Blog and Research

Generative AI is reshaping the eCommerce funnel by influencing awareness and consideration before customers visit a website. It shows how AI answer engines compress discovery and evaluation into single interactions, often without producing measurable clicks or sessions. As a result, traditional SEO metrics and attribution models fail to capture how demand is formed upstream, even when performance data appears healthy. The article argues that CMOs should treat generative AI as a demand-shaping layer, focusing on visibility and directional signals rather than forcing it into existing channel-based ROI models.

Over the past year, a new generation of answer engines, SearchGPT, Perplexity, Claude.ai, and others, has begun reshaping how people discover information.

Why “quotable content” is replacing “optimized content” in AI search. In the early days of search, visibility was simple: whoever earned the most backlinks won. Each link was a vote of confidence that told Google, “this page deserves to rank.” But AI-driven search has rewritten that playbook. Systems like SearchGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini don’t crawl links the way traditional crawlers do — they cite snippets of text from pages they trust.The number and placement of these citations reveal a hidden metric that now matters more than keyword density or backlinks ever did: Citation Density.

Answer engines are probabilistic in nature: you can ask the same question twice, but you'll rarely get the exact same answer. The responses might look similar, ideas restated in different ways, facts reordered, or details dropped and added. Here's a simple example: Ask "How do photoelectric smoke alarms work?" twice, and you might get two slightly different paragraphs. The facts stay intact, but the sentences, structure, and sometimes even the sources, change.

Why Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Matters Now? Search is undergoing its biggest transformation in two decades. AI-powered search experiences like Google’s AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity are fundamentally changing how users discover information. Instead of clicking through blue links, users now receive AI-generated answers that synthesize information from multiple sources.

Introduction Remember when SEO meant stuffing keywords into every paragraph and building as many backlinks as possible? Those days are officially over.

Introduction The digital marketing landscape has fundamentally shifted as AI-powered search engines reshape how users discover and consume information. Traditional SEO metrics are becoming insufficient. Brands struggle to maintain visibility across ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, and other AI-driven platforms.

Why We Put Our GEO Engine to the Test on SEO At IQRush.ai, our only goal is helping brands get more visible and monetize it. We started We live and breathe the science of getting brands surfaced in LLM-powered, AI-first discovery. But one question lingered: what if we pointed our math—built for next-gen GEO—at old-school SEO? Just a fast experiment. The answer: instant clarity and some real surprises.