The Wall Street Journal recently asked the question every CMO is grappling with: how should brands prepare for AI search?
The answer depends on who you ask. The market has split into three camps. The "don't touch that dial" group believes traditional SEO practices still work. The "SEO is dead" believers are funding a wave of optimization startups. And a middle ground suggests the two disciplines will merge as both search types persist.
At Evertune, we sit firmly in the camp that believes GEO requires distinct strategies—not because SEO is dead, but because AI models fundamentally work differently than search engines. Black Friday weekend demonstrated the trajectory: retailers saw nearly 8x more traffic from ChatGPT and LLMs compared to last year. As Evertune CEO Brian Stempeck noted in the article, when he asked University of Virginia students whether they use Google as their primary search platform, no hands went up.
The market is projected to grow from $81.4 billion to $171 billion by 2030, but confusion remains about the right approach. Some experts suggest simply creating more content—a strategy that risks repeating the "content farming" mistakes of early SEO. Others advocate for user-generated content and constant experimentation.
What's clear is that guesswork isn't a strategy. At Evertune, we prompt at scale to capture variations in prompt responses and deliver statistically significant insights across every major LLM—because AI search optimization requires understanding how models actually respond to real-world queries, not assumptions about what might work.
The billion-dollar question isn't whether AI search matters. It's whether your brand is approaching it with the right data.
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