Generative Engine Optimization: Digital Web Solutions Goes Global

What happened

On October 12, Digital Web Solutions (DWS), a Newark, Delaware–based digital marketing agency, launched Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) services across its offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.12 The company says the service is meant to get businesses named when people ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Copilot for recommendations.11 Its slogan for the launch is that SEO gets a brand seen and GEO gets it chosen.12

CEO Dawood Bukhari described the problem this way: clients spent years climbing to the top of Google, and now a buyer can put the same question to ChatGPT and never see the page that ranks there.11 DWS was founded by Vaibhav Kakkar in 2005. It built its business on SEO, link building, digital PR and content services, and it now adds GEO in all four of its markets.12

According to the company, the GEO work has three parts. DWS researches the conversational questions buyers ask, structures client content so AI models can quote it, and implements schema and structured data so company information is machine-readable. Every engagement includes monitoring, so clients can see when an AI system mentions them.12 DWS also says GEO is built on top of its existing SEO services, so the same content is meant to rank on Google and get cited in AI answers.13

The agency backs the launch with performance claims. It says it has been running GEO for its own clients for 18 months. Across those accounts, it reports average gains of 25% in citations, 30% in mentions and 12% in share of voice.13

Why this matters: the click is shrinking

The launch makes more sense against the steady stream of data showing that Google's AI features are cutting into organic traffic. The most widely cited figure comes from Seer Interactive. It tracked 53 brands, 5.47 million queries and 2.43 billion impressions from January 2025 to February 2026. When an AI Overview appeared, organic click-through rate (CTR) was 0.61%, compared with 1.62% on queries without one.8 Other trackers report a 61% drop, from 1.76% to 0.61%, on informational queries where Overviews appear.49

The damage isn't limited to queries with Overviews. Organic CTR on queries without an AI Overview also fell about 41%, from roughly 2.7% to 1.62%. That suggests people are clicking less across the board, not just when a summary sits on top.16 Advanced Web Ranking studied 1.75 million U.S. results in July 2026. It found the top organic result's CTR falls from 20.02% to 9.69% when an AI Overview appears, and the loss gets steeper when Overviews stack with other features like local packs, videos and People Also Ask boxes.2

The pressure also extends beyond Google. One analysis reports that the overlap between Google's top-10 rankings and AI Overview citations fell from 75% in mid-2025 to somewhere between 17% and 38% in early 2026. If that holds, a page-one ranking no longer guarantees a mention in the AI answer.4 A G2 report finds that 51% of B2B software buyers now start their research in AI chat instead of Google.5 Google's AI Mode is reported to have passed one billion monthly users and is now the company's default AI-powered search experience.2 Zero-click rates in AI Mode are put at roughly 93%.8

That is the gap DWS is pitching into. Bukhari's point that a top Google ranking no longer means a buyer sees the page fits closely with the ranking-versus-citation data.

Where the numbers disagree

The industry agrees on the direction but not on the size, and that matters for anyone deciding whether to buy GEO. Estimates of how often AI Overviews appear vary widely. One source cites Click Vision's 2026 data at about 13% of queries.3 A McSaatchi Performance analysis puts it at 43% of sampled U.S. desktop results.2 A third compilation says 48% as of March 2026.10 Some of that gap comes from different methods and samples, but the spread is too wide to treat any one figure as settled.

The estimated payoff of being cited also varies. Some trackers say brands cited in AI Overviews get 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands that aren't cited.13 Others put the lift at 120% more clicks per impression.8 The McSaatchi Performance analysis adds a caveat: even cited pages still got less traffic than ordinary organic results on pages with no AI summary at all.2 In other words, a citation softens the loss more than it restores the old traffic.

The trend isn't moving in a straight line either. Organic CTR on Overview queries reportedly rose from about 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% by February 2026, though it stayed well below the non-Overview benchmark.28 Whether that reflects users adjusting, seasonal patterns or Google's own changes is still unclear.8

On balance, the data supports the core premise behind DWS's launch. Ranking alone is losing value as a measure of visibility, and getting cited is becoming a separate thing that needs its own tracking. The data does not support any precise forecast of how much traffic a GEO program will win back.

A crowded market

DWS is far from the first to sell this. SoCal Digital Marketing launched what it called Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), which it also labeled GEO, in November 2025.17 White-label agency SEO.co announced GEO services in April 2026, aimed at agencies that want to resell the work under their own brand.18 First Page Sage says it launched a GEO service as early as May 2023.15 Rankings of the best GEO agencies, many of them written by agencies that rank themselves, now list a dozen or more firms. Each claims its own framework, from Intero Digital's trademarked GRO to Go Fish Digital's semantic content audits.1420

The methods have largely converged. Across these offerings, GEO means some mix of structured data, entity-focused content, passages written so AI can lift them cleanly, digital PR to earn citations from trusted sources, and tracking of mentions in AI answers.1418 DWS's version, with question research, quotable content, schema work and monitoring, fits that pattern.12 What sets it apart is mostly reach. The four-country rollout gives existing clients in English-speaking markets one package, rather than a new method.

The repackaging question

The most useful framing comes from a competitor. Power Digital's GEO page asks whether GEO is just SEO under a new name and answers "partly," warning that anyone who says otherwise is overselling.16 It argues that much of the work is basic SEO done well, including technical health, structured data and authoritative content. What is genuinely different, it says, is optimizing for how AI systems retrieve and combine sources rather than for rank, and measuring citations because there is no rank position to report.16 The same page tells buyers to be wary of providers who sell GEO as a separate premium service without acknowledging how much it overlaps with SEO.16

DWS appears to have positioned itself on the safer side of that line. It describes GEO as a layer on top of its SEO work, not a replacement, with the same content serving both Google rankings and AI citations.13 That framing fits the competitor's own argument that the sites AI systems cite most tend to be sites that already rank well.16

The 25%, 30% and 12% gains are another matter. They are averages the company reports for its own clients. The launch materials don't say what the baseline was, which questions were tracked, or how a "citation" differs from a "mention."13 Because the industry has no agreed way to measure AI visibility, buyers should treat these figures as signs of direction, not benchmarks they can compare across agencies. Even agencies selling the service say this kind of tracking is less precise than rank tracking and differs by platform.16

The takeaway

The DWS launch says less about one agency's innovation than about where search marketing now stands. GEO has moved from a niche offering to a standard service line. Mid-sized agencies that began with link building and technical SEO are adding it across countries because their clients' Google rankings no longer bring the traffic they used to.1112 The data on falling click-through rates is strong enough to justify the shift. Claims about how much any particular GEO program recovers still need independent checking. For brands, the practical point is that technical SEO and structured data still come first, and the useful question to ask any agency is how it measures being chosen, not only being seen.