Your Buyers Stopped Googling. Here's Where They Went Instead.

Somewhere in the last two years, a meaningful share of B2B research moved from a search bar to a chat window.

Your buyers didn't announce this. They just started asking ChatGPT and Perplexity instead of typing into Google, and the tools started answering with confidence, naming two or three vendors, and moving on.

If your brand isn't one of the two or three named, you don't just rank lower. You don't exist in that answer at all.

Where the answer comes from

AI models don't cite press releases. They cite the places where people talk honestly about products, and Reddit is one of the most visible sources across major AI platforms.

Not because Reddit optimized for this. Because it's where unfiltered opinions about vendors already lived, at massive scale, years before anyone called this GEO.

What this means practically

The brands showing up in AI answers today aren't the ones with the best SEO. They're the ones with a real, credible footprint in the conversations AI models already trust.

That footprint takes time to build, which means the brands building it now are accumulating something that's much harder to buy later.

The honest caveat

No one can guarantee a specific citation in a specific AI answer. The models change, the sources they weight change, and anyone promising a guaranteed placement is promising something outside their control.

What's controllable is whether your brand has a credible presence in the source material at all.