The Death of Ten Blue Links (and Why Small Drinks Brands Should Be Thrilled)
The established SEO model rewarded scale. GEO doesn't work that way. For a six-person vermouth company, that's a meaningful structural advantage.
Three weeks ago we sat down to review our SEO strategy for Asterley Bros. Standard stuff. Keywords, meta descriptions, schema markup. The kind of quarterly housekeeping every small brand does (or should do). We'd just published our case for why the drinks industry is about to have its AI moment, and the timing felt pointed. Halfway through, we stopped and had a conversation that basically rewrote the entire plan.
The question wasn't how to rank higher on Google anymore. It was how to get cited by the AI that's increasingly answering the questions our customers ask before they ever see a search results page.
The shift from SEO to GEO, and why small brands should care
Everyone in digital marketing has heard about GEO by now. Generative Engine Optimisation. The practice of structuring your content so that AI-powered search platforms can retrieve it, cite it, and recommend your brand when they answer questions. It sounds like just another acronym to add to the pile, but the underlying shift is genuinely significant.
A study from Princeton and Meta AI found that applying GEO techniques increased AI visibility by an average of 40.5%. Authoritative citations alone boosted visibility by nearly 40%. Traditional keyword optimisation? The same research found it actually decreased performance by half a percentage point. The old playbook isn't just less effective. Parts of it are actively working against you.
What makes this interesting for small producers specifically is the opportunity it creates. The established SEO model rewarded scale. Bigger sites, more backlinks, larger content teams. GEO doesn't work that way. A smaller site with highly specific, data-dense, genuinely authoritative content about its niche can outperform a corporate site with outdated coverage. For a six-person vermouth company competing against drinks conglomerates with dedicated digital teams, that's a meaningful structural advantage.
How ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini cite sources differently
Here's the part that caught us off guard and has reshaped how we think about the whole thing. Different AI platforms prioritise completely different citation sources. It's not one game anymore. It's several, running simultaneously, changing on a weekly basis.
ChatGPT weights pre-training authority heavily. It favours content from established, high-trust domains and third-party mentions. If you want ChatGPT to cite your brand, getting mentioned on authoritative industry publications matters more than what's on your own site.
Perplexity takes the opposite approach. It performs real-time web searches for every query, with mandatory inline citations. Content freshness is a direct ranking factor. A newer page with current, specific data can outperform an established domain that hasn't been updated. Monthly queries on Perplexity hit 780 million in May 2025, with over 20% month-over-month growth. That's not a niche platform anymore.
Gemini leans on Google's existing infrastructure but adds entity authority on top. It wants to see your brand with a clear footprint across the web, backed by robust schema markup. The technical foundations overlap with traditional SEO, but the emphasis on entity recognition adds a layer that smaller brands can actually build quite quickly if they're systematic about it.
| Platform | Citation priority | What matters most | Best strategy for small brands |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Pre-training authority | High-trust domains, third-party mentions | Get mentioned on industry publications and review sites |
| Perplexity | Real-time web search | Content freshness, inline citations, specificity | Publish frequently with current data and cited sources |
| Gemini | Entity authority via Google | Schema markup, web footprint, entity recognition | Build robust structured data and consistent brand presence |
We've started building our own tools to monitor how each platform cites sources in our category, and the landscape genuinely shifts week to week. Not quarter to quarter. A source that's heavily cited in Monday's Perplexity results might barely appear by Friday. It's frontier territory and it's moving fast.
Practical GEO strategy for small drinks brands
The practical response has been to stop treating search optimisation as a single discipline and start treating it as three or four parallel strategies. Our structured data and schema markup now serve double duty. We're building content that's formatted for extractability (self-contained paragraphs that make sense in isolation, because that's what AI Overviews pull from). We're tracking earned media mentions differently, understanding which publications carry weight with which models.
We're also making these processes transferable. Through Absolution Labs, we work with other SME drinks businesses, and the common thread is that most small producers haven't started thinking about this yet. That's not a criticism. It's an observation that the window for early-mover advantage is still wide open.
The drinks industry has always been slow to adopt digital tools, and there's wisdom in that caution. But GEO isn't a trend you can wait out. It's the infrastructure of how people will discover products. When 84% of decision-makers already say they're buying based on AI's first suggestion, being invisible to these platforms is a business risk that gets more expensive every month you leave it.
The good news? You don't need a massive budget. You need specificity, authority in your niche, and the willingness to structure your knowledge in ways machines can parse. Small drinks brands have been building that kind of deep, specific expertise for years. Most of them just haven't formatted it for the new audience yet.
Frequently asked questions
What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?
GEO is the practice of structuring website content so that AI systems (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) can extract, cite, and surface it in conversational answers. Unlike traditional SEO, which optimises for ranking in a list of links, GEO optimises for being quoted as a source by AI.
How is GEO different from SEO for small brands?
SEO rewarded scale: bigger sites, more backlinks, larger content teams. GEO rewards depth and specificity. A six-person vermouth company with genuinely authoritative content about its niche can outperform a corporate drinks site with outdated coverage. A 2024 Princeton and Meta AI study found that GEO techniques increased AI visibility by 40.5% on average.
What practical steps can a small drinks brand take to start with GEO?
Start with structured data (schema markup for products, recipes, FAQs), write content that answers specific questions rather than targeting keywords, include cited statistics, and build authoritative content around your genuine expertise. The transition from SEO to GEO favours producers who know their subject deeply.
Does GEO mean SEO is dead?
No. Traditional search still drives traffic and will for years. But the share of queries answered by AI is growing rapidly, and brands that only optimise for traditional search will miss an increasing portion of discovery. The smart approach is to layer GEO on top of existing SEO rather than replacing it.
Robert Berry is co-founder of Asterley Bros, a London-based premium aperitivo company, and Absolution Labs, an AI automation consultancy for drinks businesses.