Digiday published new research this week showing that marketers are reworking their generative engine optimisation strategies in response to the rise of zero-click search. The findings confirm what most of us working in organic visibility have been seeing for 18 months: the click-through model that built the SEO industry is shifting, and brands are scrambling to adapt.
Here's what the report actually says, and then here's where I think most marketers are still getting it wrong.
What Digiday Found
The Digiday+ Research team surveyed marketers and brand-side practitioners about how they're responding to zero-click search results, AI Overviews, and the broader shift toward answer-engine experiences. The headline finding: marketers are now actively building GEO into their playbooks, not treating it as a fringe experiment.
The piece, published by Digiday on May 11, 2026, highlights a few key shifts in marketer behaviour:
- More budget moving toward content designed to be cited by AI systems, not just ranked on Google
- Marketers measuring brand mentions and citations in AI answers as a new KPI
- A growing acknowledgement that traditional traffic metrics are decoupling from actual business outcomes
- Increased focus on structured data, entity clarity, and authoritative sourcing
You can read the full Digiday piece here.
The summary version: marketers are waking up to GEO. They're starting to take it seriously. They're starting to spend on it.
The 66th Take: Marketers Are Treating GEO Like a New Channel. It Isn't.
Here's the part of the Digiday research that nobody is saying out loud. Marketers are treating GEO as a new, separate discipline that needs new budgets, new tools, new vendors, and new strategies.
It isn't.
I have said this on every client call for the last 12 months. GEO is 80% really good SEO and 20% entity management, citation building, and structured review signals. The brands winning AI citations right now are not the ones who hired a "GEO specialist" in Q1. They are the ones who already had clean technical foundations, specific content, real authority signals, and a coherent entity footprint across the web.
Where the Digiday data confirms our position
Look at what the report says marketers are now spending on: structured data, entity clarity, authoritative sourcing. Those are SEO fundamentals. We have been doing all of that for clients since before ChatGPT existed. The AI systems just happened to start rewarding it harder.
Where marketers are still getting it wrong
Two mistakes I see brands making right now, and the Digiday research suggests these are widespread:
Mistake 1: Chasing AI visibility while neglecting the site itself. A brand asks me to get them cited by Perplexity. I look at their site. The pricing page renders client-side. The location pages are thin. The schema is broken. You cannot skip the foundation and bolt GEO on top. ChatGPT cites sources Google trusts. If Google does not trust you, ChatGPT will not either.
Mistake 2: Tracking AI citations without tracking what they convert. Yes, 41% of marketers are now measuring AI mentions. Good. But a brand mention in an AI answer is not the same as a buying intent click. We still see the majority of revenue come from bottom-funnel local search and conventional organic, not from people copy-pasting brand names out of ChatGPT.
Old GEO Thinking vs. What Actually Works
| What Marketers Are Doing | What Actually Moves Citations |
|---|---|
| Hiring a separate GEO vendor on top of SEO | Investing in 1 team that does both, because they are the same discipline |
| Optimising content for AI "prompts" | Writing specific, source-quality content humans want to cite |
| Buying AI visibility tracking dashboards | Fixing the technical and entity issues those dashboards reveal |
| Treating zero-click as a traffic loss | Treating zero-click as a brand impression and measuring downstream lift |
| Adding FAQ schema to every page | Adding schema where it accurately describes the entity |
What I'd Tell a Brand Reading This Report
If you are a founder or marketing director reading the Digiday piece and feeling behind, here is what I would actually do, in order:
- Audit your fundamentals first. Crawl your site. Check render. Check indexing. Check schema accuracy. Most brands are not losing AI visibility because they lack GEO. They are losing it because their site is technically broken in ways that block both Google and AI crawlers.
- Pick 5 questions you want to own. Not 50. Not 500. Write the best answer on the internet to each one. Make it specific to your category, your geography, your customer.
- Clean up your entity footprint. Your Google Business Profile, your citations, your review signals, your knowledge panel. AI systems cite entities they can verify. If your business looks inconsistent across the web, you will get cited less, full stop.
- Measure what matters. AI citations are an indicator. Revenue, qualified leads, and bookings are the outcome. Do not confuse the 2.
The Digiday research is useful because it confirms what we have been telling clients for over a year: GEO is real, it matters, and brands that ignore it will lose ground. But the response should not be to panic-buy a new strategy. The response should be to double down on the SEO and authority work that was always going to pay off.
Most algorithm shifts reward what good operators have been doing all along. This one is no exception.
