GEO as a revenue channel: what changes for Italian companies

A year ago, GEO — that is, optimization to appear in the responses of AI engines like ChatGPT or Perplexity — was a lab experiment. Today, major international publishers are selling it to brands as a paid service, and clients are asking for it.

Why GEO has become an urgent topic for companies

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization, meaning optimization to appear in AI search engine generated answers — is no longer a technical curiosity. According to reports by Digiday , at least six major international digital publishers already offer these services to brands, and clients are renewing them.

The shift is easy to understand: more and more people are asking questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI instead of searching on classic Google. Whoever appears in those answers gains visibility. Whoever doesn't appear, doesn't exist for that slice of users. If you want to understand how much this phenomenon is already changing the rules of the game, our hub on SEO and visibility for AI gathers everything you need to know.

How it works in practice: brands pay to be mentioned by AI

The mechanism is different from traditional advertising. A publisher with authority on a certain topic — technology, health, finance — produces or updates content optimized to be read by AI engines. The paying brand is associated with that content, and when the AI answers a relevant question, it cites that source. The brand appears in the response.

Think about a company that produces industrial machinery. If a buyer searches on Perplexity for “what are the best filtering systems for chemical plants,” they want their name to appear among the cited sources. Today, they can only do this if the right content exists and is written in the right way. Tomorrow, they will also be able to do it by paying an authoritative publisher to be included in that flow.

We have already analyzed how the “earned” part of this visibility works in the article on ChatGPT Ads and GEO: Paid and Earned Visibility on AI . The novelty today is that the “paid” part — the paid one — is becoming a structured market.

The measurement problem: nobody knows yet what counts

There's an unresolved knot worth knowing about before investing: there isn't a standard way to measure GEO results yet. Those who sell these services measure citations in AI search engines, brand visibility in answers, and comparisons with competitors. But nobody can yet attribute a sale with certainty to an AI citation.

This does not mean the channel doesn't work. It means every company must define in advance what it wants to measure. Mentions? Generated traffic? Position compared to competitors? Without a clear goal, the risk is spending without understanding if it's working. It's the same problem we described in the article about AI visibility as a new metric for SMEs : the metric exists, but it needs to be custom-built.

For us, this is the key point: technology is a tool, and a tool without a measurable goal isn't an investment, it's an expense. Before buying AI visibility, a company needs to know what matters to it.

What it means for an Italian SME that isn't a big publisher

The services described so far are sold by international publishers to large brands. But the principle also applies to medium-sized Italian companies, in a different way.

An SME doesn't buy space from a publisher: it optimizes its own content to be cited directly by AI search engines. The starting point is figuring out if and where it already appears today in the AI answers for its sector. Often companies discover they don't appear at all, or they are cited inaccurately. The article on AI citation audit explains how to do this check systematically.

The time to act is now, not in a year. When GEO becomes a standard — like classic SEO did — those who built authority first will have a hard-to-close advantage. Those who come later will have to pay more to catch up.

What to check immediately in your company

• Search for your company name and main products on ChatGPT and Perplexity: do you appear in the answers? How?
• Check if your web content is written so an AI engine can easily read and cite it (clear structure, explicit Q&A, up-to-date data).
• Identify the questions your customers ask AI engines before buying: are these questions your content answers?
• Check if your competitors appear in AI answers instead of you: if so, on which topics.
• Define a minimum metric to measure AI visibility: even just “how many times we are cited on three key queries” is a starting point.
• Evaluate if a SEO audit that also includes visibility on AI search engines, not just Google.

Frequently Asked Questions

GEO is not yet mandatory — but those who wait for it to become mandatory will already be starting late.