Speaker 1 (00:00):
Most people running businesses right now are drowning in noise. Every week there is a new AI tool, a new platform update, a new thing that you are supposed to be doing, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, the actual job of growing your brand, acquiring customers, and building something that lasts, it's getting harder to focus on. That's why I built this podcast, the Unlock. I'm Oliver Bruce. I'm the founder and CEO of Pinpoint Media, a performance marketing and paid media agency based in the uk. We run campaigns for some of the most ambitious brands in the world. We live in the data, we test the creative, and we operate at the intersection of where creativity meets performance. And over the last few years, I've watched AI and automation completely reshape what's possible for marketeers and business owners. Not in theory, but in practise, in the ad account, in the creative studio, in the way brands acquire and retain customers at scale.

(00:53):
This is for anyone essentially running a business or a brand who knows things are changing fast and wants a way to stay ahead. Whether you're scaling a startup, leading a marketing team, or just trying to figure out what AI and automation actually means for your bottom line, the unlock is built for you. No hype, no theory, just what's working, what's changing, and what you should be doing about that. Now let's get into the episode. Most marketers are doing SEO in a world that has moved on and the gap between what they think they're doing and what actually drives visibility in 2026 is getting wiser every single month. Right now, if you spent any time on LinkedIn or reading industry content, you're seeing three acronyms thrown around S-E-O-A-E-O and GEO, that search engine optimization, answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization. Now, a lot of marketers, and to be fair, a lot of agencies are treating these as if they're the same thing with different names.

(01:51):
They're taking their old SEO playbooks from 2022, slapping an AI label on the cover and selling it as GEO. Now, to be fair, that is a dangerous mistake. These three disciplines are fundamentally different. They operate on different surfaces, they require different strategies, and they're measured in entirely different ways with totally different KPIs. Now, if you don't understand the difference, your brand essentially will become invisible over the next 12 months or so. It won't happen gradually. It'll happen very quickly. Now, here's the data that puts that into context. In the first four months of 2026, spark Toro reported that 68% of Google searches ended without a single click. More than two thirds of the time, the consumer asks a question online, they get the answer directly on the results page and never visit the website. Google's AI overviews chat, GPT perplexity, they fundamentally changed how information is retrieved and consumed.

(02:52):
On top of that, a 2026 analysis of 680 million citations across the major AI platforms such as Chat, bt, et cetera, found that 15 domains captured 68% of all the citation shares. This is a winner takes all environment. If you're not in the top tier of sighted sources for your category, you're essentially invisible to ai. So let me break down what each of these three disciplines actually is, what it requires, and then critically, I'm going to walk you through a step-by-step action plan for each one. So you hopefully leave this episode with a concrete playbook that you can start executing this week. So if we were to start with SEO, you know what that is? It's about ranking. It's about traffic acquisition. You find a keyword with search volume. You create content targeting that keyword, build back links to a single authority, and you get that blue link, right?

(03:50):
So you're at the top of the page on Google. The goal is to get the user to leave Google and come to visit your website. Now, SEO is not dead. It's still the foundation. AI engines still need to crawl the web to find information, which means technical SEO site speed. Crawlability clean indexing is actually more critical than ever. If Google's bots cannot read your site, then basically Google's AI cannot cite your site. But SEO alone is no longer enough because of that 68% click figure. Getting to page one does not necessarily guarantee traffic anymore. You can rank number one and still get nothing. It's mental. This is where a o comes in, answer engine optimization. Now, if SEO is about the user clicking a link, a EO is about being the answer they read without clicking. A EO is how you optimise your content to be pulled directly into Google's featured snippets, local pacs and AI generated summaries.

(04:51):
It's about providing the exact concise answer to a specific query in a format that an algorithm can easily extract and surface essentially. Hey guys, it's only me. I thought this might be really useful for you. If, like me, you found that one of the biggest headaches when running a business is actually managing money across different tools, different currencies expenses, then I think I found the solution for you. Incar is built to essentially fix this. Now, incar is a new financial platform designed specifically for high growth, modern businesses that gives you multicurrency accounts, connective banking and smart spend management all in one place. Now, the really cool part is that with rewards, you get up to 2% cash back on things that you probably are already spending money on, like advertising, maybe SaaS tools, travel. Every time that you guys are spending, you generate points and you can redeem them instantly for cash directly in the card platform.

(05:48):
If you're building or scaling an online business and you want a smarter way to manage your finances, then check out in card using the link in this description. Thanks for taking the time to listen to this. Now let's get back to the episode now. Then there's geo EO. So generative engine optimization, which is fundamentally different to both SEO and a EO Geo is about optimising for AI models that can synthesise original responses. So chat, GPT, perplexity, Claude, Google's Gemini in AI mode. Essentially, when a user asks chat, GPTA complex question chat, GPT does not retrieve a snippet from a website. It reads multiple sources, synthesises the information and generates a completely new conversational answer. Geo is the science of ensuring your brand is the source that these AI models trust. They cite it, they recommend it, and then they give those answers to the user.

(06:44):
You need all three really to be able to truly optimise, but you cannot use the tactics of one to achieve the goals of another. So let me give you a step-by-step action plan for each. So here's the SEO action plan, right for 2026. So step one, run a full technical SEO audit. Use tools like Screaming Frog or SEMrush to crawl your entire site. What you're looking for are four things. Pages that cannot be indexed or crawled. Slow page load times. Anything over three seconds on a mobile is a problem. Broken internal links and duplicate content fix these issues first because they're the foundation. Everything else sits on. If the AI can't crawl your site cleanly, then basically nothing else will matter. Step two is build topical authority, not just keyword rankings. The old model of targeting individual keywords is being replaced by the concept of topical authority.

(07:37):
Google's AI system now evaluates whether your site comprehensively covers a topic, not just whether it ranks for a specific phrase. This means you need to build content clusters. So a pillar page that covers a broad topic in depth, supported by a series of detailed articles covering every related subtopic. If you're a B2B software company, your pillar page might be CRM strategy supported by articles on CRM implementation, CRM for small businesses, CRM, integration with marketing automation and so on. The goal is to become the most comprehensive authoritative resource on your topic on the internet. Step three is to prioritise the eat signals, EEAT, Google's quality guidelines. Now heavily weight experience, expertise, authorit and trustworthiness. So this means every piece of content on your site should have a clear identified human author with a bio and credentials. It means citing your sources becomes easier. It means having a clear about page that stabilises your company's experience, establishing your voice in the market, and it means that authors mentioned and linked to from your site have an element of authority.

(08:46):
These signals tell Google that your content is produced by real experts not generated at scale. Now, here's your a EO action plan. Step one is to map the question landscape. So go to your Google search console and identify every query your site currently appears for. That is phrased kind of as a question. Then use tools like also asked or answer the public to find every related question in your category that you are currently not actually answering. Build a complete map of the questions your target audience are asking. These are your a EO targets. We then move into step two. So create direct answer content for each question on your map. Create a piece of content that answers it directly and concisely in the first paragraph. That's really important. The structure is simple. State the answer in one of the three sentences at the top of the page, then expand in the body of the article.

(09:42):
Google's featured snippet algorithm is essentially looking for the clearest, most direct answer to a specific question. If your page buries the answer in paragraph seven, you'll not get the snippet. Put it right at the top. It's the first thing you need to serve. Step three is implement structured data and markups essentially. So what does that mean? This is a technical layer that tells search engines exactly what type of content is on your page. So use FAQ schemas for question and answer content. Use how to schemas for step-by-step guides. For instance, use article schemas for editorial content, product schemas for product pages, et cetera, et cetera. These markups essentially give Google a significantly easier way of using AI to search your website, right? The systems extract, they surface the content featured and they position you at the top. If you're not using structured data, you're essentially leaving visibility on the table.

(10:39):
It's kind of as easy as that. Guys, I think you might find this useful. Something that we've started to use in my businesses is in card. It's a new financial platform designed specifically for high growth modern businesses. Now, if you are running a business, you've probably found that one of the biggest headaches is managing money across different tools, currencies, and expenses, right? So in Card essentially gives you multicurrency, accounts, connected banking and smart spend management all in one place. The best part, however, is that you can earn up to 2% cash back on everyday spend, such as ads, SaaS, and travel, earning you points every time you spend, and you can redeem them instantly for real cash in the platform. Check out in Incar using the link E in the description. If you are building or scaling an online business and you want a smarter way to manage your finances, check out incar.

(11:33):
Let's get back to the episode. Step four, however, is optimised for voice and conversational queries. That's really key. As AI assistance become more and more prevalent, more searches are being conducted in natural conversational language rather than keyword fragments. So your content needs to match this. So write it in a natural conversational tone using complete sentences, answer the question the way that you would answer a human, for instance, not in the way that you would necessarily answer keyword optimization in an article. So that's really key. Now, this is a GEO action plan. We've done a EO, we've done SEO. This is GEO. So step one is to audit your current AI visibility. Before you can improve your GEO, you need to know where you stand. Open AI chat, BGPT, perplexity and Google's Gemini. Ask them questions about your specific category. Ask 'em to recommend solutions to the problems that your product or service solves.

(12:28):
Ask 'em to direct, directly respond to your brand. Document every response. Is your brand even mentioned? Is it cited as a source? Is it even recommended, or is it completely absent from the conversation? Because that's a bit of an issue. If it is right, the audit will give you a baseline and it will essentially immediately show you the gap between where you currently are and where you need to be. More often than not, so many brands actually don't appear here. Step two is to create citation worthy content. AI models, site sources that contain unique, verifiable information they cannot find elsewhere. This means you need to invest in original research commissioner survey and analyse your own customer data and publish findings, run an experiment and document the results. Produce a definitive guide that synthesises information from multiple sources in a way that has never been done before.

(13:21):
Playbooks, for instance, are a really good way of doing this. Every time you publish genuinely original data, you give AI models a reason to cite you. Every time you publish generic content that resonates what everybody else is saying, you give them a reason not to mention you at all. So be authentic and be real to use a buzz phrase. Step three is build your one-off site brand presence systematically. AI models do not just read your website, they read the entire internet. They're looking for consensus, multiple independent sources confirming that. The same claims about your brand of right. This means you need to be deliberate with your strategy for building your brand presence off your own site. So you need to have backlinks. You need to have authentic, authoritative articles, for instance. So get your brand mentioned essentially in high authority industry publications, contribute to guest articles to respected trade media.

(14:14):
Build a presence on platforms where your audience has conversations like Reddit or LinkedIn, and industry forums like Slack communities is really important. Respond to journalist queries on platforms like quotas or connectively to get quoted in press coverage. Every mention of your brand in a credible independent source is a signal that tells the AI your brand is trustworthy and actually worth citing. So step four is optimise for entity association. So AI models understand the world through entities and the relationships between them essentially. So you need to explicitly and consistently associate your brand with the specific topics, problems, or outcomes that you want to be known for. This means using consistent language across all of your content and all of your site mentions if you want to be cited for an authority on performance marketing. For instance, every piece of content that you produce, every article that mentions you, every forum post that you contribute to should use the specific language.

(15:18):
You need to essentially train the model to draw a direct line between your brand and your category using the same language throughout you schema markup to define your brand as an organisation, to list your products, to list your services, and to establish that relationship between your brand and the topics that you're actually covering. This structured data is essentially a direct instruction to the AI about how you categorise or how they should categorise, I should say that your brand. So how the AI should understand fundamentally your brand. Now, step five is to monitor and iterate, right? So geo is not a one-time project. The AI models are being updated consistently, and the citation landscape is shifting almost daily, right? So you need to monitor your AI share of voice on a regular basis. So at least monthly use tools like Brandwatch mention or dedicated geo monitoring platforms to track how often your brand is cited in AI generated responses.

(16:18):
When you see a competitor being cited more frequently than you for a topic that you should own, investigate why that is. What content do they have that you essentially don't? What offsite mentions are they getting that you are lacking? Use that intelligence to close that gap, right? So here's a summary of the entire framework that hopefully after this episode, you can take away and you can implement into your business. So SEO is your foundation. Fix your technical issues, build topical authority and establish that EAT framework that ensures that your brand can be called and understood. A EI, sorry, a EO even is your zero click strategy. Map your question landscape, create direct answer content, implement structured data, and optimise for conversational queries. That's really important. This gets your visibility in a featured position even when users don't actually click on it. And then geo is your AI citation strategy.

(17:14):
So audit your current AI visibility, create original citation worthy content, build your offsite brand presence, optimise for entity association, and monitor your AI share of voice consistently. This gets your brand recommended by the AI agents that are now basically influencing millions of buying decisions every single day. So the brands essentially the execute. All three of these in parallel will, and I promise you, dominate the next decade of digital visibility. Now, the ones that don't and the ones that keep rolling out the 2022 SEO playbook will simply disappear from the conversation. Now, this isn't a prediction. This is already happening. We see it daily in what we're doing. The question is, which side of that divide do you guys actually want to be on? So simply put, start with the audit this week after this episode, open up chat GT and ask it about your category.

(18:06):
See if your brand even comes up. If it doesn't, you now have, or you now know exactly what you need to do to fix it, and you now have the playbook in which you can implement. So go and do that. Hopefully you guys can optimise rank and continue to grow. Thanks so much for listening or watching. If you're on YouTube, the latest episode of the Unlock, remember to hit that follow. Hit that subscribe button. Please share it with your friends, families, colleagues, and loved ones. This podcast doesn't grow without you. Honestly, it is really appreciated. I mentioned it earlier, but something that you may find super useful if you are a business managing multiple transactions across multiple platforms is in card. It's a new financial platform for modern online businesses giving you multicurrency, accounts connected banking, and smart spend management all in one place. Open a Euro GBP or USD account in minutes. Attach cards for expenses and earn up to 2% cash back on everyday spend like ads, SaaS, and travel. Check out in card using the link in the description.