Search visibility is increasingly moving beyond blue links and website rankings. Status Labs, a digital reputation management firm within Millbrook Companies, is expanding its focus on generative engine optimization (GEO) as AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity increasingly answer questions directly instead of simply directing users to websites.
The company says its GEO work now represents almost a quarter of new client engagements during the first half of 2026, highlighting how quickly AI-generated answers are becoming another consideration for organizations managing digital visibility.
Status Labs was founded in Austin in 2012 around online reputation management. Its latest expansion moves that business into a newer layer of the search ecosystem: understanding how large language models interpret, summarize and recommend information about companies and individuals.
The distinction between traditional search optimization and GEO is important. SEO generally focuses on helping pages appear prominently in search results. GEO addresses a different outcome: whether an AI system includes a company in a generated answer, how it describes that organization and which third-party sources it uses to construct the response.
That shift is already visible across the major search platforms. Google has expanded AI Overviews and AI Mode, while its 2026 updates have pushed Search toward more conversational and context-aware interactions. Google says AI Mode has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users globally, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch.
For brands, that creates a new visibility problem. A company can rank well for conventional keywords yet receive little or no representation when a prospective customer asks an AI assistant which providers operate in a particular market.
Status Labs says it began studying this behavior in 2023 before formally launching its GEO offering in October 2025. Its current approach combines language-model diagnostics, semantic content mapping and what it describes as credibility-signal engineering. The objective is to understand how AI systems interpret a company’s existing information and identify gaps in the external sources that influence generated answers.
The company also positions earned media and independent sources as an important part of this process. Its 2026 AI Reputation Report says roughly 60% of searches now end without a click to an external website. The report cites Semrush research showing that AI-referred visitors converted at 4.4 times the rate of organic-search visitors in the study it analyzed. Those figures come from Status Labs’ report and should be treated as research cited by the company rather than a universal benchmark for every industry.
The broader market is moving in the same direction. Gartner published a March 2026 Market Guide for Answer Engine Visibility Tools, describing a growing category designed to help brands maintain visibility as users incorporate answer engines into discovery and purchasing journeys. Gartner has also published guidance on integrating SEO, answer engine optimization and GEO into a unified search strategy.
That creates an emerging technology category around monitoring AI-generated brand mentions, identifying source gaps, measuring answer visibility and connecting those signals to conventional search performance.
For enterprise marketing teams, the implications extend beyond content production. AI search visibility increasingly touches SEO, digital PR, corporate communications, brand management, analytics and reputation management. Teams may need to monitor how different models describe their organization, which sources are repeatedly cited and whether important products, executives or areas of expertise are being accurately represented.
Status Labs’ No. 10 position on the 2026 Austin Business Journal advertising and marketing agencies list provides business context for the company’s expansion, but the more significant industry development is the changing definition of search visibility itself. As Google and other AI platforms turn search into increasingly conversational experiences, optimization is moving from simply winning a ranking to understanding how machines construct the answer.
Market Landscape
The search market is entering a period in which traditional SEO, paid search and AI-generated answers increasingly coexist rather than operate as separate channels.
Google says AI Mode has surpassed 1 billion monthly users globally, while its AI-powered Search experiences are designed to support longer, more conversational queries. Gartner’s 2026 research similarly describes enterprise SEO as evolving toward unified search visibility that accounts for LLM-powered search requirements.
This creates opportunities for vendors offering answer-engine visibility, GEO monitoring, content intelligence and AI reputation analysis. It also changes the responsibilities of enterprise teams. Marketing leaders can no longer rely solely on rankings, impressions and website traffic to understand how their brands appear during AI-assisted research.
For platforms such as Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, the transition also introduces a new relationship between search, content and advertising. Google is already testing new advertising formats inside AI Mode, including experiences built with Gemini that combine advertising with AI-generated product guidance.
As these systems mature, GEO is likely to become increasingly connected to broader search marketing and brand intelligence platforms rather than remaining an isolated content discipline.
Top Insights
- Status Labs is expanding its GEO practice as AI-generated answers become an increasingly important layer of brand discovery alongside traditional search and paid advertising.
- Google’s rapid expansion of AI Mode demonstrates how conversational search is changing the environment in which brands compete for visibility and consumer attention.
- GEO extends conventional SEO by examining whether AI systems accurately represent companies, products and expertise when generating direct answers for users.
- Enterprise teams increasingly need visibility metrics covering search rankings, AI-generated mentions, source citations, brand accuracy and downstream business outcomes.
- The emerging GEO market connects SEO, digital PR, reputation management and AI analytics as organizations adapt to machine-mediated information discovery.
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