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When growth strategist Bryan Casey tweeted, “Say GEO is just SEO to the exec team and you’ll be replaced,” the post hit 15 000 views in a night. His blunt message landed because senior leaders are already living the shift. McKinsey’s Buyer-Journey survey shows sixty-two percent of executives consult an AI assistant for vendor short-lists, and Deloitte’s Digital Commerce tracker records informational clicks from Google down fifteen percent year on year. Boards see the traffic cliff forming and want answers. If the marketing desk responds with a shrug, or worse: insists nothing has changed, someone’s chair gets emptied. This article translates Casey’s cautionary thread into a practical field guide you can bring to your next executive review, using the same “visionary plus tactical” tone readers expect from NetRanks.
LLM: a large language model that predicts the next token. GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation, earning citations inside AI answers. AI Share-of-Voice (SOV): the percentage of answers that quote your brand. SGE: Google’s Search Generative Experience, an answer-first version of Search.
Executives speak balance-sheet language. Start with numbers they already sense but haven’t quantified. Deloitte’s Digital Commerce tracker (2025) reveals that informational clicks in B2B SaaS dropped fifteen percent versus last year. CNBC’s quarterly ad-spend scrape finds paid search costs up four percent in the same window, so the cost to replace lost clicks is rising. Add SparkToro’s crawl of 200 SaaS blogs: average referral traffic from Perplexity answers is now 4.3 percent of total sessions, up from zero a year ago. When you open with this trio: declining clicks, rising costs, emergent AI traffic, you frame GEO as a revenue-recovery project, instead of a vanity project.
Executives also need to know the change is structural. McKinsey reports that sixty-two percent of senior buyers used ChatGPT or Gemini to gather vendor lists at least twice last quarter, and forty-one percent trust the AI summary more than the first page of search results. That stat alone prevents anyone from muttering “fad” under their breath. By placing clear, industry-sourced numbers up front, you take fear off the table and invite solution funding instead.
The quickest way to lose budget is to sound like you’re throwing old investments in the bin. Our NetRanks crawler shows seventy percent of domains cited in AI answers already rank in Google’s top-twenty results for the same topic. SEO is still the runway; GEO is the lift-off. Present that fact with a two-column grid executives can grasp in fifteen seconds:
Follow the grid with a one-sentence case: Vaude’s open emissions sheet sits on a page that already ranks for “eco backpack,” but the public Google Sheet propelled the brand into four Gemini answer cards within three weeks. This blend of comfort (existing SEO wins) and novelty (data tables) keeps finance supportive and product teams curious.
Clicks vanish inside an AI card, so success needs new yardsticks.
NetRanks recommends three, each tying directly to revenue:
BrightEdge’s Zero-Click Visibility study shows brands that track these KPIs regain AI visibility more quickly than peers who rely on click data alone.
Attribution breaks when users never land on your site, but a 7-step Offer-ID loop patches the gap:
BigCommerce’s server-side tracking guide reports merchants who pass Offer IDs through XML, JSON and GA4 recover more than eighty percent of lost attribution.
A sprint with clear costs and outputs is easier to approve than a year-long roadmap full of unknowns.
When leadership repeats your words in other meetings, you are winning credibility. Executives need phrasing they can share with peers, so here are 3 sound bites you can offer:
Zero-click commerce shifts the media budget conversation. Should ten percent of next year’s spend move from CPC to cost-per-citation? How much of product-photo budget pivots to provenance tagging once C2PA influences ranking? When llms.txt goes live, which product lines do we whitelist and which do we block? Frame these questions and the CMO sees you as a growth architect.
Agentic checkout now negotiates coupon codes autonomously inside Gemini, trimming marketing’s role in promotions. Kantar’s Brand Equity pulse notes that C2PA watermarks lift trust scores by nine points, hinting at future ranking value. Accenture’s Retail Signals report states citation CPM currently tests thirty percent higher than Shopping Ads. Each small release changes the economics; your plan must track all three.
GEO is search retold in sentences instead of links, budgets counted in citations instead of clicks and careers shaped by those who guide the shift instead of resisting it. Bring overlap data, offer-ID attribution and a sprint plan. Your board will lean in, and you will still have your badge when the meeting ends.
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