AI-driven search has fundamentally changed how people discover, evaluate, and trust brands. OuterBox recognized early that the fundamentals of search remained, and much of the work being done helped brands stay visible. However, this shift created a new PR challenge.
The news was grim with the effects of zero-click. We needed clients to know that SEO wasn’t dead and that AI wasn’t a replacement for it. It was the next evolution of search.
OuterBox has always taken an integrated approach across SEO and paid media, knowing that true success comes from owning multiple spots in the search landscape. Being featured multiple times across a SERP has always been a competitive advantage. GEO introduced a powerful new platform to extend that.
We knew our clients needed to understand that we weren’t simply maintaining rankings—we were protecting discoverability in a world where impressions rise, clicks fall, and answers happen before users ever reach a website.
The objective behind our AI Search or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) strategy was to guide clients through this disruption with clarity—keeping brands educated, accurately represented, discoverable, and trusted within AI-powered search environments.
Rather than treating GEO as a separate trend, OuterBox built a strategic framework grounded in what has always driven high-performing SEO: authority, structure, credibility, and user intent.
Our goals were to redefine SEO success to include citations, brand mentions, and brand sentiment. But more importantly, educate clients through thought leadership, webinars, and strategic guidance of our work.
OuterBox’s GEO strategy starts here: search is no longer just about rankings—it’s about answers. As AI Overviews and LLM-powered platforms accelerate the zero-click effect, many brands are left uncertain about what visibility even means. We wanted a leadership stance and shared that AI search wasn’t unknowable; effective strategies existed.
Because disruption was not uniform across industries, our first step was to tailor GEO efforts client by client. B2B brands faced rapid change, as AI engines surfaced more informational, technical, research-driven answers, while eCommerce visibility depended heavily on structured product data and Merchant Feeds. Understanding how AI impacted each client’s search landscape enabled OuterBox to future-proof visibility based on where AI adoption was headed—not just where it stood today.
To add education and engagement for our clients, we published thought leadership and strategic white papers that shared our approaches from the front end to the back end. Our team hosted webinars and executive-level conversations to allow clients to ask questions and feel comfortable approaching SEO in a reframed way. We reintroduced structured data, indexing, and other technical SEO in a relatable way, while reemphasizing the importance of quality content for both traditional and AI-search.
Our framework focused on three core pillars:
1. Authority AI Can Trust
We strengthened entity-based SEO through content hubs, original research, PR signals, and E-E-A-T-driven resources that reinforce expertise and improve the likelihood of being cited in AI responses.
2. Conversational Discovery
We shifted content architecture toward long-tail, question-based formats that mirror how users prompt AI tools, supported by user-generated content, FAQs, and authentic trust signals from communities AI engines frequently reference.
3. Technical Foundations for AI Visibility
We implemented structured data, entity linking via @id properties, crawlable site architecture, Merchant Feed optimization, and emerging protocols like IndexNow and LLMs.txt—ensuring AI systems could accurately parse and represent client brands.
Finally, OuterBox redefined measurement beyond clicks, tracking AI citations, referral traffic, brand sentiment, and share of voice across generative ecosystems. We shared webinars on tools like AccuRanker to show clients how these new metrics are being tracked.
GEO wasn’t a trendy add-on or experimental tactic. OuterBox made it part of an agency-wide evolution of an already in place integrated search strategy—combining technical precision, authority-driven content, and client education. It ensured brands stayed visible wherever answers appeared. By tailoring strategies by industry, moving beyond rankings into citations and sentiment, and guiding clients with clarity, OuterBox educated clients on AI search as a competitive advantage.
OuterBox’s GEO strategy delivered measurable success by helping brands stay visible, trusted, and discoverable as AI reshaped search behavior.
In one example of this impact, an eCommerce client generated 210 purchases and $75,000 in revenue directly from ChatGPT referrals, demonstrating that strong SEO fundamentals—evolved through GEO—translate into real growth in AI-powered environments.
Beyond performance, GEO also drove meaningful client engagement and education. An example of a successful education marketing campaign, OuterBox co-hosted a webinar with Search Engine Journal on AI-Search, attracting 2,085 registrants and 335 attendees. A corresponding GEO thought leadership piece was downloaded 1531 times, with an additional 239 from the OuterBox site. This campaign helped brands replace uncertainty with strategic clarity. Our Accuranker partnership/webinar had 335 registrants with 154 attendees, helping clients understand the impact of AI-search on analytics and key metrics. These efforts also improved our AI search results, adding more authority and expertise to our content footprint.
By redefining what it means to “win” in search, OuterBox ensured clients didn’t simply survive the shift to AI—they gained a durable competitive advantage. In a world where rankings matter less and answers matter more, OuterBox helped brands become the authority that AI chooses to surface, trust, and recommend.
