Marketers shift growing shares of search spending to GEO

“We’re seeing increased testing and experimentation within search budgets — specifically allocation to GEO,” Brian Yamada, global chief innovation officer at VML, said in an email to Digiday. Client budgets are also increasing to understand where agentic AI fits into the workflow, he added. Yamada did not provide specific ad spend figures. 

Reallocating SEO dollars to GEO

VML’s clients aren’t alone — 55% of marketers surveyed say they have dollars outfitted for GEO within their marketing budgets, according to recent research from marketing and public relations agency Scribewise, which polled 205 executive leaders and marketing managers working at U.S.-based organizations. Also per the report, 70% of marketers said that GEO strategy accounted for 11 to 20% of that budget.

At Noise Media Group, most clients who prioritized SEO are now allocating some of that budget toward GEO, according to Noise Media Group co-founder and CEO Joe Levi. And that trend is only growing, he added anecdotally. PMG is recommending a pilot budget of 1.5 to two times the current search budget for GEO, according to Matt Allfrey, head of SEO EMEA at PMG.

Related Insights

Generative AI

OpenAI’s ad push begins, and The Knot is co-piloting Read More

Meanwhile, pet food brand Pawco made an incremental addition to the budget, increasing 10% in Q1 of this year alone to test and learn LLM discovery optimization, according to Ryan Bouton, vp of growth at Pawco. The brand also allocated an estimated 30 to 35% of budget for its new brand, Genius Dog, to be experimental, he added. Levi, Allfrey and Bouton did not offer specific dollar amounts.

“What we are seeing is a reallocation of SEO budget towards GEO or AI visibility,” said Levi. Marketers aren’t hacking up their SEO budgets, but slicing it differently. “If a brand was spending $10,000 dollars a month or whatever, on SEO, they would now expect at least half of that budget to also cover GEO,” Levi added. 

For example, budgets that previously funded Pawco’s SEO content production and SEO experts now have been expanded to fuel the pet food brand’s AEO expert partnerships and platforms. Money that was previously set aside exclusively for testing ad effectiveness is now being used for website improvements to boost LLM search engine rankings, per PMG’s Allfrey.

Moving up the funnel

From a purely paid media standpoint, some marketers are taking dollars that were earmarked for performance channels to things like experimental activations and out-of-home ads, said Nitin Sinha, head of media planning at Noble People. Sinha did not specify dollar amounts. In some part, the goal is to drum up the buzz LLMs pick up on and include in their responses, he added. 

AI-powered search is moving faster than marketers can keep up with. There’s more investment with fewer clicks and weaker attribution signals. Metrics go from clicks to things like salience, or brand mention rates, according to John Dawson, vp of strategy at Jellyfish. For now, the result is more tolerance for ambiguity.

“One of the things it lacks is a clear output or clear ROI,” said Allfrey, referring to the large language models, “but the excitement around it, it’s meaning that businesses are willing to invest to test and to learn and to see what the outcomes are.”