The way in which customers search for information is undergoing its biggest transformation in over 25 years. In the past, organisations have focused on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), ensuring their websites ranked highly on Google in the hope that customers would click through to learn more. That approach has served businesses well, but customer behaviour is changing rapidly.
There are foundational shifts happening across digital search that have massive implications for how brand and organisational discoverability is changing. Welcome to ‘The GEO Revolution’.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the optimisation of online content to appear on the AI-driven search engines which are used millions of times each day, think platforms such as Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini and Co-Pilot. The goal of GEO is to be favourably mentioned, cited and recommended within the single, summarised responses on these platforms, which are being drawn from thousands of sources.
The main difference is that GEO provides one comprehensive answer, pulling various sources together, removing the need for users to click through to a secondary website. As AI search becomes more deeply ingrained in all of our daily lives, the race to understand and influence GEO becomes increasingly critical. Rather than presenting pages of search results, these platforms provide a single, summarised answer, drawing information from thousands of online sources. For customers, this is faster, simpler and more convenient. For organisations, it fundamentally changes how they are discovered.
The significance of this evolution became even more transparent in June 2026, with Google announcing their AI Overviews would become the default search experience for their users. This marked their biggest change to their search offering in over 25 years. One marketing leader and former CMO summed this up when speaking to The New York Times recently, describing it as a “tectonic shift…the way discoverability is changing is like an earthquake nobody expected.”
From an Irish context, AI adoption is well underway with increasing both in our daily usage but also in the ways marketers are starting to embrace and invest in AI implementation. The recent Coimisiún na Meán 2026 Digital News Report highlighted that AI chatbots are emerging as a news source for Irish users, used by 7% overall and 14% of 18-24 year-olds. The same report showed that younger Irish adults (18–24) are far more engaged with AI than older cohorts. While 35% of 18–24-year-olds report using AI often or daily, this drops to just 4% among those aged 45–54.
As AI becomes a natural part of everyday decision-making, organisations need to ask an important question: When a customer asks AI about our sector, our services or the problems we solve, does it recommend us?
At a recent New Media Playbook event in Dublin, it was revealed that 80% of marketers feel pressure to adopt AI, while just 6% say they have successfully made it work within their organisations. Research cited during the session also suggests that one-third of organisations have yet to see measurable returns from their AI investments.
Rather than viewing AI simply as another technology project, organisations should think about it as a new audience with their own way of consuming information. AI platforms favour content that is accurate, credible, clearly structured and consistently reinforced across multiple trusted sources. But while marketers scramble to find the best practice for their specific organisations, the clearest and most effective approach is to simply just start thinking about AI as a completely separate audience, one that might even require existing content to be adapted to be more easily read by AI machines.
At Drury, we are already helping clients with identifying how to make their information easier for AI to read, focusing on the type of owned authority that they can create through their own websites and content channels. The core communications tenets of accuracy, consistency and simplicity are even more relevant here, but AI visibility isn’t going to just be a quick win. GEO is not just about chasing another digital trend; it’s a long-term strategy over the next 18-24 months which will take your organisation from citation to category leadership where AI models will suggest you first every single time.
To learn more about Drury's range of communications services, feel free to contact Dylan Newe via LinkedIn or dylan.newe@drury.ie
