From SEO to GEO: How 2025 changed search, and what 2026 will demand from brands

For years, the rules were clear. If you wanted to be found, you played the SEO game: keywords, rankings, backlinks, content volume. Do it well, and search engines rewarded you. Then 2025 happened. AI didn’t just tweak search. It broke its logic.

Search stopped being a gateway and started behaving like an advisor. Answers became more important than links. Recommendations more powerful than rankings. And for the first time, brands started to realize something uncomfortable: being visible to search engines is no longer the same as being visible to consumers.

This is where GeoMind enters the conversation. Not as a buzzword, but as a response to how discovery actually works today.

SEO isn’t disappearing. But it’s no longer enough.

Classic SEO still matters. Pages are still indexed. Queries are still typed. But increasingly, consumers don’t browse – they ask. And AI answers.

Google’s AI Overviews, conversational assistants, and LLM-based tools are collapsing discovery, evaluation and recommendation into a single interaction. The funnel is no longer a funnel. It’s a moment. And in that moment, visibility is no longer about where you rank. It’s about whether AI understands you, trusts you, and chooses to mention you. That’s a fundamentally different game.

2025 was the disruption year. 2026 will be the selection year.

2025 was the shockwave: sudden AI answers, zero-click journeys, brand messages bypassed by machine summaries.
2026 will be quieter, but more decisive. Because this is the year when AI systems will start consistently selecting some brands, and consistently ignoring others. Not because of budgets, but because of structure, credibility and meaning.

From GEO theory to GeoMind in practice

At its core, GEO – Generative Engine Optimization – is about optimizing not just what you say, but how AI understands and represents you. GeoMind is Publicis Groupe’s proprietary tool and translates the GEO principle into a practical framework. Instead of asking only where do we rank?, it asks:

• where does our category appear in AI-generated answers?
• in what decision moments are we present, and where are we missing?
• which competitors, platforms or retailers are shaping AI recommendations instead of us?

This is the shift from: “How do I get to page one?” to “How does AI understand our role in the category?” GeoMind is built to surface these cognitive gaps: the moments where consumers ask, AI answers, and brands are absent: because in AI-driven discovery, silence is the biggest risk.

What AI actually surfaces

Both academic research and applied tests point to the same pattern: AI prefers content that is clearly structured, authoritative, and contextually useful.

In category analyses, we consistently see brands performing well in headline queries – core products, flagship features, top-line descriptions – and disappearing in the moments that matter most: comparisons, usage scenarios, “which is better”, “what should I choose”. In other words, brands show up where they talk about themselves, and vanish where consumers are actually deciding.

That gap is not accidental. AI doesn’t reward brand-centric content. It rewards decision-centric content. And when brands don’t provide it, platforms, retailers, and review sites step in.

Why this matters now – and especially in Romania

Romanian consumers are fast adopters of AI-powered tools, but they remain pragmatic, price-aware and comparison-driven. As AI-assisted discovery grows, recommendation power concentrates quickly.
By 2026, we are moving into a world of:

• fewer traditional searches
• more AI-mediated journeys
• higher reliance on summaries and recommendations
• less patience for exploration

In this context, the risk for brands is no longer being outranked. It’s being filtered out. If AI doesn’t understand your category, your advantages and your use cases, the consumer never sees them.

From SEO strategy to AI strategy

GEO marks a reset – from chasing keywords and volume to building intent, authority, and content AI can truly understand. SEO isn’t dead, but it’s no longer the whole story.

2025 disrupted search; 2026 will decide who matters.
And GEO is where that decision takes shape – because in the age of AI, visibility is no longer about being loud, but about being understood.

Photos @Pexels