GEO is already deciding Southeast Asia's winners

This post is sponsored by Construct Digital.

By the time somebody fills in the “speak to us” form on your website, they’ve already researched your category with an AI assistant, formed an opinion, and narrowed their options. What used to be the start of a sales conversation is now the receipt for a decision already made.

Bain & Company found that 44% of US online buyers now start their journey inside a large language model or split their search between AI tools and traditional search. McKinsey, surveying nearly 2,000 consumers, found that 61% use AI-powered search to compare specific products side by side, the step right before someone buys.

A client of mine ran into this the hard way. Organic traffic was down 30% year on year, and they’d been briefing agencies to fix their search rankings. Their rankings were never the problem. Their buyers had stopped arriving through search results, and nothing in their analytics could show them where those people had gone.

Most brands cannot see where they stand

For any question your buyers ask, you’re named in the answer, cited as a source or absent while another brand takes your place. That third outcome leaves no click to count and no line in your analytics. It never registers as a loss because there was no pitch to lose, just a buyer who moved on without you ever being in the room.

Almost nobody is measuring this. McKinsey found just 16% of Fortune 500 consumer brands systematically track AI search performance. My experience in Singapore suggests ours is lower.

What it takes to measure AI visibility

No single tool does the whole job yet. We use SEMrush, the closest thing to a workable indicator, though it’s still limited by country, engine and data coverage. Its biggest failure is brand identification.

For one of our clients, a travel eSIM brand, two unrelated companies sharing the same first word get counted as theirs, so we have no reliable overall visibility figure for that brand we can trust. We report citations instead, because a citation is traceable to a specific page.

So, we built our own prompt monitoring tool, tracking what each AI engine says about a client across the questions their buyers actually ask. We run it monthly to track our own optimisations.

Take that same eSIM brand. We looked for the prompts buyers were typing into AI engines and built pages that answered them directly. Across the 19 pages in scope, monthly AI citations went from 87 in April to 256 in August.

The speed surprised me more than the total. We published a page answering whether the brand’s eSIM works on a specific phone model. It went live 1 June and was cited in Google’s AI Overview by 6 June. A second page went up 4 June and was picked up within two days. A page answering the query buyers search for can go from published to cited in under a week.

Four things worth doing this month

1. Ask the engines what your buyers ask. Collate the questions that come up in a real sales conversation, put 10 of them into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI results, and record whether you were named, cited or absent, and who was mentioned instead. An afternoon’s work, or talk to us and we’ll run it for you.
2. Answer the real questions on your own site, in plain words. Marketing language works against you here: “industry-leading connectivity solutions” gives an engine nothing to quote. “Our eSIM works in 190 countries and costs $4 a day” does.
3. Fix your entity basics. One consistent company name everywhere, a Wikidata entry, a current LinkedIn presence, and third-party sources that corroborate who you are. That’s how an engine decides you exist.
4. Check the AI engines can reach you. Crawler access, structured data, server-rendered content. Cheap technical issues that are often broken and easily fixed.

Or hire someone (carefully)

Plenty of agencies will sell you a GEO package: schema fixes, a content refresh, a monthly dashboard, priced like a media retainer. Most haven’t worked out how to deliver it, and you find out months later when nothing has moved.

Ask two questions before you sign anything. How will they establish whether you're named, cited or absent in AI answers? And can they show you that measurement for a client they already have? An agency doing this properly answers both without hesitating.

Nothing’s stopping you

Whether you sort this yourself or hire someone who actually can, none of this is difficult. So the barrier was never skill or budget. Starting costs an afternoon and some unglamorous website housekeeping, while waiting costs you the moment a buyer asks about your category and hears three competitors named instead of you. Nothing in your analytics will ever tell you it happened.

The author is Charanjit Singh, CEO of Construct Digital, a Singapore-based digital consulting agency working with clients across Southeast Asia.