Leah Nurik, CEO and co-founder of Brandi AI, argues that when a buyer asks an AI assistant which vendor to consider, the answer names a few companies — and the rest effectively don’t exist. She and Greg Kihlström get into what decides who makes that list.
Generative Engine Optimization is not SEO with a new acronym. Nurik discusses which parts of a mature search operation still do real work in AI-mediated discovery, and which parts have become motion that connects to nothing.
Much of what shapes your AI answer lives in sources you don’t own. Earned coverage, third-party reviews, and public discussion carry the signal, which makes this a job of influence rather than control — and strains a marketing plan built around owned channels.
Visibility stops being a rank and becomes a probability. Ask the same question twice and a model can answer differently; ask a second model and it answers differently again. Nurik and Kihlström talk about what to measure instead, and how to tell that story to a CFO when site traffic goes down and AI citations go up.
About Leah Nurik
Leah Nurik is CEO and Co-Founder of Brandi. Leah has worked with over 400 growth-stage software companies in her 20-plus year career. She has held senior strategy, product and marketing leadership positions at Motorola, Symbol Technologies, Infowave and others. She also founded and led Gabriel Marketing Group, an award-winning global public relations, branding, and integrated marketing agency focused on B2B SaaS companies. Leah’s expertise spans digital, public relations, content marketing, product marketing, and go-to-market strategy.
Leah Nurik on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahgabriel/
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Transcript
Brandi AI CEO Leah Nurik on winning the answer, not the click
[00:00:00] Greg Kihlström: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of The Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. Your buyer asks an AI assistant which vendor to consider, and it names three companies. What decides whether you’re one of them? For years, discovery meant being found. Now it means being the answer and being the same recognizable company no matter which model is doing the summarizing. Today we’re talking about how generative AI is rewriting brand discovery. Specifically, we’re going to talk about why generative engine optimization, or GEO, isn’t SEO with a new acronym, what actually earns a brand a place inside an AI-generated answer, and how you measure visibility in a system that gives you a different answer every time you ask. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Leah Nurik, CEO and co-founder at Brandi AI. Leah, welcome to the show.
[00:01:30] Leah Nurik: Hey, Greg. Thanks so much for having me on. Glad to be here today.
[00:01:33] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, looking forward to diving in here. Before we do, though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Brandi AI?
[00:01:40] Leah Nurik: Sure, yeah. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Brandi AI. We are a narrative intelligence and generative engine optimization platform. Prior to starting Brandi, I ran a public relations and product marketing, go-to-market strategy marketing agency for a number of years and have led go-to-market strategy and corporate marketing and product marketing for a variety of B2B SaaS companies over my career. So I’m very passionate about what this new role AI is playing in brand positioning and how marketing organizations need to work together in order to maximize the communication of their message and drive more growth for companies of all types, from B2B, B2C, small to Fortune 500.
[00:02:29] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, love it. So let’s dive in here, and we’re going to talk about a few things here, but I definitely want to start with what I teed up in the intro as far as generative engine optimization. I know there’s a number of acronyms floating around, but I think we’re going to settle on GEO for this.
[00:02:47] Leah Nurik: [laughs] Pick your poison.
[00:02:48] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, I’ve heard there’s a difference. Maybe we’ll get into that as well, but that said, I think what I started hearing at the beginning of this is a lot of comparisons to SEO, and I’ve been around a bit, and so I was there in the early days of SEO before it was just optimizing for one or two engines and stuff like that. So certainly seen a lot of things change and mature with SEO, but in the beginning, it felt like people were essentially saying, “Oh yeah, this is SEO, but it’s got a little nuance to it,” or whatever, and that feels wrong the more we kind of know and understand it. But for those orgs out there that have a very mature SEO and search practice, now they’re faced with, “Okay, what’s going on here? Why are we not getting cited? Why are we not getting found with AI?” I guess where do you start from a mature SEO capability to then either add on or build out this GEO capability?
[00:03:57] Leah Nurik: I mean, there’s different organizations that are impacting or owning GEO now. And so I think in the beginning, because it was about search and buyer discovery, it was always the SEO team. And now what we’re seeing is that it could be the SEO team, but it could also be the brand strategy team, it could be the comms team, and in so many cases, we’re seeing product marketing play a huge role as well. And I think that the takeaway of that reality is that the folks who succeed in GEO are the ones who can collaborate in the marketing organization. So SEO folks traditionally are just… They’re amazing analytical people, right? They’re really great at process of research, right? All those kind of things. They have a specific talent, so to speak, the majority of them, right? You’ve hired them, you’ve worked with them, you’ve been there. It’s kind of like there are certain skillsets that you look for and different ways of thinking. And then there’s the content writers who are producing collateral pieces or traditionally are doing subject matter expert social media activity. And then you’ve got your comms pros, like the PR people and the brand strategy people and the storytellers, right? And what we see is that all of them play a role. So if your advanced, highly sophisticated SEO team can make easy changes to the website and they understand schema and they can manage all that, they need to work with the people who are producing really great content, right? So it’s a much more collaborative exercise than existed, where in my experience, it usually was like, okay, the SEO team had the growth budget, right? They were the ones who were concerned about traffic. They had the formula that, okay, if this is how much traffic we get, this is what we know we’re going to get to convert, and that’s how we get to our revenue number. And most organizations have experienced a drastic drop-off in traffic because buyer research is happening now within a completely different experience than clicking on a blue link. And so the way that the brand is positioned needs to come from the people who do the storytelling and the people who write the content. So I would say that the first step you do is you reach across the aisle to the people [laughs] who you might not have traditionally been working with. The digital people, they might be in the same meetings as the PR people, but they weren’t necessarily really working together except for, “Hey, can you post this press release or make this update to the page?” Now it really has to be a cross-discipline collaboration that goes together for massive success.
[00:06:59] Greg Kihlström: Well, yeah, ’cause to your point, it is about getting cited to an extent, but it’s also about these models pulling a lot of different information. They’re telling almost their own stories about your stories, right? So how do you guide that in the right direction? I know a bit more about how you do stuff like that with SEO, but how do you do that when… Maybe it’s just a product of GEO being a little less mature as an industry, and so there being less best practices so far. But how do you steer that narrative when it’s also rewarding not necessarily brand content as well, right? Because some of these AI citations are emphasizing third-party reviews and things like that. So how do you steer the narrative in cases like that?
[00:07:58] Leah Nurik: Well, it’s really about the data to know what the AI thinks is authoritative in your market. So when we’re on LinkedIn, right, we hear all these people say, “90% of the citations come from earned media,” and you’re like, “Okay.” And I can see in the data, for some markets, right? [laughs] For traditional markets that have traditionally been more brochure websites, like cars, luxury goods, the Guccis of the world, those kind of markets, 90% of them come from either earned media or off domain. But let’s say you’re a B2B services company or you’re a B2B software company, or you are a consumer goods company that has a really strong e-commerce website, that doesn’t hold fast. So the best way to make an impact is to understand the ecosystem that your brand lives in. And so it could be Reddit, but it could also be a whole bunch of trade media. It could be Instagram in certain markets, like in beauty we see that, or it could be sites that do sponsored content or a mix of earned and sponsored content. So for pharmaceuticals, Healthline or GoodRx comes up all the time. So it’s so important to understand what domains the AI finds authoritative in your specific market universe. At Brandi we always talk about market universes. A lot of traditional SEO tools, it was always like put the blinders on and only think about your brand. So in this world, you can’t just think about your brand. You have to think about all the competitor brands. You also have to think about brands that are tangential or voices that are tangential that are also impacting the conversation. So when you can see what the AI finds to be authoritative in your market, then you can focus your next best action on that if you’re taking action off domain. And then when you’re taking it on domain, the way the AI constructs narratives is, you’re basically writing a research paper in a sense. You have footnotes, right? You are demonstrating your authority, your credibility. You don’t want to use words like, “Hey, we’re the best, most innovative thing ever.” Right? You really need to build authority, and so to identify where that authority comes from in your market will allow you to triage and to create a web of authoritative entity reinforcement.
[00:10:47] Greg Kihlström: SEO went through several phases of maturity. In the beginning you would just keyword stuff and actually rank and stuff like that. Eventually Google and a few others got a lot smarter, and so in my estimation, good SEO actually started becoming just creating good content. Some of the things that you just mentioned about GEO, to me that just sounds like really good practices anyway, [laughs] right? So how much of this is something that’s new for organizations, and how much of this is just maybe we should have been doing this all along?
[00:11:27] Leah Nurik: Well, I think you get to the greater point, which is the most successful brands adhere to their mission and their brand promise, right? And so I believe so very strongly in that. My entire career I’ve been advocating for that. And now with AI, you can’t trick it. But when you say really good SEO, we also have to think about there are SEO players out there, people who do SEO, where it’s always about the next best trick and tactic, right? I highly recommend not doing that with GEO. And the reason being is that, one, it’s the right thing to do, right? Why are we going to work every day spending our lives doing things that aren’t positive, right? Or that you’re trying to trick it. You don’t want to be in that situation. You want to live your brand promise, just what your mom told you to do when you went to kindergarten, right? It’s like, [laughs] do the right thing. But with GEO, you don’t know what will change with the models, and that was the same with algorithms. But the thing is that shortsighted tricks don’t tell the complete brand story either. So you really need to… I like to think about what’s happening with AI and brands as regulation of capitalism without regulation, because you can’t lie. You can’t fool every corner of the internet, every thread on Reddit, every G2 review, every Trustpilot review, every social post, every piece of earned media. It’s not just about optimizing your website for it, but it’s about creating a connected ecosystem that underscores the fulfillment of your mission and your brand promise. Telling the story is a lot easier when the story is reflective of the reality of the story. So getting back to basics of delivering, of truly being consistent in communication in the way that you tell your story and how you communicate in every little bit of every email to every customer so that they are also communicating your brand promise while you’re fulfilling it, and you’re going to do much better to have your authority outlast any changes in the algorithms.
[00:13:56] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, well, I love the way you frame that, and also, it reminds me of a pet peeve of mine, which is reducing marketing to hacks. [laughs] And I think there are cases where, yes, okay, if you do this one thing versus this other, it’s going to have a nice impact or whatever. But I see so many of the… And a lot of these are clickbait and stuff like that too, but to be so reductive in how we brand and market to say, “Oh, yeah, just do these five hacks, and you’re going to get more sales or whatever,” I think to your point, doing that actually may work for a couple minutes, but then in the long term, it hurts on so many levels, right?
[00:14:44] Leah Nurik: I mean, to your point, one of the biggest hacks or tools now that people are using to engineer citations are these listicles, right? And it seems ridiculous that people are putting blogs on their websites that call out their competitors and put themselves at the top. And then I get, I don’t even know, probably like 20 to 30 emails a day from people who are like, “Hey, you guys are getting really well ranked in AI. Can you add me to this blog post?” Just like they used to do with backlinks, but it seems counterintuitive. And I would make the argument, they’re still working. It still works. But I would make the argument that it’s not going to work forever, because the AI is going to say, “Okay, well, that’s a corporate website. Why is it listing all the competitors in there?” Now, if it’s an Avaya site, it’ll probably still work, because those are categorized differently, and those are more authoritative and authentic. So the hack, I’m with you 100%. I come from a comms storytelling world where… Well, we’re a different kind of hack, right? Or flack. [laughs] But in that sense, you can’t think about tactics when it comes to GEO only. It really has to be about a strategic approach. And those folks who do take those tricky kind of things, I just don’t see them maintaining authority in the long term. Because it can be sniffed out. But also, why not just… It’s not that hard to be consistent and truthful to your brand promise and take authentic, credible action off domain. So why wouldn’t you do it that way?
[00:16:42] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, I totally agree. So let’s talk a little bit about measurement here, and again, just to use the analogy with SEO, we have a relatively mature set of metrics, keyword rankings and stuff like that. What should brands be thinking about in terms of measuring success, and what might not be the right thing to focus on right now?
[00:17:12] Leah Nurik: So you should be benchmarking yourself against competitors. So for example, if you’re in one market, let’s say that you’re a marketing agency. There’s so many marketing agencies, right? So the conversation is split up, and it’s very busy. If you are one of three robotics companies that focuses on a certain thing, you may have 40% of the share of voice. So versus 5%, you’re kicking butt if you have 5% of the voice within a very crowded market. So it’s really important to see how you’re doing against your competitors. Without a doubt, that’s what I would do. So for metrics like this, sure, how often are you mentioned in the most likely prompts for your market? How much of the work that you’re doing is being cited to inform the definition and the context of returning those results, not just about you, but let’s say for example, take a look at Brandi: what is the definition of generative engine optimization, right? Market definition, or what are the de facto features that you should have in a narrative intelligence platform? If your content either on your website or the earned media content that your PR firm got you, or their LinkedIn articles or your reviews, if that’s being cited, your marketing organization took action, and it’s being cited to inform the answer, not just at the bottom of the funnel, like how does this compare to that, but how does it define the market, that’s a win, right? ‘Cause you’re playing a role. Those are things as marketers we could never really measure before. How many times in my career I got hired to redefine a market, right? According to the vision of what the company wanted to portray with their own innovation. You couldn’t really measure that. You would just get excited when you would see it. You’d see the way that it was positioned in an analyst report or the way a reporter talked about it. Maybe you could spend a million dollars to do an independent research report in order to validate market definition, but now you can actually see it. “Okay, I took this action. It’s informing it.” The other thing is your own content, as well as content off domain of which you take action, and then your competitive differentiation or the way you stack up, but then even more, sentiment. So before, we always used these sentiment tools. It’d be like the dreaded gas gauge. Where the heck are you getting that number from? I don’t know. So being able to actually configure your market definition and see, am I tracking against that, and how am I ranked against my competitors? Where am I winning? Where is it coming from? That’s something that’s brand new that we’ve never been able to do before, and that’s pretty powerful. And then I’d say the last thing is accuracy. Is what the AI’s saying about you right, wrong? Where is it getting it from? So these are things now that you can measure, and so these are new KPIs that should increase budgets in disciplines where they didn’t have them, like PR, content, people who are writing their own content. So many corporations got rid of their blogs. They’re back. You better bring it back, right? So those are the things now that we can measure that we couldn’t before. And so when people were cutting PR and cutting influencers ’cause you couldn’t really measure it, now you can again, and so I think you’ll see budgets go back to that. And that’s what all the analysts are predicting as well.
[00:21:09] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, I mean, it definitely seems, and to your point with those that I’ve talked with as well, it definitely sounds like earned media is going to, if not already, have quite a few more conversations with the marketing folks than they used to, and likely budgets and stuff like that. It seems like possibly even some convergence of roles. Do you see big changes happening there just because there’s more opportunity there?
[00:21:44] Leah Nurik: Yeah. So as a communicator at heart, it’s extremely exciting. I started my career in the dot-com boom when PR kind of ruled the roost, and storytelling ruled the roost, and then it didn’t, right? And so some of the brands that I have conversations with that are really cool, innovative brands, their team now is, you’ve got the digital people that are working with the brand people, and the brand people who had the PR are now working with the digital people. And product marketing is coming in and publishing things, and they’re doing stuff. And so I think the SEO, the digital role will evolve significantly from what it has been, and it’ll have to involve storytelling in order to continue to be where it was in the organization. So like I said, those organizations that can be collaborative and foster a sense of partnership across those traditional disciplines are the ones who are going to have the most success, and we can see it in our customer base. It’s pretty exciting. You’ll have the head of brand on and then the head of comms, and they’re working together, and then you’ve got the growth marketing person, and everybody’s working together. And you didn’t usually have those meetings before, right? Where they were on the same call vetting a vendor.
[00:23:13] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, I mean, those people didn’t even know each other before, [laughs] right?
[00:23:18] Leah Nurik: And so I think that’s what you’ll see. So I don’t know if in the end you have a tighter, smaller marketing organization, which could happen, but I think you’ll have folks who wear multiple different hats. And there’ll be a lot less of, “I’m going to hoard my budget because I don’t want this person to get it.” And imagine now you’re the CMO, and you can have one platform where everybody—you have an agency, your agency’s logging in, and you have your PR people logging in, and your content people, and your digital people, and the people who care about sentiment and product marketing, and they’re all in there, and you can run metrics on the impact of all of them together. That’s the Holy Grail, right? I don’t think there was anything that could ever do that before, but I’m sure there were attempts. But now you can do it, and that’s pretty cool. And also, just as a side note, the content people, what we can see in our data is that the citations that last the longest and the content that performs the best is written by real people, not AI. So if the marketing organizations that are under pressure to get rid of their liberal arts majors and just use Claude to produce all their content, that’s not the strategy that actually works in the data. So I think you’ll see really smart critical thinkers across the marketing organization that can tell complex stories, and then you’ll see AI as an efficiency enabler but not the lead. That’s my prediction. ‘Cause I can see it in the data. And we all thought we’d be out of a job like a year and a half ago. And now we’re back.
[00:25:07] Greg Kihlström: [laughs] Right, right, totally. Nice. Well, Leah, thanks so much for joining today. I’ve got one last question for you as we wrap up here. What do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:25:23] Leah Nurik: How do I stay agile in my role? I have my focus time that enables me to get outside and get in nature, which allows me to not get too focused on one thing. So I usually try to get outside for at least an hour and a half a day to think clearly, either before, in the middle, or after work.
[00:25:47] Greg Kihlström: Nice, nice. Love it. Well, again, I’d like to thank Leah Nurik, CEO and co-founder at Brandi AI, for joining the show. You can learn more about Leah and Brandi AI by following the links in the show notes.
