Jasper Clow, Tangerine
The impact of AI on search and buying behaviours is causing sleepless nights for marketers in the built environment and beyond, and they’re not worrying for nothing. As AI-powered and agentic search becomes embedded into how decision-makers research suppliers, answers are increasingly delivered without clicking through to a website.
You need only look to recent evidence from DMG Media, the publisher of the Daily Mail and Metro, which reported an 89% fall in click-through rates thanks to AI overviews in search results. Buyers are comparing options, understanding risks and forming shortlists inside AI interfaces, not on brand-owned websites.
This means brands that don’t appear in AI search results are all but invisible to large proportions of buyers, so marketers are having to get to grips with Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) as a solution, and do it fast.
It’s no easy task – the industry is a long way from settling on a defined GEO best practice and the market is fraught with platforms trying to offer a solution. But marketers should be wary of the misconception that GEO is a new generation of SEO that can be covered off with a new keyword strategy.
The truth is that GEO requires brands to align all the signals they send across multiple channels to build a picture of Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust (EEAT) for AI models. The likelihood is that most construction brands will already be doing this to some extent, particularly in a market where the people already value experienced, authoritative, trustworthy experts. So no, demolishing your comms strategy and starting from scratch with AI as your sole audience isn’t effective GEO.
Instead, focus on optimisations that build trust through clarity, relevance and authority, not volume. Earned and owned media, when properly aligned, become the raw material that that AI systems draw on to generate answers, no matter where your audience is in the buying cycle or how far they’ve progressed down the funnel.
The brands that will win in this new environment are those that:
- Explain complex issues simply, clearly and consistently.
- Show real expertise through informed, timely commentary.
- Appear in credible, independent trade media and national media environments that AI systems already value.
- Maintain coherence between what they say, where they say it, and which spokesperson has their name on it.
Brands should start working to these principles now, because this is the silver lining to GEO: there is no cost barrier to improving where you stand with these models. Far from deepening worries about AI, the reality of good GEO should soothe them. Any work you do to increase how your brand is trusted by AI will build more trust with actual, real-life humans.
B2B and construction marketers are in a better position than most, because the EEAT model is already what good looks like in these industries. What’s changed is the carrot is bigger for those that get it right and the stick nastier for those that get it wrong.