← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#801: Brandlight CEO Imri Marcus on GEO, AI browsers, and the new search experience
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- [00:02]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
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Commercial Announcer
Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
What is this, your first date?
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Oh no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Dish has been
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Dish Network Commercial Announcer
connecting communities like yours for the last 45 years, providing the TV you love at a price you can trust. Watch live sports news and the latest movies, plus your favorite streaming apps all in one place. Switch to Dish today and lock in the lowest price in satellite TV starting at 89.99amonth with our two year price guarantee. Call 888-@dish or visit dish.com today.
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Commercial Announcer
The agile brand.
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Podcast Narrator/Producer
Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
the brands you know and love.
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Podcast Narrator/Producer
I'm Greg Kilstrom, your host and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information go to teksystems.com now let's dive in.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
For the last two decades now, marketers have lived by the decisions one company has made and the experience customers have with that company's search bar and in many cases, browser. But what happens when Google is dethroned by an AI? Agility requires not just adapting to new channels, but fundamentally rethinking the entire customer discovery journey. When the rules are rewritten practically overnight, it's about moving from optimizing for keywords to influencing AI driven conversations. Today we're going to talk about the rise of AI browsers and Generative Engine Optimization or Geo. Whether it's using ChatGPT or perplexity to search the web, or with tools like OpenAI's Atlas browser, we're seeing a convergence of search, shopping and conversation that could fundamentally change how brands are discovered, evaluated and purchased, creating a new battleground for customer data and attention.
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Podcast Narrator/Producer
Tell me Discuss this topic.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
I'd like to welcome Imrie Markus, CEO and co founder At Brand Light. Imre, welcome to the show.
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Thank you, Greg. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah. Looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely a timely topic on a lot of people's minds right now. So before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Brand Light.
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Sure. So I am Remarkus, I'm the CEO and I'm one of the co founders at brandlight where we help the world's biggest brand win in this really new era of now AI driven discovery where you have customers that don't just click search results, they actually ask AI engines what to buy, where to go, really, which brands to trust. So in this era, Brand Light really is the control room for AI visibility. We help the world's biggest brands measure influence and monetize how they show up across all AI environments. ChatGPT, perplexity now AI browsers and agentic shopping experiences. So definitely a new era in marketing and we're trying to be the secret sauce to the CMO in that shift.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, love it. Yeah. And I mean definitely, you know, pouring through the holiday shopping data from end of 2025, one of the things that struck me the most was just the extent, you know, I talk with a lot of marketers and obviously marketers are using AI and all that stuff. But I was struck by the extent that consumers are using AI in this process. And that really kind of leads to the first thing I wanted to talk about, which is just redefining brand discovery, which has been traditionally rooted in search. And certainly search isn't going away, but it's certainly changing and the things you mentioned are certainly helping to change this. So, you know, you framed this as a battle over who owns the data. From a brand executive's perspective, how does the power dynamic with platforms like Perplexity or OpenAI's Atlas differ from the one they've had with Google for the past over 20 years at this point, yeah, very different.
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
And from multiple assets, a you're not competing to be a result on page one, you're now actually competing to be the answer. I think one of the most fundamental shifts is that the legacy market in Funnel is collapsing to an extent. For 20 years, the model was you optimize for a click, that click gets you to visit a website. That's what you measured and then you track conversions. Now you really are starting to see that the customer journey is happening inside a black box. Right. The moment of discovery is happening inside these AI engines. Right. So that's been taken away from Google. But then something much bigger starts to happen. Consideration happens within that black box. Right. Google was the door to the Internet, but then you got met with 25 blue links. Now you have that moment of discovery, but then you have an AI that can act as a frontline salesperson for your brand or for your competitor. Right. And probably by the time this errors, because everything is shifting so quickly, we already are starting to see conversions happening within that environment. You can actually make purchasing decisions from within ChatGPT, definitely from within the browsers. So a convergence of the entire marketing funnel and it's all happening very, very quickly.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, yeah, well, and in order to influence those, I mean, you know, I've been doing SEO since pre Google, right. So you know, those platforms that probably many don't even remember anymore, like AltaVista and Lycos and you know, and probably many others, obviously it's gotten a lot more sophisticated over the years. Google has gotten very sophisticated, but there's still a certain set of levers, so to speak, that you use to influence search rankings. And, and while the algorithms may evolve over, over the years it's, you know, SEO has become a rather mature practice. But in an AI native browser or an AI chat interface, what are the new levers or what are the, you know, what's, what's the strategy for maintaining brand narrative control or gaining that influence and kind of this new paradigm.
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Yeah, great question. Maybe I'll start with the inverse because yes, Google has matured and the algorithm, but also like you said, SEO is a very mature industry with well defined best practices now that can kill a non agile brand right now with a shift to AI search and AI visibility. If they're solely applying SEO tactics to an environment that really doesn't work like traditional search fundamentals still matter, but delivers, like you said, have completely changed. Keyword stuffing doesn't work nearly as well when you have LLMs that really understand semantic meaning. Backlink schemas, they don't really work. When you have models that can weigh authority and consistency over just link volume. Same for title tags, generic content, all of that is getting thrown out the window. Really add to that that this is a changing environment and the velocity of change is really astounding. Right. So when you ask ChatGPT a question, it will go out. It can read through dozens, sometimes hundreds of articles and synthesize an answer. So the approach we're taking and that approach allows us, and then the brands we work for be completely agnostic, is to be very, very data driven. Right. So when we give a brand a recommendation, it's after we've analyzed really billions of points of data about them and their vertical. When someone asks a question in your vertical, where does ChatGPT go? Where does perplexity go? Right. Then which types of pieces of content will it choose to dive deeper into than to synthesize into the answer? So by the time we give you a recommendation, not only about your visibility, but about the next actions that you need to take, we have essentially reversed engineered the parts of the Internet that the AI engines and environment are really being attracted to. Right. And that allows us to again, be agnostic to these changes and for the brands we work with to know that even if the industry keeps changing, and it will surely keep changing for the next few years, right. They get it each week, each cycle. Essentially a data driven answer that can propel the revisibility.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
And to your point, you know, SEO took a while to, I would say, gain any level of real sophistication. I mean, you, you used to be able to put a keyword on a page and, and rank for something that in this day and age you have no right to, to rank for. So, you know, obviously SEO matured quite a bit. Even, even if GEO matures much faster, it's still got, we're gonna go through some changes. Right. So, so to that, to that point, having a, having a flexible way of, of being able to adapt to that seems just, you know, it seems pragmatic.
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Fair amount.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And, and so from, from a CMOS perspective then, you know, they've probably been, you know, their SEO and their paid search budgets have been, whether they've fluctuated over the years, they've been sad. And it's, it's an understood thing and it's an understood line item in their budgets and their team structure and everything like that. What is GEO and this, you know, AI browsers and all this new way of brand discovery, what does it mean for budget allocation, team structures? You know, how should CMOs be thinking?
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Yeah, I think that's one, by the way, of the most fundamental and important questions for CMO to answer. So a few things are happening and a few things will continue to happen. When I spoke to Fortune 50 CMOS 12 months ago, for most of them, we needed to explain why it's even important.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah.
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
And we did a big survey about it. 95 of CMOs at enterprises have already gotten asked about it by their CEO or board. So everyone is aware. In 2025, most budgets came as they should from the SEO department. And you are starting to see an evolution of the SEO department and the content teams, which is 100% correct to do. That being said, this shift is even more foundational. We have only seen in 2025 a real impact on traffic that sits with search teams. In 2026, we'll start seeing media budgets being inducted. Right? What happens when Google Ads move to Google's AI environments? So now to answer your question, after a very long drilling, this needs to sit with the CMO and with the VP of marketing. When we work with a brand, we are always in close contact, even with Fortune 100, always in closed contacts to the VPs of marketing, to the CMOs. But then we deploy solutions to different teams. So we have solutions that we deploy for geo for the search teams, but we have solutions that we deploy to the social teams. We have solutions that we deploy for partnerships. How do you work with publishers? Right. That affects your AI visibility. So you really need to start thinking about it not as a singular practice, but as a marketing channel that's on the rise. And you need to allocate really intelligently and strategically towards that because your consumers are starting to move to this environment faster than any other marketing cycle we've ever seen before.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
And you also mentioned some changes, you know, some of those SEO best practices, backlink strategies, even creating, I would say volume of content over quality of content in some cases, if there had to be a trade off, kind of a legacy of SEO days, let's call it, what does this shift do to a content strategy?
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Yeah, again, great questions. So first of all, maybe to frame it, you can think of it, of it as if the AI result page is now almost like a new retail shelf. And when you analyze, when you have the ability to analyze all of the data, all of the different pieces of content, all of the different domains that are impacting your vertical, whether brand owned, social media or third party owned, you start to see almost a heat map of the Internet and within that, what type of content works, Right? So I can give you high level best practices, right? You want structured product information, you want it to be consistent, you want it to be refreshed. These are all things that will matter for sure. You want to speak at the product line level versus just the brand level. Because people ask about jobs to be done in these environments, rather about brands, right? No one goes and asks, is Apple a good company? You go in and say, you know, I'm a hobbyist photographer looking for a new smartphone. What's the best option in the market. For me, those all are extremely valid. Then there's a deeper layer that if you have the right data, you can exercise and that's really understanding for your brand exactly what type of content is already working in each of the different AI environments. So where should you be placing it, how should you be writing it, which structures and what should you be even talking about? And you can extract all of that with the right data. This is at least what we've been helping our brands do.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, yeah. Well, and then the, the next logical thing is how do we measure this? Right. And, and so let's, let's, let's go there a little bit here. And again to I, the, the best parallel is, seems to be SEO. And, and it's because I think there, there are some similarities and yet there's, there's some fundamental differences as well. As you had mentioned, you know, we've been tracking things like, you know, clicks, impressions, conversions from SEO world, in, in many cases there is no click or you know, there were someone's having a conversation with ChatGPT or others. How do brands begin to measure influence and performance when the customer journey, that, that buying process, that funnel that you described earlier is happening within an interface? You know, what kind of metrics are we using instead?
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Yeah, that's really the hardest part. Right. Because traditional digital marketing really was built on clicks, then impressions, then conversion, tracking. And in AI interfaces, a customer may never even click. Right. It's the first time in history where as a brand you can add a piece of content that no person ever sees, but the AI engine saw it and it's now completely affecting entire customer journeys. Right. ChatGPT used it to influence 10 million people, but none of them actually saw it. So the measurement really shifts to influence how often are you included? When you are included with what type of sentiment, how are you described? Right. How accurate is the model about you? Does it accurately represent your brand? Right. So brands need to measure things like share of voice in these AI environments, recommendation, rate positioning within the engine, and how correctly are you being described versus your competitors? The goal really isn't traffic. It's been the one answer that really gets recommended. Now this is essentially the first act of the market. The market will evolve to full on attribution. This is actually work that we're now doing with our clients. But if you take the perspective and you spoke about Google's rise and the evolution of SEO, everything is very new, but is evolving faster than any other marketing channel that we've seen before.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, yeah. And so for those that are listening to this and maybe not as far along as they would like, are there early signals? Are there early indicators that, okay, hey, we're, we're on the right path, we just need a little, you know, to nudge things in the right direction or maybe we're way off. Like, how do you, are there ways that someone could very quickly gauge how far they need to go and how quickly?
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Yeah, I definitely start with two main things. You need to fully understand what your AI visibility share is. So out of a set of high intent questions customers are asking in your category, really, how often are you included as the answer? So that's one. The second representation, accuracy and sentiment, it's great to be included, but when you are included, does the AI describe you correctly? Right. Are you differentiated? Do you come up with a negative sentiment with the positive sentiment? So they touch on both the unbranded visibility that you have as well as the branded visibility. And there are many other things to measure, but I would definitely say these are the first two. Every CMO should know about their business.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, yeah. And looking out a little further, as, as you mentioned, and certainly we've all seen, you know, search, if you can imagine, you know, search at one point didn't have ads all throughout. Right. So it's hard to even remember those days, some days, but AI certainly will. There's going to be ways that it gets monetized and it's sort of the inevitable. Right. So how do you see AI browsers or AI chats becoming the next advertising platform? And what does this mean for CMOs that are planning down the road?
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Yeah, okay, great question and a few very interesting points. First of all, it's inevitable. Media budgets are the biggest part of most budgets and all of the major AI platforms are already fiddling with it. I think two things will happen. I think we'll see a first version that's somewhat akin to what we're used to. It will be, you know, it's easier to start with what you know. Yeah, right. So we'll see a first version of Sponsored Answers. Probably Perplexity has already tried that quite a bit for the past 12 months. But then because we have a new modality, Right. That sits on a completely new set of axioms, I think we'll see an evolution of what ads even look like in these environments. So the evolution from. And no one totally knows what will that look like, but we have a new material. Right. We used to build houses out of wood and then you started using concrete. Now the first phase, you build the same type of house, but you use concrete and it's just much more stable. But then you understand, oh, I can do totally different things. It's a completely new material. So I think we'll kind of see something like that. It will start somewhat similar and then completely morph and change.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah, yeah.
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
That's for. What will it look like from the brand's perspective and the commercial perspective? I think this is actually going to be one of the more violent changes CMOs will experience if they are unprepared. Google is now fiddling with AI ads. Google CEO went on stage to say they're essentially solely focusing on their AI search. That will completely replace their legacy search sooner than later. When that happens, they also flip a switch on their ads model once they think they can create a relevant and significant one in their AI environments. So that will happen very fast. Right. And that probably will happen in 2026. And CMOs definitely need to be prepared. Even though that's not in full effect. It's actually something we've been working on with the CMOS we work with just to prepare them for that moment. So even though a lot of the work is around Geo right now with them, this is definitely something that's coming.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll definitely have to talk more about that in a year or so. It's going to be amazing what transpires. Well, Emory, thank you so much for joining today. Really appreciate your ideas and insights. One last question for you before we wrap up though. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Yeah, so I think in my role you have to stay really close to reality. No assumption of what used to work in marketing. I think this is a time where you really have to be able to analyze from first principles what's happening in your space and then build strategies and tactics based on that. I think that in this category, agility is a requirement now. It's no longer, you know, a mindset that you get to choose to have. I think that CMOs that are agile will start to completely flourish in these next few years.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Yeah. Love it.
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Podcast Narrator/Producer
Well, again, I'd like to thank Imre
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
Marcus, CEO and co founder at Brand
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Podcast Narrator/Producer
Light for joining the show.
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Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
You can learn more about Emory and
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Podcast Narrator/Producer
Brand Light by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode hit, subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKillstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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Commercial Announcer
The Agile Brand.
- [25:52]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
And Doug there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [26:02]
Commercial Announcer
Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird.
- [26:04]
Podcast Host (Greg Kilstrom)
What is this your first day?
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Oh no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
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Imrie Markus, CEO and Co-founder of Brand Light
Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty.
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Commercial Announcer
The Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from I know the way to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Arrow get ready to go from make it happen to Made it happen and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu Jack Welch MBA to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chevin as many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.