I started this newsletter mostly to force myself to keep up with all the new AI marketing news. Things are moving fast! I figured other people might want to learn about it too, so here we are. If there are topics or companies you’d like me to cover, please send them over. I’m a team of one person, so I’ll do what I can. If you want to connect, you can find me running the fractional CMO arm of Foxtown Marketing on most days.

Welcome to today's edition of AI Marketing Geek, your daily dose of the latest AI developments, tools, trends, and actionable insights shaping marketing in 2026. As AI shifts from experimental hype to pragmatic, ROI-driven reality, we're seeing agentic AI take center stage. Autonomous agents are handling media buying, personalization, and commerce, which is wild to watch.

The clearest sign that generative engine optimization has moved from conference buzzword to real budget line item is this: brands are not adding GEO money on top of SEO spend. They are carving it out of the same bucket.

As generative AI upends how people search and shop, marketers are funneling more dollars into the industry's latest buzzword: generative engine optimization. It is less about abandoning tried-and-true SEO strategies and more about navigating a new reality. LLM bot crawlers pull press releases, news articles, and social posts to generate responses. Brand visibility now means everything from structured website data to Reddit threads. Fifty-five percent of marketers surveyed say they have dollars designated for GEO within their marketing budgets, according to recent research from agency Scribewise.

The reallocation is happening at the individual brand level in very practical ways. Pet food brand Pawco increased its search budget 10% in Q1 of this year alone to test and learn LLM discovery optimization. "What we are seeing is a reallocation of SEO budget towards GEO or AI visibility," said one marketing leader. "If a brand was spending $10,000 a month on SEO, they would now expect at least half of that budget to also cover GEO."

The underlying reason for this shift is a change in how discovery actually works. Gartner predicted traditional search volume will drop 25% this year as users shift to AI-powered answer engines. Google's AI Overviews now reach more than 2 billion monthly users, ChatGPT serves 800 million users each week, and Perplexity processes hundreds of millions of queries every month. Getting found online is no longer just about ranking on page one. It is about being the source AI engines cite when they generate an answer.

What makes GEO structurally different from SEO is what drives the algorithm. Traditional SEO rewards backlinks, keyword density, and domain authority. GEO rewards something different. Traditional search shows you ten blue links. AI search compresses that entire journey into one synthesized answer. When someone searches for the best CRM for startups, an AI engine does not just list options. It evaluates them based on multiple sources, weights authority signals, considers context like budget and company size, and delivers a recommendation. Often with citations. About 65% of AI citation sources come from publishers, review sites, user-generated content, and community discussions. Authority comes from third-party validation, not your own marketing copy.

For B2B marketers in particular, this has direct implications for where content investment should go. Getting quoted in third-party publications, cited in industry roundups, and mentioned in authentic community discussions like LinkedIn and Reddit does more for AI visibility than optimizing your own website copy ever will.

The IAB NewFronts wrapped this week in New York, and the collective signal from four days of platform presentations was hard to miss: mobile is the infrastructure layer that holds the new advertising ecosystem together, and AI is what runs on top of it.

The 2026 NewFronts closed with a clear industry-wide shift: mobile is no longer just a channel but the infrastructure powering a new generation of advertising defined by artificial intelligence, creator ecosystems, and performance-driven video. Across four days of presentations, major platforms including Meta, Amazon, TikTok, and YouTube unveiled a wave of new ad formats and tools designed for mobile-first consumption and real-time engagement.

Meta came with a specific play. At NewFronts, Meta introduced Reels trending ads, a format that places brand messages directly alongside high-performing creator content, allowing advertisers to tap into momentum rather than static placements. The move is part of Meta's broader strategy to align ads more closely with cultural moments as they form, rather than simply targeting audiences.

Google used the NewFronts to demonstrate just how deeply Gemini now runs through its ad stack. At the 2026 NewFront, Google showed how Gemini is now embedded end-to-end through Display and Video 360, from curating media packages before campaigns go live to powering a new Ads Advisor that can translate an uploaded media plan into a full campaign setup with a single prompt. Advertisers who added just one more Google Marketing Platform product to their mix saw a 76% lift in return on ad spend.

Yahoo introduced something quieter but worth noting. A new feature called Planner scans Yahoo Mail for deadlines, appointments, and tasks, then auto-builds a calendar around them. Advertisers can embed themselves into that daily routine through Sponsored Events, so the ad becomes the useful thing instead of the interruption. Powering the whole operation is Yahoo Scout, an AI answer engine in beta that pulls intent signals as third-party cookies vanish.

The through-line from all four days: the era of buying an audience has given way to buying adjacency to intent. Every platform at NewFronts was selling some version of the same thing, reaching a person at the moment they are already in a relevant frame of mind, whether that is trending content, a product search, or a calendar appointment. The targeting happens automatically. What marketers bring to the table is the creative judgment to make that adjacency feel right rather than intrusive.

GEO does not require a new tool stack to get started. Here is a practical audit you can run right now to understand where you stand.

Step one: query yourself. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, and search for the problems your service solves rather than your company name. If you are a law firm, search "how to choose a personal injury attorney." If you are an agency, search "how do I evaluate a marketing agency." Note which brands appear in the answers, which sources get cited, and whether you appear at all. This tells you your current share of model for the queries that matter most to new clients.

Step two: audit your citation sources. Research from Princeton found that the top optimization methods, including citing sources, adding statistics, and including expert quotations, can improve AI visibility by 30 to 40% compared to unoptimized content. Look at what content about your brand exists on third-party sites. Are you appearing in listicles, comparison articles, and industry roundups? Are journalists and industry publications quoting your team as experts? AI systems weight third-party mentions over your own website copy, so the question is really whether the internet is talking about you in the right context.

Step three: identify your fastest GEO win. For most businesses, it is structured FAQ content on their website that directly answers the questions their customers are asking AI tools. Write clear, authoritative answers to the five most common questions in your category. Keep them factual, specific, and free of promotional language. AI systems cite content that sounds like an answer, not content that sounds like an ad.

2026 is the year AI moves from "cool demos" to real and measurable business use cases. Expect more agentic tools, voice-powered targeting, and a focus on privacy-first data.

Stay ahead of the game by treating your AI reputation like your website. It would behoove you to make your brand easy for agents to understand and cite.

What AI experiment are you running this week? Reply and let me know. I'll feature top stories in future editions! (Everybody loves a good story)

Stay sharp,
Jon
@mistersterling
Chief AI Marketing Geek