From SEO to GEO and AIO, call 2025 the year of the three-letter acronym. Large language models, such as ChatGPT and Claude, have ushered in a new era of marketing that has startups pivoting from their traditional search engine optimization methods to emerging strategies of generative engine optimization or as some others call it, artificial engine optimization.
As Andy Crestodina, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Orbit Media Studios, a Chicago-based digital agency that focuses on web development and website optimization and three-time Inc. 5000 honoree, told Inc. recently, “Marketers are losing their minds, because organic traffic from search is down.” That has prompted a massive realignment. Now, more than three-quarters of e-commerce companies to focus on a new goal: making sure their brand name surfaces in AI-generated search results.
A new survey commissioned by Mercury, a San Francisco-based financial technology company that provides banking services to more than 200,000 startups, found that 77 percent of e-commerce companies are rethinking their marketing strategy to account for AI search. In that effort, businesses have been investing in different forms of editorial content for LLMs to crawl and cite in their answers. The report, which polled 750 leaders from e-commerce businesses in the U.S. during October and November, found that 74 percent of companies are doing more content marketing and 68 percent have purchased tools to help. Another third have hired external agencies.
This shift AI search was even more pronounced for larger companies, 51 percent of which said they are investing significantly, compared to just 19 percent of companies with 10 or fewer employees.
Even though GEO and AIO are relatively nascent terms, businesses still have thoughts on where the future of discovery is headed. Three-quarters of e-commerce companies said AI-generated search would lower marketing costs by making customer acquisition more efficient. An even larger share, 86 percent, predicted that AI search would help them reach new customers. Nine out of 10 said that AI search would boost sales this holiday season.
Though not every finding was as rosy. The report, which was released on Thursday, also found that 43 percent of e-commerce companies worried AI search could make it harder for new customers to find their products. Two-thirds of respondents were concerned that AI search would increase their customer acquisition costs, even if overall marketing costs went down.
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