Every conversation has minimum 3 sides now

The advisor is always there

For a hundred years, brand managed one relationship. You to your customer. Direct line (more or less). The message, the placement, the recall.

Not any more. There are always at least two relationships now.

1. Yours to the customer.

2. The AI’s to your customer. The advisor.

The first is the one you’ve been managing. The second is the one that’s actually deciding things, in private chats, at 11pm, with an openness the customer reserves for someone they trust.

And the customer trusts the advisor more than they trust you.

GEO is not just SEO 2.0

Most of the writing calls this GEO. SEO with a new acronym. That framing keeps the conversation stuck on tactics when the change underneath is much deeper.

SEO was a ranking problem. Ten options on a page. The decision still belonged to the customer. They scanned, compared, clicked, chose.

GEO isn’t that. There’s no list. There’s a recommendation, often a single one, delivered after a deep conversation the customer is already trusting. They don’t pick between ten. They get an answer.

In SEO, the engine surfaced options and the customer chose. In GEO, the model has chosen, and the customer is mostly checking whether to disagree.

SEO competed for placement. GEO competes for being the answer. There’s usually no second place inside a recommendation.

It’s not one AI. It’s a generation raised on the same books.

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity. Different companies, different personalities. Each its own neural network.

All trained on roughly the same public information. The same New York Times. The same Reddit. The same Wikipedia. The same founder blogs. They form similar, though not identical, impressions of who you are.

Like a generation of students taught from the same books. They disagree on details. They agree on the basics.

There’s no single brain to game. There’s a shared pool of knowledge that’s been written, said, and quoted about your brand. Whatever picture builds up in that pool is what every advisor pulls from.

Substance is what gets repeated

Most people reduce this to “have a strong POV”. Already overused.

The harder version: opinions don’t matter on their own. Opinions matter when other people repeat them. Substance isn’t what you believe. It’s what gets quoted back about you when you’re not in the room.

The work isn’t writing one good essay. The work is writing things people pass on.

A founder who writes one excellent essay that nobody shares has produced nothing the model can see. A founder whose one strange phrase gets repeated by customers, picked up by journalists, paraphrased in podcasts, has built something the model remembers.

This is where brand strategy breaks. Brand books, tone of voice docs, messaging matrices - none of these get repeated. They sit on a file and die there.

You become how you sound

If your brand can be summarised as “a fintech company”, “a fintech company” is what the model returns.

Everything else was decoration.

The model isn’t punishing you. It’s just shortening you. And shortening rewards whatever’s specific enough to survive being shortened. Most brands sit at the category description and don’t realise it.

What this changes about the work

Brand used to be a closed loop. You wrote the positioning, designed the identity, ran the campaign, measured the lift.

The loop is now widely open.

A third party reads everything you publish, everything anyone says about you, every podcast, every Reddit thread your customers start. It pulls all of it together into an opinion. That opinion gets delivered, when you’re not there, to the customer who would have been yours.

You can’t manage that opinion the way you used to manage messaging. You can only feed what builds it.

Brand books matter less. Founder presence matters more. Internal alignment matters less. What other people say about you matters now even more. The homepage matters less. What the advisor hears about you everywhere else matters more.

The customer increasingly skips the homepage. They consult the advisor.

So when you build your brand, think about who you’re really speaking to. It’s the new key persona you need to win. Before the customer ever shows up, this third party has already formed a view, and the view is what the customer hears.

That opinion is forming whether you participate or not.

Love
Stef