For years, marketers have been conditioned to think of visibility as something you pay for — through ads, sponsored posts, and performance campaigns. But 2025 is proving to be the year that flips the script. Generative-Engine Optimization (GEO) — the art and science of making your brand discoverable through AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) — is quietly outperforming traditional paid campaigns on both conversion and ROI.
According to Campaign Asia’s September interview with Neil Patel, GEO is now rivalling — and in some cases beating — SEO, SEM, and even email for revenue contribution. HubSpot, for example, reports that 13% of its new sales now originate from AI tools, while Southeast-Asian brands are already seeing similar trajectories as generative-search adoption accelerates.
From Clicks to Citations: The New ROI Equation
Paid campaigns buy attention. GEO earns authority.
The old funnel relied on impressions and click-throughs. But when AI models act as decision intermediaries — summarizing, recommending, and citing — visibility shifts from who pays more to who contributes credible, structured, and consistent content.
That’s why brands winning in GEO all share the same operational DNA:
- Refreshing, frequently updated content that LLMs recognize as active and trustworthy.
- Structured data and FAQ schemas that let AI engines interpret intent precisely.
- Omnichannel presence across YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, and community forums — where models pull relational context to validate expertise.
The playbook is no longer “buy more ads.” It’s “be more indexable by intelligence.”
Case Study 1: HubSpot — Turning Knowledge into Revenue
When HubSpot noticed traffic from AI answers surging early in 2024, the company re-architected its content library. They implemented FAQ-driven structures, layered schema markup into 30,000+ pages, and refreshed blog posts with conversational intros and generative snippets.
Within six months:
- Mentions from ChatGPT and Perplexity increased 3×.
- Lead conversions via AI citations surpassed email nurtures.
- Marketing ROI improved by an estimated 27% versus paid search.
The insight? GEO doesn’t just replace paid — it compounds the lifetime value of every asset you’ve ever published.
Case Study 2: Sribu (Indonesia) — Winning Organic Trust at Scale
In Indonesia’s crowded creative-service market, Sribu.com adopted GEO principles during its 2024 growth push. By re-optimizing freelancer success stories and knowledge articles for generative platforms, Sribu shifted from campaign-led to conversation-led discovery.
- Structured “How It Works” and “Pricing” FAQs boosted citations across AI aggregators.
- Community-driven videos and user testimonials amplified E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust).
- These efforts helped power 67% year-on-year growth — largely organic, with no proportional increase in ad spend.
For a marketplace of 50,000+ SMEs and 1.6 million freelancers, this validated GEO as not just a traffic channel but a reputation engine.
Case Study 3: Local Southeast-Asian Challenger — From Paid Fatigue to GEO Momentum
A mid-tier e-commerce brand in Thailand (name withheld) experienced ad fatigue after CPMs doubled in 2024. Shifting to GEO, the team focused on creating explainers, video FAQs, and Reddit-style troubleshooting threadsaround their core category.
- Monthly ad budget cut by 40%.
- Discovery via ChatGPT and TikTok summaries grew 5×.
- Overall sales up 32%, with GEO leads converting 1.8× higher than paid.
The moral? You don’t need bigger spend — you need smarter visibility pathways.
Building Your Own GEO System
You don’t “hack” GEO. You engineer it — one system at a time.
Building visibility in the generative era isn’t about chasing algorithms — it’s about engineering discoverability through structured, self-reinforcing systems.
Here’s what that system looks like in practice:
1️⃣ Entity & Schema Start by defining your brand as a data object. Implement Organization, FAQ, and Product schemas so AI engines can “see” and interpret your business context clearly. When you do this right, you’re no longer just a website — you’re an entity that machines recognize and reference.
2️⃣ Topical Clarity Build content ecosystems with clear intent. Create pillar-cluster topics around “how to choose,” “what is,” and “best tools” queries — the kinds of natural language prompts people actually feed into ChatGPT or Perplexity. Clarity > cleverness.
3️⃣ Multimodal Authority Expand beyond written content. Turn your articles into YouTube explainers, LinkedIn clips, Reddit AMAs, or podcast discussions. Generative platforms pull from multiple modalities — so the more touchpoints your brand has, the more confident AI becomes in citing you.
4️⃣ Proof Library Show your receipts. Publish testimonials, case studies, review snippets, and data-backed results. Each “proof” teaches AI that you’re trustworthy — the same way backlinks once did for SEO.
5️⃣ Feedback Loop Treat Perplexity, SGE, and ChatGPT not as end points, but as analytics dashboards. Monitor where you appear, what you’re cited for, and refresh monthly. Visibility compounds when you keep your content alive and evolving.
Each loop feeds the next — creating a system where every new proof, review, or Q&A expands your AI visibility footprint. That’s how brands engineer authority that scales.
The Takeaway: GEO Isn’t a Trend — It’s Infrastructure
The shift from paid to generative visibility mirrors every major technological inflection before it: from print ads to Google, from Google to social, and now from social to AI ecosystems.
Early adopters are already cashing in — not because they spend more, but because they structure better.
As Patel warned, “The brands that teach AI how to understand them will own the next decade of discovery.”
Author Note
Alexandro Endy Wibowo is a practitioner-operator and system builder behind Avonetiq’s AVO methodology and Sribu’s 67% growth year. He writes about how businesses can engineer visibility systems — from SEO to GEO to AEO — that compound authority and revenue over time.
