A growing share of search marketing budgets is moving toward GEO — generative engine optimization — as brands rework spending for AI-driven search experiences, Digiday reports.

The shift is straightforward in direction, though the reporting stops short of exact percentages. Marketers are redirecting money they once spent on classic SEO tactics toward making brands visible inside AI answer engines. That means optimizing content to appear in AI Overviews-style summaries, chatbot answers and other generative surfaces rather than only in the ten blue links.

What is GEO, exactly?

Generative engine optimization is the practice of tuning content so large language models and AI search tools cite, quote or surface it. Traditional SEO targets crawlers and rankings. GEO targets the models that synthesize answers. The two overlap, but they reward different things: structured facts, clear attribution and quotable passages matter more to a model assembling a response than a perfectly tuned title tag.

The budget move signals that marketers now treat AI answer surfaces as real traffic and awareness channels, not experiments.

What's confirmed versus what's speculative?

Digiday's reporting confirms the direction of travel: spend shares on GEO are growing. What the report does not supply is a quantified breakdown — no percentage of budget, no named advertiser figures, no date-stamped before-and-after comparison. Treat any specific numbers you see elsewhere about "GEO spend up X%" as tool-signal or survey speculation until an engine or a named marketer confirms them.

Who feels it first?

Publishers and content-heavy sites face the sharpest edge. If budgets follow visibility into AI answers, sites that models cite often win. Sites that models skip lose share of both attention and, gradually, referral traffic. Retail and brand marketers face a different calculation: they can buy placement in classic search, but citation inside a generated answer is harder to purchase — which is precisely what makes optimizing for it attractive.

What to watch next

Watch whether Google, OpenAI and other engine operators publish referral or citation data that lets marketers measure GEO's return directly. Right now the spending shift runs ahead of the measurement tools, and the next reliable benchmark — a named study with sample sizes, or disclosure from a major advertiser — will tell us whether GEO is a real line item or a relabeled SEO budget.