For most of our work, westOeast has been a fairly ordinary cross-border B2B marketing agency — demand generation, PR, social, the occasional KOL program. A couple of years ago we started noticing something on client research calls: buyers showed up already informed by an answer from ChatGPT or Perplexity, not a Google search. So we did what any marketing team does when a channel shifts. We started paying attention to it.
The simplest way we describe the new piece of work internally: generative engine optimization is the part of marketing that decides whether an AI answer engine mentions you when a buyer asks it for a recommendation. It sits alongside everything else we do, not above it.
What surprised us early on is how little of it lives on a client's own website. We're used to optimizing pages. But the engines seemed far more interested in what other credible places said about a brand than in what the brand said about itself. That reframed the work: less "publish more on your blog," more "make sure the brand is described consistently everywhere, and present where these engines actually read."
We got plenty wrong. We assumed a strong site equals strong AI visibility — it doesn't. We assumed it was a one-time fix — the answers move week to week, so it's maintenance, like any other channel. And we assumed it was a technical job for engineers; in practice it's mostly a positioning and content job, which is squarely a marketing problem.
None of this replaced the rest of our work. PR still earns the third-party mentions these engines trust. Social and community still create the signals. GEO just gave us a clearer way to measure whether all of it is landing in the place buyers increasingly start: the answer.
About westOeast
westOeast is a B Corp certified, cross-border B2B marketing agency. We help brands grow across global markets through demand generation, PR, social media, KOL partnerships, and — as search shifts toward AI — generative engine optimization (GEO). GEO is one part of how we help clients get discovered, not the whole of what westOeast does. More on how we think about AI visibility: https://www.westoeast.com/en/services/geo/
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