Digital Marketing's Next Intersection Opens Inside the Chat Box

Not long ago, I went back to my hometown — a small county seat.

After dinner, I took a walk with my dad and our route took us down an old street. He pointed at a corner shop and said that thirty years ago, this was the most expensive storefront in the entire county. Whoever rented it sold cloth; later, electronics; later still, mobile phones. Now — it's a bubble tea shop.

I asked: why this spot, of all places?

He said, silly boy, the movie theater was right across the street. Then the theater moved away, and the bus station came. Then the bus station moved too, and a shopping mall went up.

The shop is still the same shop. What was expensive was never the shop — it was the foot traffic streaming past its door.

Where the foot traffic goes, the business goes.

If you work in marketing, you put that line into practice every single day. Because what you do is, in essence, exactly this business: securing your brand a prime spot at the crossings all that foot traffic has to pass through.

It's just that online, this street swaps intersections far faster than any county town ever did.

Three Decades, Three Intersections

Think back for a moment.

The internet's first intersection was the web portals. In those days, an ad slot on the Sina or Sohu homepage was a golden storefront.

The second intersection was the search engine. Users typed their question into the search box; one page of results, ten spots — whoever ranked highest ate the meat. And so a craft was born, called SEO, search engine optimization. Countless companies got their start on it; countless jobs were born because of it.

The third intersection was the feed and social media. People stopped searching and started scrolling. Content went looking for people, hand-fed by algorithms. That, in turn, sustained a whole new army of content-making, ad-buying teams.

Thirty years, three intersections. Every time the intersection changed, the marketing playbook got rewritten from cover to cover.

The sharpest SEO masters of the old era had to start learning all over again when the age of feeds arrived.

Now, the fourth intersection is here.

The Fourth Intersection Lives in the Chat Box

The traffic research firm OneLittleWeb tallied a telling figure: from April 2024 to March 2025 — one full year — ChatGPT recorded 47.7 billion visits. The year before that, 28.5 billion.

In a single year, up 19.2 billion.

Google has put AI summaries straight into its search results page. Microsoft has stitched Copilot into Bing. Perplexity was simply born as AI search.

What does that mean?

Users no longer have to flip through that page of blue links. They ask one question; the AI reads the entire web and writes the answer for them. Which brand to recommend, which suppliers to list — laid out plainly in a single paragraph.

In the past, users hunted down their own answers, and what you fought for was their eyes. Now the AI finds the answers for them — and what you're fighting for is the AI's pen.

That line is the crux of this whole piece.

What Exactly Is GEO?

In 2023, researchers at Princeton University and several other research institutions wrote a paper on precisely this question, and gave it a name: GEO, Generative Engine Optimization.

Put plainly: SEO optimizes your ranking on a search results page; GEO optimizes the odds that your content gets cited by AI.

Cited? Yes — cited.

Think about it: a procurement manager asks the AI, these two suppliers' quotes are about the same — which one should I pick? Whether the AI's answer contains one good word about you could, behind the scenes, mean an order worth millions.

If you're never mentioned, then in that user's world, you don't exist. It doesn't even count as being "passed over" — you never stepped onto the field at all.

The Interesting Part: the AIs Don't Share a Palate

I've read several comparative studies, and the more I read, the more interesting this gets.

SEOmator analyzed 41 million results: when ChatGPT cites content, it favors reference material like Wikipedia; Perplexity favors the real discussions that ordinary people argue out on Reddit; and Microsoft Copilot talks like it grew up on Forbes and the other business titles.

Even more brutal is a July 2025 comparison by SE Ranking: the domains cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity overlap by only 25.19%.

One quarter. Brutal.

In other words, each AI eats from its own menu. You can be an honored guest at one table and not even make it onto the menu at another.

So stop asking the one-size-fits-all question "how do I do GEO?" Start by asking: which AI is my customer actually talking to?

So How, Concretely?

I'm not going to hand you ten commandments. Boil all the tactics out there down to the bone, and you're left with three things.

First, create content worth stealing.

Even in AI's eyes, content has a pecking order. Original data, exclusive research, first-hand judgment from practitioners on the front lines — that is the content it scrambles to cite. Me-too press releases and endlessly recycled advertorials won't even earn a glance.

Think about it: how is that any different from a human editor's standards?

Second, write content that's effortless to digest.

However clever the AI, hand it a tangled mess and it still can't distill you. Subheadings, a summary up top, key conclusions in bold, definitions for jargon — add structured markup like Schema.org, and it's as if you'd attached a machine-readable résumé to your content, one it can grasp at a glance.

Third, own one field so thoroughly that mentioning the topic means mentioning you.

Write about food today, finance tomorrow, parenting the day after, and the AI has no way to file you. Around the one thing you know best, grow a forest of content, keep it updated, and put your author credentials on open, confident display.

Two Warnings, Three New Metrics

Warning one: don't write your content into the ground. The moment some people hear "optimize for AI," they start cramming keywords into their articles, turning what humans read into what machines read. That's exactly backwards. What AI cites is, precisely, the authoritative content that humans also love to read.

Warning two: don't count on set-it-and-forget-it. This road was only mapped out in 2023, and every platform rewrites its rules several times a year — the move that worked last month may stop working this month.

As for how to measure results? The ranking charts are done for. Watch three new metrics instead: how often the AIs cite you; whether searches for your brand name are climbing; and how much traffic clicks over from the various AI platforms.

It used to be about clicks. From here on, it's about being cited.

A Final Word

That night, my dad said one more thing: the year the movie theater moved away, the shopkeepers on that street cursed for a long time. And when the cursing was over, some went and reopened inside the mall, while others stood guard over an empty street, dropping their rents lower and lower.

On the internet's street, the intersections are moving at a pace of three per decade. My read: it will only get faster. Next, content will expand from text into images, audio, and video, and the AI's answers will keep getting better at understanding each specific person.

A few years from now, look back at the words "digital marketing," and they may well describe a different trade altogether.

It's fine if you missed the last intersection. The next one is only now being drawn.

This time, may you open your shop in the direction the foot traffic is coming from.