14 Days Journey to GEO – Day 3

Until now, you have:

• joined the GEO Academy by AISQ Growth
• hopefully also joined the JourneyTeam, as it will prove valuable
• learned that the shift is not taking place right now, nor in the future. THE shift has already happened.
• if you went through lesson 1 of the GEO Academy, you have found that out. And you have an explanation for why online marketing results aren’t what they used to be
• you saw the importance of Entity Data and of clearly and constantly describing and talking about your entities everywhere (refresh that knowledge here)

Most business owners and marketers do not understand this big shift in online marketing, because they think ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and even Google AI Overviews need training data, in order to recommend brands.

Even I have stated before that there is one type of AI Search ( AEO / GEO ) that small businesses and smaller brands will never be able to achieve. I talked about that here.

However, this is also a thing of the past, which is why it became vital for me to build the GEO Academy and change the 14 Days Journey forever.

You no longer need to hope to be included in the training data of the LLMs!

So for Day 3, let’s address some of the changes that have completely changed the game.

Okay, I’m just going to drop this here:

All the NEW 2026 Thinking LLM models perform web searches, in order to make their recommendations.

This is the biggest reason WHY you can safely start doing Generative Engine Optimization. You no longer need huge PR budgets to show everywhere (it still helps; but isn’t the only factor anymore).

The AI companies have also (obviously) seen their stats and the crazy amounts of human users performing searches directly inside Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini.

The wave that sweeps everything off and made this whole shift happen is bigger than anyone expected:

ChatGPT processes 2.5 billion prompts every single day in 2026. For context: Google processes around 8.5 billion searches per day. ChatGPT is now handling nearly 30% of that volume — and the platform didn’t exist three years ago. Wytlabs

Google AI Overviews now reach 2 billion monthly users across 200 countries in 40 languages. ALM Corp

These are the first clear 2026 indicators that what started being felt in 2025 has only changed forever by 2026.

Those bits of info are from Lesson 1 of the GEO Academy by AISQ Growth. Make sure you finish the lesson, because it’s very important for defining this change.

Because there is so much usage, the AI companies realized they need to bring fresh content, fresh data and fresh recommendations.

AI Companies had to step their game up and make LLMs recommend fresh content

A person asking right now for the best coffee shop in Paris, doesn’t want to hear about what was trendy in Summer 2025 when the training data ended! They need to plan their June 2026 trip to Paris and want to know something useful for exactly that period.

And of course, there could be many many other examples where users require fresh data. AI companies figured without doing this, people will revert to using classic search engines.

By doing this big 2026 shift of grounding all recommendations in actual search (via BING — most use Bing; and Google — only Google’s AI stuff), users all over the world have started using AI more and more. And they’re using it for all their necessary recommendations and search needs.

I’ve interviewed many people during Spring 2026 from all kinds of walks of life: employees, factory workers, warehouse staff, mechanics, entrepreneurs, CEOs, tech entrepreneurs, cafe owners, dentists, lawyers, psychotherapists, real estate professionals, bar tenders, chefs and more. I opened up discussions around AI usage and how they and all their friends were doing searches when a certain topic came up.

“So last time you got together with your family and friends and someone brought up a topic that wasn’t overly familiar, how many used the phone to search for it and what did they use on the phone to find out what it was about?”

Guess what?

In all these cases and all these scenarios: women and men from all walks of life have mostly been asking ChatGPT or Claude to answer their questions. They told me in very few cases that someone at the table had made a Google search and looked at the usual 10 blue links that appear.

So… it all worked. People don’t seem to want to go back to the old way of searching.

This is something you can try out for yourself next time you’re in a group setting.

However, the changes did not stop for one minute

There’s more:

Google Search now only displays 7 total blue links for some queries. All the others are AI stuff or sponsored posts!

7 out of 10.

Good-bye TOP 10 rankings on Google. <<< now… don’t take this at face value yet, because TOP 10 still counts for GEO, as you will see in Lessons 3, 4 and 5 of the GEO Academy.

And more:

Google Search changes forever over THIS summer! They announced it and changes can already be seen. They are forcing more and more only the recommendations made by AIs.

Our clients started getting more results from alternative search engines. This can be seen here on the results page. This is due to customer push-back against Google making the search page horrible on their own search engine. You can see Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGO a lot there as traffic sources for the work we’ve crafted for our clients.

Still, that is only one of the reactions against Google’s search engine. Most people are just completely switching over to AI search.

Which is why this Journey to GEO is important.

We’ll continue tomorrow.