The Agile Brand Guide®: Generative Engine Optimization: For Marketers | 2026 Edition

Your customers are asking AI what to buy, who to trust, and which brand to choose. Often they never visit your website at all.

When ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot answer those questions, the answer either describes your brand accurately or it doesn't. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the discipline of making sure it does.

Search has changed. AI systems now read, synthesize, and recommend on your behalf, and the brands that appear in those answers win attention the old SEO playbook can't reach on its own. GEO — sometimes called answer engine optimization, or AEO — builds on SEO rather than replacing it. And getting it wrong carries real cost: wrong pricing surfaced to a buyer, an outdated policy quoted as fact, or a competitor recommended in your place.

The Agile Brand Guide: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) gives marketing and CX leaders a practical, enterprise-ready field guide to generative visibility, moving from strategy through measurement to the operating model that keeps it running.

Inside, you'll learn how to:

• Define GEO and explain it to a skeptical executive in two sentences
• Build the business case for GEO and tie AI visibility to pipeline, retention, cost-to-serve, and brand-risk reduction
• Prepare your content and technical foundation so AI systems can read, trust, and cite you
• Structure product data for the rise of agentic commerce and AI shopping assistants
• Measure what matters with a three-tier KPI hierarchy that connects generative visibility to outcomes your CFO already tracks
• Put governance and guardrails in place so AI never states something false or non-compliant about your brand
• Operationalize an always-on GEO program with clear roles, workflows, and SLAs

Written for CMOs, heads of digital, content and SEO leaders, and CX executives at enterprise and mid-market companies who need to move fast without a year of trial and error.

Editor Greg Kihlström — best-selling author and MarTech strategist — brings together practitioners from Akeneo, Optimizely, Conductor, Incubeta, RDA Digital, and Scratch Marketing + Media, covering GEO from every angle: content strategy, product data, infrastructure, digital experience platforms, and enterprise operations.

Part of the international best-selling Agile Brand Guide® series, built to give busy leaders a clear, high-signal overview in about three hours. Finish it this week; start your GEO program on Monday.