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The rise of AI-driven search is forcing brands to rethink how they remain visible in an increasingly machine-mediated world. Recognizing this fundamental shift, Monks, the global, purely digital, data-driven operating brand of S4Capital plc, launches a new white paper titled “Owning the Answer: The Marketer’s Playbook for AEO, GEO and the AI Search Era,” a strategic guide for CMOs and digital leaders, asserting that the shift from keyword-based search to AI-mediated answers has rendered traditional SEO incomplete, demanding the urgent adoption of Engine Optimization (EO) to maintain and grow brand discoverability.
The white paper highlights a fundamental fracture in online discovery: AI agents such as Gemini, Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT are increasingly delivering direct, “zero-click” answers that bypass brand websites entirely. According to Search Engine Land’s 2025 data study¹, AI traffic is up 527% comparing the first months of 2025 with the same period last year, underscoring the rapid shift in consumer behavior.
To address this, the paper introduces Engine Optimization (EO), defined as the strategic discipline of shaping how AI systems interpret, retrieve, and reference a brand across the web. Central to this framework is AI visibility, a new metric that measures how frequently, accurately and favorably a brand and its products are cited in AI-generated responses, replacing traditional rank and clicks.
The report was born out of a think tank within the Monks Asia-Pacific team, where trends in EO have long been growing given the rapid consumer adoption of “zero-click search” in the region. The report builds upon these local market trends and learnings with a global view, taking into account learnings for brands at the global scale.
“In the age of unified growth, our focus must always be on what drives maximum client value and competitive advantage,” said Sir Martin Sorrell, Founder and Executive Chairman of S4Capital. “The strategic imperative is clear: you must be where the consumer is. As discovery is being rewritten by AI, a disciplined, data-led approach like Engine Optimisation is essential for brands to stay visible, trusted, and recommended in every emerging digital ecosystem.”
Alasdair Forsyth, VP, SEO at Monks, said, “Consumers have changed the way they interact with brands and search for information to get answers for their everyday needs. Consider how far we’ve come in the last year with AI-driven search and how much further we could go. Now’s the time to act, to figure out a game plan, and build a base that will likely change multiple times and in multiple ways. This new strategy will force you to optimize in ways that push the boundaries of traditional SEO and build holistic, integrated web optimization strategies, helping you stay ahead of the curve.”
“The definition of value in search is fundamentally changing,” said Tory Lariar, Head of Search at Monks. “Success is no longer just about ranking for keywords. It’s about owning the conversation across the generative AI and agent-based platforms our audience now relies on. This demands a holistic approach. Paid, organic, and generative search must be strategically interwoven to mirror modern user behavior and maximize our digital footprint.”
The report provides the new playbook for discoverability for brands looking to capture leads in a zero-click world. Brands that fail to adapt risk being optimized out of the conversation by the machines. Owning the Answer outlines a practical roadmap for CMOs to build an EO capability, prioritizing structure, citations, and trust signals to influence Large Language Model (LLM) responses.
