{"id":775815,"date":"2026-11-03T06:03:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T14:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=wherenext&#038;p=775815"},"modified":"2026-11-03T06:03:00","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T14:03:00","slug":"as-aeo-gains-traction-companies-looks-for-geographic-clues","status":"publish","type":"wherenext","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/publications\/wherenext\/as-aeo-gains-traction-companies-looks-for-geographic-clues","title":{"rendered":"As AEO Gains Traction, Companies Looks for Geographic Clues"},"author":501,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","transcript_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[11272,471991,20762,238001],"department":[476812,488812],"wherenext-category":[],"industry":[],"class_list":["post-775815","wherenext","type-wherenext","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-demographics","tag-market-analysis","tag-marketing","tag-site-selection","department-business-growth","department-emerging-technologies"],"acf":{"short_description":"Earning a recommendation from a chatbot poses reputational and geographic challenges. Companies are looking for tools to address both. ","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"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."},{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Left","content":"<strong>Snapshot<\/strong>: As consumers look to AI tools for shopping advice, companies work to burnish their image through AEO, or answer engine optimization. It\u2019s a challenge with reputational and geographic connotations.","snippet":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"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).\r\n\r\nAs many as 40 percent of US web searches now receive an AI-generated summary, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/corp\/reports\/2026-generative-ai-landscape\/\">according to one study<\/a>. These interactions happen through tools like Google\u2019s Gemini, OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, and Perplexity\u2014and businesses know how much is riding on the answers. If their brand isn't in the AI conversation, it isn't on the customer\u2019s mind.\r\n\r\nThis 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\u2014it\u2019s a geographic one, too.\r\n<h3><strong>How Are Brands Monitoring Their Reputation on AI Tools?<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nThe decades-long quest for SEO spawned a crop of software tools and specialists dedicated to boosting a company\u2019s search rankings, and businesses paid handsomely for the assistance\u2014a reported $119 billion <a href=\"https:\/\/backlinko.com\/seo-services-statistics\">last year<\/a> alone. Now, a cottage industry is forming around AEO. (A sister discipline, GEO, or generative-AI optimization, has similar aims.)\r\n\r\nFor companies with a national or global brand and hundreds of touchpoints in local markets\u2014carmakers, financial service providers, insurers, grocery stores\u2014the goal of AEO is often twofold: burnish the overall brand and win the local competition for customers.\r\n\r\nMany principles of good SEO also make for good AEO. As chatbots and AI-based search engines decide which company to recommend, they\u2019re looking for clear, well-structured websites, favorable customer reviews, citations from reputable sources, and other indicators of a reputable brand."},{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Left","content":"<strong>Related Read:<\/strong>\r\n\r\n\/\/ What are my customers <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/publications\/wherenext\/psychographics-inside-story\">thinking<\/a>?","snippet":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"When users ask questions like, \u201cWhere should I buy a mattress?\u201d \u201cWhat\u2019s the best local self-storage option?\u201d or \u201cWho are the top financial advisers in my area?\u201d AI tools make brand judgments. They also make geographic ones.\r\n\r\nAs companies awaken to these new paths of customer discovery, they\u2019re beginning to track their performance through AEO tools. For marketing executives, it\u2019s 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.\r\n<h3><strong>The Local View of a National Brand <\/strong><\/h3>\r\nLocation intelligence has long been a key marketing technique. High-performing businesses rely on a technology called a <a href=\"https:\/\/mediaspace.esri.com\/media\/What%20is%20GIS%20-%20Business%20Edition\/1_kdp4dvev\">geographic information system (GIS)<\/a> to analyze markets, understand customer demographics, and make decisions about ad spending.\r\n\r\nOne 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\u2019re working on or the question a senior executive asks during a strategic review.\r\n\r\nAs 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\u2019s in the middle of the pack, and where it is lagging.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s another tool in the marketing kit for companies with business locations in multiple markets. At one of the country\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/publications\/wherenext\/taylor-morrison-homebuilding\">largest homebuilders<\/a>, GIS tells marketing leaders not only how various markets are performing, but how they\u2019re changing as well:"},{"acf_fc_layout":"blockquote","content":"Inside the company, maps have become a critical tool for communicating the nuances of market dynamics, showing how and where conditions are changing.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf a picture is worth a thousand words, when you have a busy C-suite, it\u2019s probably worth a million words,\u201d says Lacey Miller, director of market intelligence and strategy at Taylor Morrison."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Marketing teams have always been tasked with moving fast, thinking creatively, and keeping tabs on what\u2019s 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.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;"}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.9 (Yoast SEO v25.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>As AEO Gains Traction, Companies Looks for Geographic Clues<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Earning a recommendation from a chatbot poses reputational and geographic challenges. Companies are looking for tools to address both.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/publications\/wherenext\/as-aeo-gains-traction-companies-looks-for-geographic-clues\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"AEO and the Challenge of Tracking AI-Driven Exposure\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As marketing teams look to track AEO performance across markets, GIS analysis is becoming more valuable.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/publications\/wherenext\/as-aeo-gains-traction-companies-looks-for-geographic-clues\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Esri\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" 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