How Will AI Change Marketing in 2026?

Hey Business Besties, welcome back to Female Founderworld, it's Jasmine, I'm the host of the show, and today I'm chatting with Emma Grace Moon, she's the founder of Grace Studio. We've been speaking for a long time about this topic, and what we're going to be diving into today is a lot around Geo, which is a term that people may or may not know, and refers to basically search engine optimization as it applies to the world of AI and LLM. Exactly, so before we dive into that, I want to talk through your story a little bit, like you have done workshops with us before, you've hosted group coaching calls with us before, but for people that haven't attended any of those, and also the recordings that in our Business Bestie library, if anyone wants to check those out, but for people that haven't attended those, let us know your background and how you got to do this kind of work. Yeah, totally, so I'm the founder of Praise, we're an editorial and AI optimization company. I started Praise at 21 years old, I came to New York at 18, and I got a message from my boss at the time when I was in house at a D to C brand saying that I needed to prove out the return on investment that I was bringing to the company for my salary and more, or else hence I would be fired. And in the moment, it was a freak out, but then after it really gave me almost like an approach to business that I probably wouldn't have had if I didn't get that push, and I fell into affiliate marketing, and I was specifically in influencer marketing at the time. So the task that I was given was to prove out the return of influencer campaigns that I was doing for the company. I ended up proving it out through affiliate marketing and driving my salary and more through the revenue. And then from there, I got a tip from a friend that this same affiliate marketing model was going to impact the PR space, right? So digital media companies like Conde Nast and Vox, etc. So I started to experiment with pitching to media, with affiliate links offering commission, to publishers, that started to kick off, and then I decided to go into my own company, which is praise. Because that's, I feel like you were quite early on this affiliate PR thing. I worked in, in media for a long time. I was a fashion and a beauty editor, and when I started, we weren't really doing affiliate links very much. And then as ad revenue started slowing down for a lot of these publishers, they thought, oh shit, we need to figure out another way to make money, and then affiliate links became a big part of that. So I feel like you were really early on that. And you've worked with some pretty, some brands that I think a lot of our community will really know. Can you rattle off a couple of them? Yeah, we've worked with Jones Road, we've worked with Great Jones, we've worked with Victoria Beckham Beauty, a lot in the home design space and the skincare and makeup space. And since 2021, when I launched my company, we've driven $15 million in revenue from PR, which is really great. But starting this year in April and the shift into AI and why we just started to go into this is because we saw an April Google through Safari had its first decline and search activity, which is pretty great breaking ever. Yeah, this is and that was no one really talked about that. And we're like, this signals the end of everything. Everything's about to change. Exactly. Yeah. So that was a big indicator for us. And obviously our work is getting pressed for our clients and getting them in media. People are no longer going to Google and something across a vogue article or something like that. Where are consumers going? So we had a hypothesis that people were going to chat to be tea. They were going to LLMs for their product recommendations, because also in July of this year, 44 out of 50 of the top news sites have seen a decline year over year in traffic, which is also pretty groundbreaking. So this year has been the shift year in media and online commerce. So we had a hypothesis that if we could marry our PR approach, our data driven PR approach, and GEO, which is generative engine optimization, we could influence and increase the search activity and the sessions and referrals that brands can get from chat to BT. So essentially helping brands come up when someone is searching like best hiking boots for this specific trip. So we set out. We had a few beta clients and after 10 days of implementing our strategy, we influenced one of our clients, chat to BT sessions by 85% increase. Wow. And their site weight sessions, which was about 20% increase. That's incredible. Yeah. Like you're like someone who's really good at predicting the future. Yeah. And then you're early on this. And I don't know, it's just something I wanted to call out. But we're going to talk about this specific things that you do to increase that traffic and like the work that you do. And obviously this is a space that is changing and we want to talk about what's working. But I want to spend a little bit of time like first, just understanding a little bit more like at a top level about what this shift means. And what it means for brands, we have a lot of consumer brands in the business bestie community and who are like listening to the show right now. And they're thinking, okay, people are finding me through, they're finding me through Google search that I'm focusing on pitching press. What do you think this means for brands who are pursuing like a now what you would consider like a traditional marketing strategy? Yeah. So I think specifically for PR and media, as we were early days in the affiliate PR space, right? So turning PR into a growth engine for brands. And we did this because we saw ad revenue down like you mentioned. And media prefers working with brands that are offering a commission and have a competitive growth focused revenue driven channel, right? When we were building those relationships, we really saw how the backbone of media was functioning, right? Like they were prioritizing brands that were offering that 20% commission. They were including us in more content, right? If we started to perform really well for them. But now we're seeing, okay, if the consumer is no longer going to vogue and that media company is no longer getting that commission cut because they're going to chat to be T. And also the whole media ecosystem relies on traffic and clicks. That's like how they prove out how big their company is. And if that's no longer a thing, I think brands are going to have to get really clear on their PR strategy and have an even more data focus approach than they do now. Because some brands have gotten away with not having to do affiliate or commission. They've thought about affiliate PR, but maybe it's not the right thing. They've had a PR agency for a while that's just getting good traction. And it's just it's good for now. But we're about to go into a different world that you're going to have to have a data mine when it comes to your PR strategy. So that's one shift, I think. So if you don't have an affiliate strategy, get one. I'm going to put it in the show. And I said, we have a workshop with you that is available. Yeah. People can check out if they want to do that. Yeah. Yeah. But I think the second thing for brands in general, it's like the like purchase journey is condensing because visibility, education, awareness, and conversion are all going to one point. It's no longer, okay, we see an ad here, and then we see a billboard here, and then we see this here. Someone is going to chat you BT asking for the best lip gloss for this. They're getting that company is going to have. Yes, it's wild. There was a recent press release that I saw that OpenAI is the most profitable company in the world right now, which is insane because that just shows how we should all just go work for. So yeah, I think it's just what is brand now? That is such a big question that I don't have the answer to at the moment. I think we're all trying to figure that out, but it is something that I really advise brands to think about. If the search window to conversion window is just shrinking, what does that mean? And how can we still educate and get in front of consumers, which is GEO, which we'll talk about some strategies there? But if you're not going to your website and you're not seeing the beautiful branding, what does it mean to have a brand? I just pulled up the statistic here that I read this week that chat GPT is now Walmart's second biggest traffic, like second biggest source of traffic, and it's driving more than 20% of Walmart's traffic. Yeah, I'm not surprised. That's insane. I'm not surprised at all. That is so insane to me. That's crazy. Okay, so let's talk about how brands get featured in or get like recommended by chat GPT because like we've also seen that chat GPT is now incorporating checkout. That's new to you, right? Yeah, that happened just a few weeks ago. Yeah, and it's on a wait list, but it's just it's going to become just where every brand needs to be. So there's a few things that currently influence LLMs. So the first thing obviously is press, like authority is so important, but it's a specific kind of press. This is a hot take, but I think majority, let's say a brand gets featured in 50 different pieces of coverage. We're heading in a direction where I think only three of the 50 are actually going to impact that business. Interesting. From a traffic perspective, from an LLM influence perspective, where now, you know, it's great to get mentioned in a 50 best food gifts for dad, right? A kind of article in Buzzfeed or whatever it is. But if people aren't even going to that article or they're not even clicking through, like then what is the impact of that LLMs from our research are really referencing a set list of articles. And it really varies by the prompt that the user is giving. It varies by the brand and the category. So it isn't like a specific category of press coverage. It really depends on the brand and the product you're selling. So it's really important for you to have the capability to search for those prompts and then figure out what specific press pieces are influencing those prompts. So press is really helpful. Also, smaller blogs and influencers, smaller content sites are really great. You'd be surprised. Some small blogs you've never heard of are influencing LLMs. Why? Why are they pulling that is the data source? I don't understand. It goes back to authority because when you think about it, I mean, I know that Vogue and these big conglomerates are influencing some capacity, right? And it wants to create a balance very factual kind of resource for you, right? Like its whole task is to find an answer that is the best answer out there. So by pulling a bunch of different sources and its whole training model is, okay, this is going to be the best answer. So smaller content sites can be really helpful. Influencer, I would also say having a really good SEO strategy at your core is really important. I've seen a lot of misinformation online where people are saying GEO is the new SEO and it's just so not true. It's not true at all because SEO is the backbone still. Like you still need to be ranked in those blogs. You still need to have an optimized site. But at the end of the day, GEO is almost like SEO's little sister. I like to think of it that way. So it's important to have both. So then after SEO, technical backend optimization is really important. So when you think about the backend schema of your website, your image schema, like making sure from the backend AI can crawl your website at a really fast speed, what does that mean? The backend of your website has a bunch of different coding, right? And you need to make sure that it's updated so AI can crawl the site super quickly. SEO, it's a little bit of a different function. So think of it as the infrastructure is just slightly tweaked of the backend of your website. As nothing to do with the creative or front end of your website, yes, updating your product pages to be a little bit more specific, like set a fill, for example, recently this year, updated there. I think it was their facial cleanser, one of their products, their PDP, their product page. It went from just facial cleanser to facial cleanser for poor, like poor minimizing skin or something like that. It was very specific. Why? Because AI wants to see what is the use case of this product? Because then that will help it match to a prompt. So when you think about when you're putting in a prompt into chat to BT, best facial cleanser for my type of skin, it's searching for those keywords all over the internet. And so if you have that on your product page already, it just makes it easier for chat to BT to be like, okay, I've got the answer. So the structure of your website is really important. And then I think that's like really the core, right? So PR, blog, and smaller content sites, a good SEO backbone of your website. And then the technical implementation, a technical optimization. You mentioned like smaller blog sites. And you also said influencer, I think in there. Did you mean by influencers? Did you mean influencers that are like have websites, small blogs that I think, or do you mean social media? Yeah, blogs and small sites. Yeah. Does social media have any play on this? From our research, no, that could change. One thing that I will say is Reddit. That is huge right now. I've heard this. Yeah, the online forums, the community forums, really influence LLMs, which is pretty crazy because I can't remember the last time I thought about Reddit. Totally, at least personally, with the demographic. But yeah, it's going to be more important for brands to have a Reddit strategy. So that means having a brand profile on Reddit and monitoring forums of people asking about products that you sell or maybe your company too, making sure things are factual, right? Like people are saying correct information. If not, maybe jump in having a brand presence on Reddit is going to be more important. And making sure that you have some sort of conversation going about your business on it. That's so interesting. I've never even thought about doing a Reddit strategy. I know. I wouldn't even know where to start. I know you can do Reddit ads as well, who we know is, okay, that's fascinating. There's one part of running a business that tapped GPT or Google just consult me and that is business financed. It is one of the most gate-capped areas of business and yet it is what separates running a thriving company from really just having a very expensive hobby. Every founder at every stage of business deserves to feel confident managing your money and that's why FEMA Founderworld is partnering with Mercury to bring you cash cap. It's a free, three-part live workshop series designed to teach women in business the financial skills that we need to scale. 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I want to talk a little bit more about the specifics of where you get press and what impacts that has and where you should be going. So you said it is super, super specific to the brand. You need to talk to me a little bit more about that. So you don't obviously don't have to tell me the clients that you've like piloted this with, but maybe some broader categories or types of brands and then the press that you saw influencing how they were being recommended by LLM. And also, do you want to, can you define LLM? Yeah, so large language model. Yeah, so chat chbt, perpline, t, LLM? I don't know. Oh, Manusai, I'd say it's apparently. One out of China, I don't know, I use it, I think all my daughter is being sold something. Or Grock, for example, yeah, those are all LLMs. Yeah, something that we notice is, like four of the prompts that we were running this beta test for. So we analyze a few things. We analyze when our client came to us and said we want to rank in LLMs. We looked at their industry-wide visibility scores, so basically taking all of the search traffic that people are coming through into chat chbt or in majority of the LLMs, like Gemini, etc, across their industries. So let's say it's cookware, for example, right? And then we looked at specific prompts. So we looked at best blue cookware or best cookware under $200 and the visibility score and those specific prompts. So we had about 20 prompts that we analyze as well. And then after we made the implementations, we saw that brand started to rank under prompts that originally did not rank in at all. And it was after we targeted specific press articles that we saw and we have different technologies in place that we can do this research of, okay, in this specific prompt, what PR articles are influencing this and other blog and small content sites. One thing that I think some people are getting wrong about doing this back end research themselves is I see a lot of people saying, I put in my chat chbt what like best cookware under $200 and then what are the articles ranking under this? Asking chat chbt for a strategy for this. But we have to remember, chat chbt is very biased to us. Like it wants to give us an answer based on us, right? So your answer is going to be very different than my answer. So for any brands that are approaching like trying to find the press articles, it's really important to have an expert praise, going to just shout out praise, or someone else that has that kind of unbiased approach. Because if you do search this, you're going to get a very different answer than I am. And the article is very, it really, there's no rhyme or reason, it's just for some reason, it's like this article or that. And then that can influence your strategy. How do you think about, or like what's your process of auditing how a brand is performing at the beginning and then after you've run your test or done your work to help them? Yeah, so I'm just thinking from the perspective of someone who actually does want to go in for your and obviously working with an expert is the best way to do it. Yeah, but someone who's sitting there and they're like, I just, I don't know, am I being recommended? You can see your chat chbt is a referral source, right? Yeah. How do you say that? So you can go into into Google and your back end like Google Analytics. Yeah, yeah. So you can go into Google Analytics and you can see the referral traffic there. And then you can also, there's different technologies out there. There's peak AI is one of them start to do some research because there's going to be other SaaS products that we're going to have to get to be able to determine the lift from LLMs. But Google Analytics is really key. And then we have other technologies in place that we can see that overall visibility score, right? So we're not only analyzing chatchbt, we're analyzing perplexity, we're analyzing Gemini. And we look at visibility score, right? So per prompt and also for the category at large. And then we look at the referral traffic. And then we monitor that every single week. So when we make our implementations, whether that's a like tech implementation to the website, adjusting a product page, a title, whether it's maybe landing a press article that's influencing LLMs, it changes very rapidly. When you think about SEO, it takes about six months minimum for you to see the return and the lift on your website from updating and optimizing your SEO on your site. Whereas GEO after our implementation, so it was 10 days. Like it's so quick. So it's really important to look at visibility scores and also traffic from GA on a weekly basis, even daily if you wanted to, because then you'll be able to see that like upwards trend and it changes really quickly. In terms of any math tests or publishes that you think are being favored, is it, is it like an allure, a burger, there is kind of legacy brands getting favored because they're more credible or they've been around for longer, you're not really seeing that. I'm seeing mostly it's the publishers that are getting the most traffic and just have the bigger names but really mail, not necessarily daily mail. I would say like dot dash Meredith, they have a really great SEO strategy. So when you think about publishers who are updating their articles to rank in Google in the first swipe. Yeah. You're searching like best lipsticks. Those are the publishers more often than not that you want to target because when you think about it, that article is driving a ton of visibility, a ton of awareness, and that is like authority and right. And so LLM see that. And they're like, okay, a lot of people are trusting this article. A lot of people are going to this article, whether that's birdie or people magazine. So if it can help you narrow down if a brand is coming up when you type in Google and you see them in that first swipe, that can be a directional cue for you. But then again, you need some of these like more technology platforms that are catered to determining AI and what the LLM's are referencing. This is so fascinating. I'm really interested in what this means for like media guests because it's like they're servicing this product that they know actually getting any benefit from. Yeah. And how that's green. What that's going to do over time because you think where's the incentive for them to continue to like want to rank in Google if they're not actually getting any benefit from it. And they're actually just fueling revenue for a competitor which Chester BT will become a competitor. So I'm curious about where that's going to go. But also for influences, do you think that this will make influence a marketing less influential or more influential in terms of having real people recommending stuff on social media? I wish I could project the future. But I do say I feel like people are we're human right? We love connection. We love seeing someone. We love talking to someone. So I have this like idea that I think we're going to get to a place where the pendulum will swing to AI and we'll get all of our recommendations from there. But then like in human nature, we're going to crave that community. We're going to crave that connection that I think like both like the efficiency of AI and also the connection of influencer marketing are really going to soar. So I think if anything influencer marketing is going to actually increase in popularity and impactfulness for businesses, I also think that like loyalty programs when you think about influencer marketing but like more embedded in your business like loyalty programs for your customers are going to be a little bit more popular because when you think about it too, like that can be really helpful to connect with a brand to be invited to events to get first merged to community building exactly that I think that just from reading I don't shout out to the book sapiens. It's been like the best book that I've read this year because it really shows like how humans adapt and how we are attracted to optimization and efficiency. But also like we're human at the end of the day that we want that connection. And I think that can come up in in the business world too. So I think influencer marketing is very primed. And I think specifically for influencers, I don't know about you but when I go through TikTok and I see ad, I just swipe right through. I'm like I don't want an ad. I know you're selling me something that I think actually affiliate and embedded in influencer marketing is going to become more popular because it's more authentic. It's yeah, use my link if you want versus this is a very catered ad too. I only created this because I was paid for it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. Yeah, someone is listening. They are a consumer brand builder and they want to do something in the next week that is going to have some impact on their G or strategy and what should they do? What's the one thing the next thing that they should do? I'm going to say follow my newsletter business wise on subbride. Because I spend so much time doing research on just how commerce media is being impact by AI and this new AI era. So that can be great. Following TikTok creators that talk about AI because you like I don't I'm happy to write a newsletter about all my fair TikTok creators in the AI space because I don't know any off the top of my head. But I think just with the speed of things changing, it's really important to not reference something like two months ago, which I know is crazy. But TikTok is, you know, new videos every day, right? So following creators that are really experienced in this space can be really helpful. Something that I've been telling people that I think can be helpful for you to just start to wrap your brain around how this is impacting businesses is go in incognito mode and Chrome or whatever browser you use and type into chat to BT with not logging into your chat to BT because chat to BT is biased to you and you do not want that kind of response for this type of prompt. Ask it a prompt that pertains to your business. So best skin care for women over 50 whatever. See what it gives you the brands it gives you and then it will give you the sources that it used to make that recommendation and start to just look at what articles are being used and there are their brand websites are their retailers sometimes you see Walmart come up as and influence there and just start to heap tabs on that. I think also something that brands can do to future prove their business is not only get used to generative AI, which is what we're using right now, which is I'm going to ask a question and I want an answer back or I want you to go find information. Then there's a gentick AI happening tomorrow. It's very quickly adapting to the public where it's going to actually make a decision and act on something for you. So then soon enough we'll be able to say I want a SPF that will last this many hours for the day. I'm traveling this place. Can you get it delivered to my hotel or AI will place that order for you and it will and like I know it's coming exactly like it will actually act on that and I think as a brand like really staying ahead of the curve there. That's going to be the future. Another recommendation I have is for people to start to download comment, which is proplexity's new browser. That is a really helpful practice for just getting to understand a gentick AI because it is a full browser where it can do things for you from like plan a reservation at dinner for a dinner tonight to searching something to building out a newsletter all in one browser. Yes, I use it. I love it. Oh gosh, for reservations. I'm like I am looking for a Spanish restaurant tonight at this time in this neighborhood and it will book the reservation for me. I love it because on one tab it could be like editing a newsletter that you just wrote and then on another tab I'm doing research on something else for the newsletter and so I get work done like half the time and it just is a like a more actionable example of what a gentick AI is if you're having a hard time like wrapping your head around it. Okay, that's such a good example. That's such a good recommendation. Yeah. Is there anything else that you're using in terms of AI tools that you think are great that people should go and check out? Yeah, for my business I use superhuman as my email inbox literally kept me out of my email inbox which is amazing as someone in PR and then motion AI is basically to be honest like a better assana I just like plans my day it adjusts things by priority and it flows throughout the week so if like suddenly Tuesday is a heavier day for me it'll adapt the week for me. I get familiar ads from them so maybe I should try it. You have to use it. Okay. Yeah. Amazing. These are such good recommendations. Yeah. The last thing I want to ask you actually do I want to I could talk to you all day back. I want to know where you go to upskill and learn about this because I feel like you're someone who is like I said you're seeing the future you're very you've got a great vision for where this space is going and I want to know what sources are helping to fuel that decision-making and your hypothesis here. Yeah, honestly like getting in the weeds with different studies and really like doing the research myself. Yeah. It's been just so helpful because when you start to put the data together like that in your a little you have an innovative mindset. I want to say it's easy to tell the future in a way because you can just put the two to two together but I will say on sub stack like newsletters following really interesting people on sub stack has been really helpful for me to just stay ahead of the curve and then meeting people for coffee just expanding my network with people in AI even though I never thought I would go into AI that was never the plan at all but as soon as I saw this trend I started to reach out to people also in AI and in the beginning it was a little scary because I'm like wait this is not my field but the more that I talked with people the more that I realized we're all flying by the seat of our family. No one really knows what's happening that just helped me feel a little bit more connected to that new industry that I'm going into and I think that if you have the curiosity and a bait like a base level understanding if you've tested a few of these things you'd be surprised how much more you know than the average person because most people have not even tried this yet. Exactly yeah like I said brands are not even thinking about geo right now but it's a future. I I I've loved this episode because I feel like there could be a lot of fear around this space and I want people to feel like they are empowered they are not too late like they are on time they can make these changes now to future proof their businesses and I feel like you have delivered exactly the advice that will help them do that so thank you so much Emma we can people find you in praise. Yeah so our website is praise.studio our substack newsletter where we write about all of this is business wise on substack and then you can find us on Instagram praise.studio and I'm Emma Grace Moon on Instagram. Thank you so much I'll put all those links in the show. Amazing thanks for having me. I just wanted to end the show with a quick shout out to all of our paid business besties subscribers. For 1299 a month we get access to a weekly live call with mentors who we hand pick from this podcast community. These are founders who have been on the show experts and operators that are helping to build their businesses and we want to give you access into a small group setting on live calls every single week so that you can get the mentorship and advice that you need to take your business to the next level. In addition to the live calls and the community you also get access to a big database of workshop recordings group coaching call recordings, templates, contactless and just all of the tools and resources that you need to make this business a success. It had to besty.femafoundable.com or the link in the show notes to sign up now.