Earlier this year, Beka Ventham from Scale Up Collective was quoted alongside 32 other AI search practitioners in Otterly.AI's roundup, How Top Brands Are Winning on AI Search? Industry Experts Share Tips for 2026. The piece covers 33 perspectives across SEO, content, PR, and digital marketing, including schema markup, Reddit presence, YouTube cadence, Wikipedia authority, entity consolidation, and topical sprints.

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Beka's contribution is clear: "Without a strategy, you're just adding wind to a storm."

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Is SEO dead because of AI search?

SEO hasn’t died, but the rules have been fundamentally and structurally changed by AI. 

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Otterly.AI's own analysis of over a million AI-generated citations found that 95% of AI-generated answers rely on third-party sources, not brand-owned content. Ahrefs research cited in the same piece found only 38% of Google AI Overview citations now come from pages ranking in the top 10, down from 76% just seven months earlier. A brand that ranks first on Google may never appear in an AI-generated answer. A brand with no Google presence at all may be cited constantly.

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Ranking well used to be enough; now it's not even a reliable indicator of visibility. What determines whether you're cited is whether AI systems trust you as a source, and that trust is built through credibility, consistency, and genuine expertise in a defined domain. Technical optimisation on its own just doesn’t cut it anymore. 

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What "adding wind to a storm" actually looks like

Let’s say that a founder reads that Reddit is the most-cited source by LLMs, confirmed by a Semrush study of 230,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. They instruct the marketing team to start building a Reddit presence. Someone else reads that YouTube accounts for 31.8% of social media citations in AI answers, so they plan a video series. Another thread says schema markup is the unlock, so that gets added to the backlog.

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Each of these things might be worth doing. None of them, done in isolation without a foundation underneath, will deliver results the way some people are suggesting. 

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Tactics only work when they're built on something. Before any of those moves, you need to know what your buyer actually asks an AI system when they're evaluating a vendor like you. 

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That means the specific, conversational, often messy question a real person types into ChatGPT or Perplexity when they're trying to work out whether your solution is even worth exploring.

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If you don't know what that question is, adding Reddit posts and schema markup is noise.

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How do I get my brand cited in AI search results?

One contributor in the Otterly.AI piece put it plainly: "If 10 websites contain the same answer, AI summarises it. If only one source contains it, AI cites it."

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However you’d like to frame it, that’s a positioning challenge. Success boils down to what you know that nobody else knows, and whether your content reflects it clearly enough for an AI system to trust it.

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Talk to your customers before you touch any GEO tactic. Ask them how they'd phrase a question to ChatGPT or Perplexity when evaluating a company like yours. Then write the answer to that exact question, in the language they used, before you do anything else. 

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That research will become your first piece of genuinely citable content: a direct answer to a real question a real buyer is asking.

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Queries to AI systems are getting longer and more conversational. Instead of matching a list of keywords to your content, you have to match the way a person actually thinks through a problem out loud.  That requires knowing your audience in a way no GEO tool can tell you.

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GEO strategy for B2B tech scale-ups: why strategy has to come first

A scaling B2B tech company doesn't have the budget or the team to chase every tactic in a 33-person roundup. 

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A founder who tries to implement all of it at once will burn their resources on activities that create noise where they need signal, and still not know why they're not showing up in the answers that matter.

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Strategy tells you which three of those 33 tactics are actually relevant to your business, your audience, and your current stage and which twenty aren't.

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For a company at Series A or Series B, the answer to "how do we win in AI search" starts the same way the answer to "how do we win in any channel" starts: with a clear understanding of who you're trying to reach, what they're actually trying to do, and what you know or do that nobody else does.

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The tactics will naturally follow from that. 

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For the full picture and the other 32 perspectives, read the Otterly.AI piece in full: How Top Brands Are Winning on AI Search? Industry Experts Share Tips for 2026.

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This is also the same reason a marketing function needs someone thinking about strategy before tactics, whether the question is AI search, content, PR, or go-to-market. If you’re interested in learning more about it, we're here.