn’t on the customer’s mind.

This has sparked a rush to embrace AEO techniques, which help companies stand out to chatbots and assistants, and thus consumers. The challenge isn’t simply a reputational one—it’s a geographic one, too.

How Are Brands Monitoring Their Reputation on AI Tools?

The decades-long quest for SEO spawned a crop of software tools and specialists dedicated to boosting a company’s search rankings, and businesses paid handsomely for the assistance—a reported $119 billion last year alone. Now, a cottage industry is forming around AEO. (A sister discipline, GEO, or generative-AI optimization, has similar aims.)

For companies with a national or global brand and hundreds of touchpoints in local markets—carmakers, financial service providers, insurers, grocery stores—the goal of AEO is often twofold: burnish the overall brand and win the local competition for customers.

Many principles of good SEO also make for good AEO. As chatbots and AI-based search engines decide which company to recommend, they’re looking for clear, well-structured websites, favorable customer reviews, citations from reputable sources, and other indicators of a reputable brand.

When users ask questions like, “Where should I buy a mattress?” “What’s the best local self-storage option?” or “Who are the top financial advisers in my area?” AI tools make brand judgments. They also make geographic ones.

As companies awaken to these new paths of customer discovery, they’re beginning to track their performance through AEO tools. For marketing executives, it’s a golden opportunity to place that data in a geographic context, just as they do with sales dashboards that track the performance of local stores, offices, restaurants, or service centers.

The Local View of a National Brand

Location intelligence has long been a key marketing technique. High-performing businesses rely on a technology called a geographic information system (GIS) to analyze markets, understand customer demographics, and make decisions about ad spending.

One of the advantages of location technology like GIS is its ability to manage complex information in simple ways. The marketing team might maintain a GIS map with a dozen or more layers, including stats on out-of-home advertising, the correlation between media buys and sales performance, and five-year projections for the demographic makeup of top prospective markets. Decision-makers can turn each layer on or off with a click, depending on the project they’re working on or the question a senior executive asks during a strategic review.

As marketing teams gather AEO insight from software and specialists, they can feed the information into GIS, creating a map of AI search performance in markets across the country. A simple color scheme can designate areas where the business is outperforming the competition in AI search, where it’s in the middle of the pack, and where it is lagging.

It’s another tool in the marketing kit for companies with business locations in multiple markets. At one of the country’s largest homebuilders, GIS tells marketing leaders not only how various markets are performing, but how they’re changing as well:

Marketing teams have always been tasked with moving fast, thinking creatively, and keeping tabs on what’s working. In an age where AI is changing how consumers discover brands, every data point on how and where a business reaches its customers is worth seeing in living color.