GEO goes from experiment to publisher revenue line

Generative engine optimization, the discipline of getting a brand surfaced in AI-generated answers, has moved from a defensive experiment to a billable product in under a year. Future's GEO offering now has more than 30 clients with renewals; Ziff Davis has "a number of clients" tacked onto branded content deals. Future CRO Mike Peralta framed it as turning the traffic loss into a feature: "Fundamentally, the nature of how people discover things is different today. That being said, let's turn that bug into a feature." Steve Horowitz, Ziff Davis president of tech and shopping, said brands come "because of that trust factor, and because they know that ultimately we're not going to compromise the edit to deliver it." The caveat the piece carries: Perplexity blocked Time's agent-facing ads as deceptive last month, yet is still scraping Time's site, and September saw the highest Perplexity agent traffic to Time's site this year.

The crux

Publishers have found a genuine new revenue stream in selling AI visibility, but the platform that controls the answers (Perplexity, and by extension every LLM) can throttle or reprice that visibility at will, so the product rests on a foundation no publisher controls.

Sell-side read

GEO is being sold as an extension of branded content, not programmatic, which means it sits in higher-margin editorial-adjacent budget; the publishers winning are bundling it with existing client relationships and authority, not selling visibility as a standalone.

Watch

The Interactive Advertising Bureau's attribution framework, due in November, which will decide whether AI-visibility campaigns can be credited to conversion and unlock performance budget.