Search has changed. The way people find information, products, and ideas has evolved faster in the past year than it has in the last decade. And the brands that don’t adapt are about to disappear from the conversation entirely. Search marketing is intent-based; it's vital to grow any business, and it's often overlooked, well, the organic part mostly.
For years, SEO sat quietly in the background as the workhorse of digital marketing. Then social media took over the headlines, and everyone chased likes instead of intent. But now, as artificial intelligence reshapes how discovery happens online, SEO is not only back, it’s fundamental to growth.
Generative Engine Optimisation GEO is the next evolution of search. It’s what happens when AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity become the front doors to the internet. People no longer type keywords and scroll. They ask a question and get a summarised answer. That means if your brand isn’t being referenced, cited, or surfaced inside those AI-generated responses, you don’t exist in that new ecosystem.
This isn’t a niche tech shift. It’s a commercial one. Intent-based marketing is once again at the centre of how brands grow. The difference now is that intent is being interpreted by machines that decide which sources to trust. The old rules of SEO ranking, keywords, and backlinks still matter, but they’ve been absorbed into something much larger: the fight for inclusion in AI-driven discovery.
The playground used to be just Google, really, Bing and Yahoo were and are tiny, but now you have social search, and then all the new AI platforms that are search-oriented!
And there’s urgency here. OpenAI has just confirmed that ChatGPT will soon support e-commerce integrations through partnerships with Shopify and Etsy. That means users will be able to find, compare, and buy products directly within ChatGPT, without ever visiting a website. It’s an early glimpse of a future where conversational interfaces replace search engines and shopping platforms altogether.
If you’re a South African brand, this should be a wake-up call. The country’s consumers are digitally mature, mobile-first, and quick to adopt tools that make their lives easier. The platforms shaping this new landscape, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and emerging African-built systems like DataProphet, Cape AI, SIVOXI, Clevva, and Isazi, are already influencing how people discover products, make decisions, and form opinions.
Yet most local brands are still optimising for yesterday’s internet. Their websites aren’t structured for machine readability. Their content lacks attribution signals, schema or expertise indicators. Their PR isn’t linked to technical SEO, and their data stories are being told without the metadata that AI needs to understand and reuse them.
GEO changes that. It forces brands to integrate strategy, storytelling, and structure. It’s where PR meets performance, and creativity meets code. Because when AI decides which voices to amplify, it’s looking for authority, clarity, and proof, not just clever headlines.
This is the moment for South African marketers to get serious about intent again. SEO isn’t dead; it’s evolved. GEO is the new growth channel, and the brands that master it first will own visibility in the age of AI discovery.
Personally, I feel very excited as an old SEO nerd for the future ahead!
Because in a world where the machine answers for you, being absent from that answer isn’t just bad marketing.
