Modern Retail+ Research: Marketers optimize GEO strategies amid the effects of zero-click search

The number of AI-powered search applications is growing. Google introduced its AI Overviews search function in 2024, followed by AI Mode in 2025, while OpenAI rolled out its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, later integrating a conversational search feature. Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude and “answer engine” Perplexity also feature conversational search results.

While AI-generated search results are still relatively new in comparison to traditional search results, marketers are deeply feeling the effects. As consumers benefit from increasingly detailed search results driven by AI, brands are seeing significant decreases in site referral traffic.

Digiday’s survey found that more than one-third of brand and agency pros (37%) said their companies have seen decreases in upper-funnel search traffic as a result of AI, and 21% said their companies have seen decreases in lower-funnel search traffic as a result of AI.

This phenomenon has come to be known among marketers as zero-click search — consumers find answers to their search queries directly on the results page and don’t have to click through to additional websites for more information. Zero-click search is more common in AI-generated search results that typically provide information in conversational summaries, like Google’s AI Overview.

In a December 2024 survey of 1,100 consumers conducted by Bain and Dynata, 80% of users said they relied on AI summaries at least 40% of the time, leading to an estimated organic traffic decrease between 15% and 25%. And a 2025 eMarketer report estimated that AI search agents could cause a 38% drop in ad exposure during discovery, 47% during consideration and 30% at conversion.

Knowing how and when a brand appears in AI-generated search results is also an obstacle for marketers, according to Jen Cornwell, senior director of AI, SEO and innovation at performance marketing agency Tinuiti.

“Because we don’t get data outputs from the [AI search] platforms themselves, it’s been really difficult,” Cornwell said. “We’ve moved into zero-click, where there is minimal attribution for visibility inside of one of the AI search platforms. Yes, you can get a citation. You could get a link and look at your referral traffic, but that is what we’re assuming. It is a fraction of the visibility that some of these brands are getting.”

Some third-party companies are looking to help marketers combat this with tools that monitor and boost search performance, according to Adam Simon, former managing director at IPG Media Lab.

“We’ve seen a slew of new companies like Profound, Evertune and Bluefish that are great at being AI brand monitoring firms. Startups like Scrunch that help navigate the space and optimize existing content for AI-powered search and eventually for agentic commerce,” Simon said. “If you have the budget and the resources to work with a company like Scrunch, it can be helpful. Long term, we are going to see better tools and communication from the platforms, like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, about how to engage with them.”

It’s worth noting that Modern Retail’s survey also found that nearly one-third of respondents (32%) said their company’s upper-funnel search traffic has remained unchanged as a result of AI, and 36% said their company’s lower-funnel search traffic has remained unchanged.

AI-generated search is still a nascent technology, but growing consumer use means that brands will likely be adjusting their business practices around it for the foreseeable future, according to Left Field Labs’ Lee.

“Shopper behaviors are changing,” Lee said. “When you talk to AI about getting a recommendation, it feels more trusted than the ads at the top of a Google search. So the nuance of how brands talk about their product, and how AI then talks about their product, is really interesting to look at. That journey for marketers is incredibly insightful.”

It’s also important to note that traditional search has not entirely fallen by the wayside. Tinuiti’s Cornwell said shoppers regularly return to standard search tools. “Consumers are still going back into a traditional search engine at some point in their search journey, maybe to extend the research that they did inside of a ChatGPT,” Cornwell said. “AI search is actually a smaller part of what brands need to worry about. Brands need to focus on the fundamentals. How can we add value? Because there is still value in organic search. It is losing value over time, and we do need to plan for zero-click. But how do we make sure that we build toward both?”

As AI-driven search evolves, GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization) are acronyms being used interchangeably to describe how publishers, marketers, and e-commerce sites ensure that AI crawlers can easily understand enough information about a brand so it surfaces in AI-powered answer engines. Essentially, GEO and AEO are to AI-generated search what SEO is to traditional search.

Marketers work to optimize GEO and AEO strategies

When Modern Retail asked marketers about how their company is optimizing GEO or AEO strategies, no dominant strategy emerged from the survey results. The greatest percentage of survey respondents (34%) said their company’s GEO or AEO strategy involves highlighting more content featuring answers to potential consumer questions.

But Modern Retail’s survey also found that just over one-quarter of respondents (27%) said their companies have not changed strategies. Meanwhile, 16% said they’re not familiar with GEO or AEO.

“AI platforms act almost as a pseudo sales person,” Tinuiti’s Cornwell said. “Because ultimately the goal is to get the AI agent to recommend your brand. In order to do that, you need to appease the agents.”

With the rise of AI-generated search, some traditional search platforms are incorporating AI shopping applications for customers. For example, in November, Google introduced tools in Google Search and its Gemini app aimed at making browsing, comparing and buying products more natural for shoppers. The biggest update was to Google Search’s AI Mode, which lets people describe what they are looking for in everyday language instead of using keywords.

This focus on colloquial language is a common strategy among brands as they rethink their search strategies based on how they show up in AI-generated results. Another strategy for brands has been prioritizing content like blogs and landing pages that use more conversational language.

“There’s a lot of talk about AI search, and not enough talk about this shift to conversational search,” Cornwell said. “Regardless of platform, people are already doing that inside of traditional search. … A lot of best practices right now are things that SEO was doing 10-15 years ago. Really basic, like an FAQ, a bullet list or an HTML table. Those are formats that all of the LLMs like to see.“

Personal care brand Suave has tailored its own strategy as the industry shifts to focus on GEO and AEO. It started updating its website in September to optimize for GEO. “We’re in the middle of revamping our entire website and web presence for Suave,” said Rafael Lopes, Suave’s vp of innovation and brand equity. “We are [using] agentic AI, when it comes to SEO and copywriting, to make sure that everything we have related to product benefits and ingredient lists and how we talk about our products is AI-friendly.”

Similarly, big-box retailer Target has prioritized five key aspects with its AI search strategy: price, product, promotions, availability and policies. According to Ranjeet Bhosale, vp of digital product management at Target, the retailer’s website is updated to make this data “machine readable” and ready for AI engines to pull from — whether internally (through Target’s agents) or externally.

Marc Maleh, global CTO at design and technology agency, said many of the marketers he talks with don’t have a plan to optimize their GEO and AEO strategies. “A lot of them ask, ‘Are people actually doing this?’” Maleh said. “We talk to them about the numbers around Google search — down or plateauing — and the explosion of people using Gemini, ChatGPT to get search results, and whether their content is ready for it.”

Maleh said brands shouldn’t think of optimizing for GEO and AEO as starting from scratch, but rather enhancing their existing content and search strategy to include GEO and AEO. “A lot of brands don’t understand that there are similarities, but you have to put the content structures in place to have it crawlable,” Maleh said. “Start with the simplest tools, like media intelligence, to do the heavy lifting.”

“It’s really about leveraging existing content to start, as opposed to thinking that you need new content to appear in these places,” Maleh added.

Several of the industry executives Modern Retail spoke with for this report also mentioned that brands should adapt their earned media and organic social media strategies for AI-generated search. “All of the LLMs eat this diet of earned media and I predict a larger investment in earned media,” Tinuiti’s Cornwell said. “In 2026, I think we’ll see a larger influence in LLMs from organic social.”

Matt Maher, founder of independent research and development firm M7 Innovations, specifically pointed to social news aggregation and discussion platform Reddit as the perfect mix of search and social opportunity. “Reddit is a platform that has a mature ad ecosystem and it has 22 billion human-created posts that are used as authority in these large language models,” Maher said. “Posts that are six-,12- or 18-months-old still get sourced first within AI search engines and Reddit continues to be No. 1, if not in the top three, of the sources cited in large language search.”

“That’s why Reddit is so powerful,” he added. “I can take my ad spend on Reddit and build authority with large language models, and that is the alchemy that brands want.”

The way former IPG Media Lab’s Simon sees it, there is still room for growth when it comes to agentic AI. “The LLMs don’t need to be better, but the agentic capabilities need to be better. Their hooks into other platforms and systems need to be better to enable them to carry out tasks in a more useful way,” Simon said. “We will see development on that front over the next year or so, but we have another two or three years worth of development on the product side, before the features, integration and distribution catches up with the capabilities.”