(Yicai) July 25 — Since Chinese artificial intelligence chatbot DeepSeek went viral, many brands have started to notice huge online traffic through their AI chat platforms, Yicai learned from industry insiders. As a result, many companies are adjusting their marketing strategies away from traditional search engine optimization to generative engine optimization, which focuses on crafting content designed to appear in AI-generated responses.
GEO is a new marketing service where ad agencies help companies create content that is more likely to be picked up by AI chatbots and included in their answers to users’ questions.
Users might not be aware that AI recommendations are based on marketing content, unless they click on the webpages that are quoted in the answers. But once AI starts recommending a brand, this becomes a form of endorsement when users share its responses on social media.
For example, when a Yicai reporter asked DeepSeek for restaurant recommendations in Shenzhen’s Nanshan district, the chatbot suggested a cattle hoof restaurant, a noodle joint, a Cantonese-style barbecue restaurant and seven other eateries. DeepSeek said the info came from blogs, Baidu Baike, the Chinese equivalent of Wikipedia, as well as the mapping service of online security giant 360 Security Technology.
The reporter also typed in ‘DeepSeek recommendations’ on social commerce platform Xiaohongshu and various posts popped up saying how great certain brands recommended by DeekSeek were.
Getting Noticed
Market insiders already know what sort of content is more likely to be captured by AI.
AI tends to favor content that is backed by data, real-world examples as well as that which gives details about the market segment that the firm is in, said Chen Jingjing, general manager of the light consulting business division at marketing solutions firm Yu An Yin Lan. This type of content has a better chance of getting noticed by AI.
AI chatbots tend to ignore official brand content and instead draw information from third-party platforms, even though these sites are not always neutral, said Luo Xiaojun, general manager of Shenzhen-based tech firm Mmimc.
Before, content was written for people, but nowadays it is first shown to the AI assistant, said a person called Frank, who is chief strategy officer of marketing firm iPlus.
“Our clients that use GEO include robotics firms, smart manufacturing companies, software developers as well as well-known consumer brands,” Chen said.
Luo secured his very first GEO order in April and ever since he added GEO services to his company website, he has been getting almost daily inquiries.
Some firms are jumping on the bandwagon in order to keep up with their rivals. One of Frank’s customers, which is a leading durable consumer goods maker, was caught off guard during the Spring Festival earlier this year when its sales team found that a competitor was using screenshots of an AI chatbot’s answers that named it as the best in the industry in its marketing materials, Frank said. The client is now rethinking its marketing strategy.
Behavior Changes
GEO is an evolution of the marketing model SEO, where marketing firms tweak website content to boost visibility on search engines. This is a result of web traffic that supports search engines’ ads business shifting elsewhere.
The use of search engines has slowed down in the last few years and users are turning to platforms like Douyin, Xiaohongshu as well as WeChat’s Channels instead, Luo said. Since 2020, SEO has dropped around 70 percent. User behavior has changed with the emergence of AI. His company is now receiving five-times more requests for GEO services than for SEO services.
Advertisements still remain an important source of income for search engines, though. In the first quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, Google’s parent company Alphabet raked in USD66.9 billion from ads, accounting for more than 70 percent of its total revenue. Chinese search engine giant Baidu earned CNY32.5 billion (USD4.5 billion) in revenue in the three months ended March 31, half of which was from online marketing.
Editor: Kim Taylor