Oct 13, 2026 - Business
Axios C-Suite: How a CEO should GEO
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
James Cadwallader, CEO of Profound, which helps brands show up inside ChatGPT and AI agents, gave me a quick briefing on how all of us should think about — and act on — GEO.
Why it matters: GEO is vital to your future growth. It decides whether you and your products show up inside LLMs like Claude and agents like Meta's Muse.
He used Nike as an example to walk through the known-knowns of GEO. It's early, and still a black box to most of us.
- Treat GEO as advanced product marketing. You need scale and content written specifically for LLMs and agents.
- Agents want boring specifics. For Nike's Alphafly, they want weight, texture, materials and construction. That's not what goes in a glossy ad or on a typical product page. So rethink marketing.
- Define or be defined. Force yourself into the conversation. RunRepeat.com, a site run by running nerds who literally cut new sneakers in half, outranks Nike.com, Reddit and Wikipedia as an AI source, per Profound's data. Why? It's obsessively specific and well-structured.
- Start with your site. Brands can now detect when an agent visits and serve it a deeper, more detailed version of the page: same facts, more depth. That means rethinking your content strategy — and doing more of it.
- Restructure everything. Content must be written and structured the way LLMs and agents consume it. As I've written before, this is why Axios content in structured Smart Brevity works so well.
Bonus pro tip: Translate everything.
- Ask about a Nike shoe in Spanish, and the model hunts for Spanish sources. In a world of infinite AI-made content, you need more than English-only, at least for now.
📈 If you're a CEO or on a CEO's team: Ask to join Jim's new weekly Axios C-Suite newsletter.
