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Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is resigning from OpenAI's board after new emails showing the extent of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein surfaced.
Axios was first to report the news.
OpenAI could not immediately be reached for comment.
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
Arbiter
Michelle Carnahan spent four years as the president of VC-backed healthcare startup Thirty Madison, and before that, had a two-decade-long career at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Now, she's launching her own startup without a drop of VC funding.
Arbiter, Carnahan's latest venture, has raised $52 million in seed funding at a $400 million valuation, Business Insider has learned exclusively.
Instead of turning to VCs, Carnahan raised the round from multiple family offices, which are essentially private investment firms that manage all aspects of a wealthy family's finances. TriEdge Investments and MFO Ventures co-led the round, joined by private equity firm WindRose Health Investors.
Arbiter's platform connects patient data to automate administrative tasks on behalf of healthcare providers and health plans, including referrals and appointment scheduling. The healthcare AI startup is only 6 months old, but its tech is already live with over 1,000 clinicians, which Carnahan credits to Arbiter's family office backing.
Carnahan has spent most of her career at Big Pharma, including a 26-year stint at Eli Lilly. She was at Thirty Madison during the 2021 VC funding boom, when the startup notched a $1 billion valuation. This September, Thirty Madison was acquired in an all-stock deal for over $500 million.
Carnahan said she didn't set out to avoid VC money, despite having witnessed the boom-and-bust cycle firsthand.
Instead, she said she turned to family offices because Arbiter was looking for more than just capital — the company wanted specialized healthcare investors who could bring their tech to market fast.
"This gives us not only a knowledge advantage, but a distribution advantage in partnerships that would take years to develop," Carnahan said.
Carnahan met Dr. Eric Moskow, cofounder and chairman of MFO Ventures, in 2022 while she was at Thirty Madison. They bonded over their frustrations with how fragmented the healthcare system had become, with data siloes and countless single-solution software products.
With the early promise of Moskow's backing, Arbiter acquired a data platform from SecondWave Delivery Systems, a healthcare company Moskow founded in 2020, along with the platform's customers and some employees. The software pulls patient data from different medical records into one place and evaluates patient health risks and other clinical factors to help doctors make better treatment decisions.
Carnahan said the deal accelerated Arbiter's path to market by 18 months. Arbiter didn't disclose exactly how much it paid for the tech, but said the deal represented a small portion of its seed funding. The company said it also signed an agreement with SecondWave to allow SecondWave to continue selling to its broader customer base, which gives Arbiter contracted multi-year revenue.
On top of SecondWave's data layer and risk adjustment capabilities, Arbiter is building AI infrastructure in-house to automate more actions across payers and providers.
Its first application uses AI agents to proactively reach out to patients, schedule appointments, and follow up with them after visits. That patient engagement tech is live with several health plans, Carnahan said.
Arbiter plans combine all of its capabilities into a unified "operating spine" for healthcare, which Carnahan said will launch next year with a major national payer and provider network, focused on automating referrals. She declined to share the names of those partners.
"Everyone keeps building new instruments for the orchestra. There's a prior auth tool here, an analytics dashboard there, but no one's building the conductor. Arbiter is that conductor," Carnahan said.
Arbiter is considering additional acquisitions to further boost its growth.
The startup is looking for solutions with a clear data strategy — Arbiter can make the tools more AI-forward, but it wants a solid data foundation for the AI first, Carnahan said. She's also considering technology that can take actions leading up to a doctor's visit, such as prior authorizations or supporting care in non-hospital settings, like the home.
Ultimately, Arbiter wants to move healthcare from reactive to proactive, including by using predictive AI modeling to forecast events such as disease onset and hospital stays.
Because Arbiter has big ambitions, it faces a full field of competitors, from AI-powered patient engagement startups like Hippocratic AI to companies that focus on freeing up healthcare capacity like DexCare.
Arbiter has assembled a top team of board members and clinical advisors to take on that challenge, including Dr. Clive Fields, an Arbiter board member and the cofounder of VillageMD, and Dr. Ainsley MacLean, a clinical advisor and the former chief medical information officer at health system giant Kaiser Permanente's mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group.
After 13 years in leadership roles at Kaiser Permanente, MacLean started her own private equity firm this year to back healthcare AI companies — and she thinks Arbiter's tech can lay the groundwork for the innovations she wants to invest in.
"I see Arbiter as the Palantir of healthcare," MacLean told Business Insider. "It's that kind of play, but with the deep connections, trust, and understanding of healthcare that will make them successful."
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Target is betting a billion-dollar facelift will improve its fortunes after a rough couple of years.
The Minneapolis-based retailer posted its earnings on Wednesday, its 10th quarter in the past 12 with negative or flat comparable sales, and cautioned that the critical fourth quarter will likely be down as well.
"We're far from satisfied with our current results, and we won't be satisfied until we're operating at our full potential," incoming CEO Michael Fiddelke said in a call with reporters.
Third-quarter comparable sales declined 2.7%, coming in below analysts' estimate of -2.06%. Adjusted earnings per share of $1.78 came in above expectations of $1.73.
Fiddelke attributed much of the quarter's shortfall to a sharp drop-off in September, while August and October were relatively flat. Foot traffic data from Placer.ai shows a similar trend during the period.
Target will increase its annual capital expenditures from $4 billion to $5 billion to invest in remodeling and refreshing its store fleet, Fiddelke said, including the biggest changes to its merchandise assortment and floor plans that the company has seen in years.
Heading into the holidays, Fiddelke and Chief Commercial Officer Rick Gomez said shoppers continue to be stretched thin and making trade-offs wherever they can — a theme that has persisted in recent years across many retailers.
Now, Gomez said, Target shoppers are focusing their holiday spending on items they see as core to the spirit of the occasion, choosing Halloween costumes and candy over decor, for example.
"As we go into Christmas and the holidays, we think the consumer will prioritize what goes under the tree versus what goes on the tree," he added.
The chain has weathered declines in both the number of transactions and the size of those transactions, and Fiddelke said improving the in-store experience is key to turning those trends around.
Still, as economic pressures such as inflation, tariffs, and layoffs weigh on shoppers' minds, Target has found itself falling behind its more value-focused competitors like Walmart and Costco. Target's stock price has declined around 35% since the start of the year, compared to Walmart's 12.6% increase and Costco's 1.6% decrease.
"Prices need to be sharp," Fiddelke said. "The consumer is looking for great price, but we know that our lane — what makes Target uniquely special — is pairing that with incredible product."
The retailer also announced an app integration with ChatGPT that will roll out in beta next week.
"We expect to be one of the first retailers on OpenAI platforms to offer the purchase of multiple items in a single transaction, offer fresh food products on the platform, and the ability to choose drive-up and pick-up fulfillment options," Fiddelke said.
Once the excitement of the holiday shopping season is over, Fiddelke will have his work cut out for him as he takes the helm from outgoing CEO Brian Cornell on February 1.
All of it boils down to one goal: "Target back to growth as quickly as possible."
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A year and a half ago, my wife and I decided it was time to leave Savannah, Georgia, after living there for two years, and return to the Midwest. While the decision initially felt right, I entered months of self-doubt and indecisiveness.
In retrospect, it's obvious to me that my lack of clarity was social media-fueled — after all, it can make life feel like a competition over who can look the coolest and most successful. My own desires felt clouded by what I saw through small, digital windows.
We'd wanted to go back to the Midwest largely because we both had family there, including my young nephews. It'd been hard to miss so much of their lives. My father, sister, and my wife's parents were there, too — all people who made up our support system. The Midwest also felt like home, and in the end, we chose to relocate to Chicago.
But I questioned whether this decision was somehow an "uncool" one. I wondered if I'd be happier or more successful elsewhere.
As a writer, I compared myself to other creative people. Writers, musicians, photographers, and dancers I knew who lived in LA or New York City. Was I selling myself short by not trying to "make it" in those places? Was I going to fall behind? Would I be happier or more successful there?
I spiraled. LA and New York are expensive and far from our families, whom we wanted to see more often. If we couldn't move there, should we move somewhere more beautiful — that is, somewhere that looks enviable on Instagram? Somewhere with mountains or lush forests. Despite seeing beauty in the Midwest and a deep affinity for Lake Michigan, I questioned whether it compared to other beautiful places.
I also wondered if my desire to be closer to home said something unfavorable about me, if it meant I was moving backward, somehow. Would I miss out on anything by making this choice?
My wife and I made a list of all the places we could see ourselves living. We wrote down Asheville, North Carolina, as well as Burlington, Vermont, and various other midsize cities with naturally beautiful landscapes that are within a 10-hour drive of our families in Michigan.
We made some pros and cons lists and tried to imagine what life would really be like in those places. But I kept coming back to the same thing: I wanted to go somewhere that felt like home, closer to people who felt like home.
I thought about the first place I lived outside Michigan — Denver. While I liked living in a city and enjoyed the mountains in the distance, it never felt like home. Sometimes, being in a landlocked state made me feel claustrophobic. I missed the big bodies of water of my home state.
Savannah hadn't felt right, either. It was beautiful there, too, but it was unfamiliar in so many ways. I missed familiarity. I wanted to see my family more than once or twice a year.
I realized that in all my indecisiveness, what I was really after was a better version of myself. It wasn't the geographic place I was concerned with, but who I could be while living there. The successful writers I compared myself to who lived in L.A. or New York weren't successful because of where they lived, or at least not that alone — they were successful because of their talent.
People who live among "Instagram-worthy" landscapes might be happier in part because of their surroundings, but they also may not be. I understood the true meaning of that cliché: wherever you go, there you are. I could be who I wanted to be anywhere, and who I wanted to be included someone with strong relationships to people that matter.
I understood, too, that I'd been treating this decision as if I were making it for the rest of my life. If I ever decide I do want to give another city a go, I can change my mind. Life is long. In Chicago, at least for now, I feel like I have the best of both worlds. A major city, "cool" things to do, no shortage of artists and beauty — and my family is a few hours away.
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Satya Nadella isn't a fan of letting memes define Microsoft.
The Microsoft CEO discussed the impact of a 2011 cartoon that depicted tension between the company's various divisions during a Tuesday episode of Stripe's "Cheeky Pint" podcast.
"That cartoon is a great example of someone else defining what became the cultural narrative more so than reality," Nadella told Stripe cofounder John Collison.
Manu Cornet
The drawing was part of a larger set of drawings by cartoonist Manu Cornet that poked fun at the Big Tech org charts. For Microsoft's chart, three separate divisions were illustrated aiming guns at each other.
"I'd say there are two things that I learned from that entire episode because I always say, look, I'm a consummate insider, right? Anything good and bad about Microsoft of the last 35 years, I lived through them all, and I'm part of it, right?" Nadella said. "So I can't deny any of it. The thing that I felt was, a little bit of that was just we lost our own belief because we lost the narrative."
"So this doesn't mean, oh, wow, we were all perfect divisions and we were all sort of, you know, in greater harmony. That is not the case," Nadella added. "But you know, in some sense, some of these divisional tensions are real issues that need to have tension, right?"
Nadella also suggested that there can be a time and a place for rivalry within a large organization.
"Social cohesion is not a goal. Winning in the marketplace is a goal," Nadella said on the podcast. "But at some level, you have to orchestrate these large organizations — in fact, you might even have two competing teams, by design."
However, the cartoon is an example of how external voices, like memes, can shape how employees internally view their workplace culture, the CEO said. That's when executives and managers have to ensure they've built enough trust with workers to withstand the influence of social media.
"How to communicate in today's world where your employees read about you outside and form opinions about you is one of the toughest leadership challenges," Nadella said.
It's not the first time Nadella has addressed the over-decade-old cartoon. In his 2017 book, "Hit Refresh," he wrote that he was upset that Microsoft's own people "just accepted it."
"As a twenty-four-year veteran of Microsoft, a consummate insider, the caricature really bothered me," Nadella wrote.
The cartoon came out years before he took over as CEO in 2014, but turning around the company's culture was Nadella's "highest priority" when he took the helm, he said in the book. He said he'd do so by removing barriers to innovation and creating a narrative from the top that shapes individual teams.
His shift to a "growth mindset" and "learn-it-all versus know-it-all" culture appears to be working more than a decade into his tenure. Nadella has grown Microsoft from a roughly $300 billion company to the second to reach a $4 trillion market cap, a milestone it crossed in October. The CEO has also positioned the company well in the AI arms race, investing early in OpenAI.
Still, external voices can be loud at times.
"I would say the challenge for all of us in today's world is, let the social media memes not define us," Nadella told Collison. "What's that inner strength that is there in an organization that can, in fact, resist the social meme — that I think is the key."
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AI has affected nearly every aspect of the workplace. Business Insider is looking for the most compelling startups transforming how work gets done.
Do you know a company that fits the bill? Let us know.
Prospective companies must be startups that use AI to improve some aspect of the workplace — whether in finance, tech, professional services, retail, or transportation.
Factors we'll consider:
Please make your submission below by December 15, 2025 to have your selection considered. Please provide as much detail as possible in your nomination.
Email editor Julia Herbst at jherbst@businessinsider.com with any questions or issues submitting nominations.
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You can't escape the call for soft skills.
As AI increasingly augments repetitive tasks, human connection is becoming more valuable in many workplaces. Even in technical fields, like engineering, developing skills that allow you to collaborate with others can help you prove your worth.
"Equally important are your soft skills, like critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and teamwork," LinkedIn's VP of Engineering for Talent Solutions, Prashanthi Padmanabhan, recently told Business Insider.
The rising importance of soft skills doesn't mean you need to suddenly become a social butterfly at work — although that might not hurt. Workplace observers have said that extroverted personalities can offer an advantage in the current workforce because human-centered tasks can't be as easily offloaded by AI.
But which soft skills are most important? And how can you highlight the ones you possess when looking for a new job? Business Insider spoke with seven workforce transformation experts, as well as executives from LinkedIn, IBM, and Cisco about the soft skills that will be most important in the AI era.
Read on to learn more about three skills they identified:
Your therapist's advice may only be as good as the information you share with them — and the same goes for AI.
Large language models can generate instant suggestions, but it's up to employees to identify the right problems, craft effective prompts, and determine the best course of action based on the insights it spits out.
"Even if AI is helping with consulting work, it's still not so great," said Michael Housman, founder and lead strategist at AI-ccelerator, a firm specializing in AI education and consulting. That means job seekers should work on developing skill sets that are "complementary to what machines are really good at," Housman told Business Insider.
Housman, who is also the author of "Future Proof: Transform Your Business with AI (or Get Left Behind)," said that job seekers should focus on developing — and highlighting — their complex problem-solving skills. That means thinking about how to solve complicated challenges with "ambiguous inputs and metrics for success," he said.
Guy Diedrich, Cisco's senior vice president and global innovation officer, told Business Insider previously that critical thinking and problem-solving will become crucial as the pace of AI innovations leads to companies making significant ethical decisions. He said "asking the right questions" about what should be done will be the most important skill humans can develop.
Alex King, founder and managing director of ExpandIQ, told Business Insider that self-awareness and the ability to read the room will become increasingly necessary in the AI age.
That involves tapping into your "gut feeling" and understanding situations where you need to lean in or step back, he said.
"People who have those soft skills around self-awareness and emotional intelligence are going to do really well in the future, because that's obviously something AI cannot do," said King, who also served as the former head of global talent acquisition at software-development firm Integrate.
Ruchir Puri, IBM's chief scientist, similarly told Business Insider that while most successful CEOs probably have a high IQ, their success relies more on their ability to connect with others and communicate efficiently, which he refers to as the "emotional quotient" and "relationship quotient."
"The advice I'll give is always be empathetic," Puri said. "Put yourself in their shoes and see why they are reacting the way they are."
That level of awareness also extends to communication and ensuring that there's "clarity" in the way you're expressing ideas.
"Don't just express a concept. Make sure the concept is at a level that they can understand," Puri said, adding that "it's not just what you say; it's how you say it."
With AI augmenting more busy work, many executives have said that there will be more time for "deep work," including expansive thinking and idea generation.
That could be especially true in software engineering. As AI accelerates the process required to launch products and helps solve the issue of "scarcity of developers," Cisco's CPO Jeetu Patel previously told Business Insider that imagination will be "the only constraint."
That means there will likely be a greater emphasis on developing fresh, high-quality ideas.
Terri Horton, an AI strategy and workforce transformation consultant at the boutique advisory firm FuturePath, told Business Insider that creativity is becoming increasingly important. Not only does that mean coming up with unique ideas for how to do your job, but it also includes thinking about where AI can be applied to make work more efficient.
"If we are replacing or removing, let's say, 30% of the tasks that are associated with the role and replacing them with AI, what else can you do?" Horton said. "How can you leverage your creativity to work collaboratively with your functional leader or to help think about how that role can be redesigned?"
LinkedIn's Padmanabhan, told Business Insider that candidates are increasingly using the interview process to highlight their creativity by showcasing a concept they have brought to life.
"If you don't have the coding experience, but you have a brilliant idea in your head — just build something," Padmanabhan said.
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AI has already disrupted coding. Finance could be next, according to Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez.
"Finance will come," Gomez told Kleiner Perkins partner Joubin Mirzadegan on a recent episode of the firm's "Grit" podcast.
Cohere, a Toronto-based AI startup focused on enterprise applications, is already doing some work in the financial sector through partnerships with RBC and TD Bank. Both partnerships are built on Cohere's LLM models. After it closed its latest round of funding in September, Cohere was valued at roughly $7 billion.
Gomez, who co-authored the famous 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need" while he was an intern at Google Brain, said that AI's power lies in its ability to augment white-collar work, a view widely shared throughout Silicon Valley and the AI industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that he's worried that AI could wipe out up to half of entry-level, white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.
"You have to pay them a lot because there's not a lot of these people for the world," Gomez said. "And so there's tons of demand for these people, but there's not enough of those people to do the work the world needs. And it turns out that these models are best at the types of things those people do."
AI's effects are already being felt in software engineering, where powerful tools like Cursor, along with frontier models like Claude and ChatGPT, allow users to "vibe code" software without any specialized coding knowledge. Other industries, including finance, legal, and publishing, are still in varying degrees of the early days of AI disruption.
"It's still so early for the enterprise," Gomez said. "We're still doing the super foundational, super — Summarize this email for me. Summarize these meeting notes for me. It's so basic, low-level. I just think there's so much to be done."
Mirzadegan said the next step of AI is the ability to "augment people."
"I mean, isn't that the whole point of this? We're eating a different part of the market where it's not seats and licenses," he said. "It's being able to actually augment people, actually do the jobs of people in many ways, and that's so much more transformative."
Courtesy of Pat Santiago.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Pat Santiago, a 28-year-old cofounder of Accelr8, based in San Francisco. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Last year, I moved to San Francisco to cofound an AI startup. Living in a hacker house seemed like the best way to make as many connections as possible.
My cofounder and I had an idea for a no-code AI workflow builder and planned to stay in San Francisco for three months, but we decided that running our own hacker house could be more fun. It would also help us build a strong network.
Soon after we decided to move from the separate cities we were in, we began searching for potential hacker houses that we could rent and run ourselves. The operational stress can be intense at times, but I've now got a better grasp on managing it.
I met my cofounder in 2023 because we were both working at Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Those projects fizzled out, and we went on to do other things.
I moved from my hometown of Pittsburgh, and he was in Dallas. San Francisco was always a place I wanted to live because it seemed like the kind of place where people who thought like me were.
We planned to share a bunk bed in one room, and fill the rest with people we found, possibly securing free rent for ourselves in the process.
We looked on Airbnb and found a place that had been converted from a five-bedroom house to a 15-bedroom house. After speaking with the owners, it seemed like it would work. They said we had two weeks to close on it if we wanted a master lease for all the units.
We were frantically sending messages to people on a San Francisco housing directory, LinkedIn, and X. We thought we could definitely convince 15 people to do this in two weeks, and it would be worth it if we did.
We scheduled around 100 calls to fill the first cohort. We made the decision to start the house at the beginning of June. By July 4, we had filled every spot, but some people dropped out, so we continued interviewing until the first move-in day on July 15.
Courtesy of Pat Santiago
One of my most memorable experiences was when the first group arrived at the house last year.
What surprised me the most about moving here was the level of optimism; people are generally optimistic by default.
For San Francisco, the money I'm making from this isn't great, but it's livable. Ideally, as we expand to more buildings and locations, I can create a better financial situation for myself. But for now, it's nothing to complain about because I'm so inspired by doing this.
The biggest motivator right now is seeing the impact our alums make in the world. They're doing some really cool stuff, and I'm constantly getting updates that make me smile.
Courtesy of Pat Santiago
At the end of summer, we dropped to 12 residents, but I wasn't really panicking because I now know this is just the natural flow of the year, and we've picked back up into the 40s.
Our first house was taken over by a new management company, and they gave us a two-month notice to leave. When I looked for our next spot, I procrastinated because I wasn't even sure if I would commit to managing this house for another year. But I had the hypothesis that a lot of hotels here are vacant, and if I called them, we could get a good deal and fill one.
After we found a building that would work with us, within a day of posting the first advertisement, we had 80 applicants. It was the reassurance I needed because I thought, 'Okay, this is going to work. People love it.'
Courtesy of Pat Santiago
We priced a private bedroom at $1,500 a month, and that base price has remained consistent, except that we now offer larger rooms or suites as additional options.
The house does a lot of community events because when we got here, we were going to networking mixers that droned on. Then, I was sitting in the backyard, complaining about just that, and I had the idea for a Mark Zuckerberg-themed rave.
Everyone was cracking up, but then we threw a Mark Zuckerberg-themed rave, and there were no name tags in sight. No one networked, and it was a blast. I was very proud that I'd sparked that.
Courtesy of Pat Santiago
People try to make community a digital phenomenon, but I think those who are literally shaping the future should be coming together and being physically present with each other.
Community used to mean gathering in a bar, a social club, a church, or somewhere physically present with other people; however, there's a lot less of that in the world now, with the rise of AI and technology.
My major piece of advice is just to be nice to the people you meet and make friends. Doing community events is what keeps me engaged. Leading a group of people out for the night, to the park for a day, or on a hike, I can see the magical feeling I felt when I first moved here through their eyes, and I really love that.
Do you have a hacker house or founder story to share? Contact this reporter, Agnes Applegate, at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.
Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
This summer, the PR agency Bospar was preparing a major announcement for its client, the AI computer vision company RealSense, when it discovered an awkward problem.
When Bospar asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot for information about RealSense, each one provided a version of the same answer: RealSense was no longer in business.
In reality, the company was on the verge of announcing a spin-out from its parent, Intel, and a $50 million funding round. How could RealSense get top-tier press coverage if the leading AI tools had already written its obituary?
"There's no 1-800 number for ChatGPT if there's an error," said Curtis Sparrer, principal at Bospar.
About half of US consumers are using AI-powered search to evaluate and discover brands, per a recent McKinsey report. In this new era, Google — which has introduced its own AI search features — still dominates the overall search market, responsible for roughly 90% of global search engine traffic, according to Cloudflare.
As the nature of search begins to shift, businesses from travel companies to clothing brands are racing to ensure they show up prominently — and accurately — inside these answer engines.
The trend has spawned a cottage industry. Former experts on SEO (search engine optimization) are now declaring themselves gurus of GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization).
LinkedIn and Meta feeds are flooded with ads from startups, agencies, and consultants saying they have a formula to boost visibility on top AI platforms. There's a huge market for the taking: only around 16% of brands systematically track their AI search performance, according to McKinsey.
The search shifts have also sparked a fierce debate: Can GEO and AEO experts actually deliver on their promises?
"Everyone is going crazy about becoming the next agency — all the side hustlers and snake oil sellers with their tools already on the train and riding the hype," said Kai Spriestersbach, an applied AI researcher, web scientist, and SEO veteran.
Business Insider spoke with SEO experts and three of the top AI search platforms — Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity — to investigate what content optimization looks like in the age of AI. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
The takeaway: Some GEO techniques can help brands boost their visibility in AI-generated answers, but these gains may be fleeting in a fast-changing space where models are constantly retrained and updated. In some ways, GEO is a new label for companies' existing brand-building strategies, which involve a mix of maintaining good website hygiene, a solid PR strategy, and traditional paid advertising to help boost consumer awareness.
One AI visibility tracking tool, Lorelight, recently shut down, with its founder saying that there was no such thing as a "GEO strategy" separate from brand building, at least for large companies.
"There's going to be a lot of people who benefit from implying that they're very good at GEO. And then there's going to be a lot of tech companies, specifically AI companies, who benefit from saying that it's all hogwash," said Jesse Dwyer, head of communications at Perplexity. "The reality is always somewhere in between."
SEO, which is largely focused on Google search, refers to the practice of designing web pages and securing links from quality sites to help your brand rank highly on search engine results pages.
The SEO industry is built on more than 25 years of study, experimentation, and some disclosures from the search giants themselves about how the ranking algorithms work. But there are key differences between GEO and SEO.
Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images
For starters, the GEO world has far less historical data to build its assumptions on. For traditional search, practitioners can draw on tools like the Google Search Console to see how their sites appear in search results and Google Trends to identify trending terms. AI platforms keep this sort of data much closer to the vest, beyond the occasional blog post, such as a recent study from OpenAI that found people were largely using ChatGPT for everyday tasks, including help with writing and tech support.
"You don't know how people are looking for brands and services right now," within AI chats, Spriestersbach said.
There's also the personalization factor. The front page of traditional search generally looks the same for everyone, though Google offers options to tailor results. Now, companies must try to make their brands shine in unique and deeper conversational searches. Answers can vary wildly for different users based on how they've configured their preferences and their chat histories.
Further complicating things: Platforms are regularly retraining their models, which can dramatically change how a brand shows up from one day to the next, said Tim de Rosen, cofounder of GEO auditing firm AIVO Standard.
While many GEO companies offer services like dashboards that analyze a subset of user prompts, most of what's being measured isn't reproducible. The different ways users ask questions and how models respond — plus the data they're drawing from — are all in a constant state of flux, de Rosen said, which makes results "inherently unstable."
Major platforms say the key principles of SEO still apply in the age of AI. Similar to SEO, AI systems rely on fresh, highly ranked, and trustworthy content, said Krishna Madhavan, principal product manager for Microsoft Bing.
"Be skeptical of shortcuts," he said.
Danny Sullivan, director at Google Search, said any GEO tools that advise designing content solely for rank and visibility purposes lose "track of the big picture."
"Are you doing things that are useful for human beings?" he said. "That's what we want to reward."
Sullivan shared an example of popular advice from SEO/GEO experts that could soon go stale: that large language models favor bite-sized content.
"Maybe they've seen that this seems to work in some edge cases in some places," but the model will inevitably change, he said. "All that work you did to please the system may not carry through to the long term."
What is new, Madhavan of Bing said, is that companies must think about optimizing for inclusion in a synthesized answer, rather than simply a list of links on a search results page.
"Think beyond keywords to user intent, question‑answer structure, and machine‑readable cues that make your content easy to parse," Madhavan said.
As the GEO industry takes shape, companies are proceeding with caution and seeking guidance from multiple practitioners.
Vineet Mehra, CMO of fintech company Chime, said marketers often make the mistake of working with one tool or agency.
"We try to use multiple companies to create a little bit of competition," he said. "You see who's going to customize their product road map for you, who is innovating faster than the other."
The PR agency Bospar also determined that bringing together a patchwork of solutions was better than relying on a single consultant or GEO platform. They ultimately traced RealSense's premature "death" to a 2021 news article that had misrepresented a restructuring, which then snowballed when it was discussed on platforms like Reddit — an important source of content for training large language models.
Bospar sought a correction from the original publication and made changes on RealSense's website, including an FAQ section addressing the closure rumor. The agency also encouraged RealSense executives to actively participate in trending robotics and AI conversations on social media to demonstrate their thought leadership.
While AI visibility tools like dashboards are in their infancy, Bospar's tactics should be familiar to anyone handling a company's reputation in the digital era.
"It's pretty early days in GEO and AEO for anyone to raise their hands and declare themselves as an expert," Bospar's Sparrer said. "I think that's a little rich at this point considering how new the science is."
Google:
Sullivan said the core principles of SEO generally apply to new forms of AI search.
"Plenty of sites succeed because they don't do SEO, or hire SEOs," Sullivan said. "They don't think about it because they're just focused on making great content."
General website and structured data hygiene always make sense, ensuring Google's search crawlers can actually get to the relevant content, Sullivan said, especially as AI answers still have a lot of traditional search results at their core.
AI formats are also getting better at multi-modal queries — a user might ask "what's in this video?" for example.
"If you've still been a text-only kind of player, more images and videos may help you. But they would have helped you anyway," Sullivan said.
Microsoft:
Madhavan said the fundamentals of SEO are still critical, including structure and freshness signals that make content easier for AI to consume. This includes using Q&A sections, sitemaps, and schema, a code that helps search engines understand your site, as well as adopting IndexNow, a protocol that lets search engines know when your site changes.
Stylistically, Krishna also suggests lists and tables instead of long walls of text, and advises keeping punctuation simple, including avoiding em dashes and symbols.
Perplexity:
With the shift from SEO to GEO, "the biggest mistake you can make is to just try and transfer your understanding apples to apples," Dwyer said — and a lot of the companies offering GEO services are doing just that.
Dwyer said he's also been advising marketers that AI search will shift budgets toward old-fashioned brand marketing. AI removes the "friction" of search and lets people buy things just by asking for them. As a result, building a strong brand will become increasingly important, he said.