From Links to Answers: How GEO Decides Who Gets Found
For decades, getting found meant ranking on Google. That era is dissolving. Increasingly, what matters is appearing in the answers that AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Co. give when people ask high-intent questions. In this episode, Christian Salow speaks with Joseph Levi, Co-Founder and CEO of Noise Media Group, about Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and what the shift from rankings to citable answers means for asset managers, wealth managers, and institutional investors.
Our guest
Joseph Levi is Co-Founder and CEO of Noise Media Group, a growth-oriented digital marketing agency that manages around 30 million in annual ad spend for clients including General Electric and IKEA.
What we cover
- Why discovery is moving from a list of links to a single AI-generated answer, and why brands now need to be inside that answer
- The two faces of GEO: how you appear when someone asks about your brand directly, versus how you compete when someone asks a general industry question
- The starting point most firms overlook: making your own website readable for AI through clean metadata, structured data, and a strong FAQ layer
- How authority is actually built, through original research, high-quality reviews, and citations from trusted publications such as the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal
- A concrete use case: how an investor might ask an AI system for the best family offices in the German-speaking market, and how citations shape that answer
- GEO as both a screening step and a distribution channel, including why AI is becoming the first meeting with a prospective client
- Why early movers gain a lasting head start, as they did with the shifts to search and social media
- A practical playbook for institutional players: decide between in-house and agency, fix the website foundation, then build authority by thinking the way a human would assess a firm
One line to remember
Build authority so that not just AI systems trust you, but humans would too. And the time to start is sooner rather than later.