Axios reports that GEO — generative engine optimization, the practice of shaping how AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews describe and cite a brand — is now gaining real ground on traditional SEO for communicators and brands.

The shift is straightforward in its cause. Discovery behavior has moved: users increasingly ask AI chatbots and answer engines instead of typing queries into a classic ten-blue-links results page. When a model summarizes an answer, it names a handful of sources. A brand that the model cites gains visibility; a brand the model ignores is effectively absent from that answer, regardless of how well it ranks in conventional search.

For communications teams, this changes the unit of work. SEO optimized pages for crawlers and ranking algorithms. GEO optimizes for models that read, synthesize and attribute — which means the assets that matter are clear factual statements, quotable definitions, structured data and third-party corroboration across the open web, not just on-page keyword signals.

What does this change for communicators?

The Axios report positions GEO as a rising discipline alongside — not yet instead of — SEO. Several implications follow from its framing:

• Two channels, two playbooks. Brands now need to monitor both classic rankings and AI-generated mentions, because audiences arrive through both doors.
• PR assets become model inputs. Press coverage, expert commentary and clearly written explainers feed the training and retrieval pipelines that answer engines draw on.
• Measurement is immature. Unlike rank tracking, there is no settled tooling standard for tracking how often an AI engine cites a brand, so early movers are building their own baselines.
• Walled gardens stay out of reach. Content locked inside closed platforms is less likely to surface in AI answers; open, crawlable, well-structured content has the edge.

Why the timing matters

The report lands as AI assistants absorb a growing share of product-research and informational queries — traffic that once flowed predictably to top-ranking pages. Publishers and brands have spent the past two years watching AI Overviews and chatbot answers sit between them and the user. Communicators, per Axios, are responding by treating AI visibility as a reputational channel in its own right, managed with the same seriousness as earned media.

The practical reading is sober rather than alarmist. SEO is not going away; it remains the substrate the answer engines themselves index and retrieve from. But the marginal dollar of communications effort is starting to tilt toward the layer above it — the generated answer where the citation, or the omission, happens.

What brands should watch next, on Axios's framing, is how quickly AI-driven referral traffic grows relative to search, and whether measurement tools emerge that can quantify AI citations at scale.