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When you type a question into an AI search engine like ChatGPT or Google AI Mode and it comes up with an answer, that information comes from somewhere. Scouring the web for content thats contextually relevant to the asker, it typically assembles an answer based on several different sources, interpreted through the lens of its training data and system prompt. The fight over being one of those sources is the new game of online discovery thats replacing SEO. Typically called GEO or AEO for generative/answer engine optimization, the field is nascent, and the rules, best practices, and even the benefits arent entirely clear. Theres one thing everyone agrees on, though: Its growing rapidly. Growth markets are opportunities, so even if the rewards of appearing in AI search havent been fully established, both media companies and marketers want to understand GEO and potentially crack the code on being the answer, or at least fuel for the answer. The precise methodshow content optimization differs from SEO, how to leverage social and PR to improve your chances of appearing, how to build a system for understanding AI queriesare promising, but still being worked out. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Also being worked out? What to do when you win. The AI search rewards system The rewards for winning at search were clear. Earning a high rank in search results means people click to your site, interact with your content, and either give you ad impressions or convert into some kind of paying customer. As Ive written before, being cited in AI answers is more akin to advertising your brand than a viable business strategy. A win in GEO means successful reputation management. This of course is why many publishers prefer to block AI crawlers from indexing their sites at all. They may want to understand GEO, but theyre not interested in having their content serving as raw material for an AI layer they feel they have no stake in (licensing deals notwithstanding). For sites that do appear in AI search, willingly or unwillingly, a win means readers perceive your publication to be more authoritative. So what happens when you losesay, your competition gets cited instead of you? For both media and marketers, its a missed opportunity for your brand to appear in front of someone interested in your area of expertise. What is the value of that? Its easy to point at ChatGPTs 800+ million users and think its a lot, and it might be, but remember: queries arent the same as search terms. Theyre much more specific, and the tools for analyzing them are in the very early stages. Its difficult to understand if youre optimizing for an audience of one or one million. When the answer is wrong Theres another kind of loss that brands are finding intolerable: incorrect or damaging information in AI answers. This is becoming a more serious problem than when it happens in traditional search because its difficult to fix. An AI answer is amalgamated from several different sources, so the precise ranking of those sourcesranking is a huge deal in SEOdoesnt matter as much as the bad information simply being present. Worse, that information may be on Wikipedia or Reddit, two sites that are based on user-generated content, have byzantine systems for how content is created and promoted, and are newly influential in the age of AI. Since they are both huge repositories of human-created text on myriad topics, theyre extremely valuable to data-hungry large language models, and the big AI companies have awarded them a kind of favored status. Reddit, notably, has used this as leverage to negotiate deals with Google and OpenAI worth tens of millions every year. All of which is to say that dealing with a reputational problem in AI search is a new kind of difficult-to-crack crisis. At the recent MarCom Summit in Washington, D.C., marketers who specialize in dealing with problematic content on Wikipedia or Reddit told me theyre newly busy this past year. Who will benefit from ads in AI search? So at least one kind of business is making money from GEO. For everyone else, theyll likely have to wait until AI answers begin to incorporate ads in a meaningful way. This is inevitableChatGPT may have almost a billion users, but most arent paying a dime. Thats a massive untapped revenue stream. Perplexity has been experimenting with ads in answers for a year, and Google is slowly stapling ads into its AI experiences, too. Skeptics roll their eyes at AI answers adopting an advertising business model, criticizing the companies for being less interested in solving societal problems than making money from user attentionthe same old Silicon Valley playbook. However, there’s another perspective: You know how AI summaries provide links to sources? That same attribution can be used to apportion the revenue from any ads in the summary to those same sources. The AI media tech startup Dappier is building such a system, splitting revenue from ads in the answer with everyone who contributed to it. So while I understand the cynicism about advertising coming to AI engines, I cant help but be a little bit hopeful about it. Yes, ads are certainly coming to AI search, but the search engines might not necessarily hog all the rewards. Will there be enough money to go around? Not yet. But like I said, its a growth market. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing meda? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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E-Commerce
The Trump administration has escalated its campaign to fire federal workers during the government shutdown, seizing the opportunity to further slash the already diminished Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On Tuesday, the union that represents workers at the CDC said that the agencys workforce has already been reduced by a quarter since the beginning of the year. During the shutdown, the public health agency, which steered U.S. health policy through the pandemic, has found itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration once again. Over the weekend, around 1,300 CDC employees received layoff notices. By Saturday, the agency rescinded roughly 700 of the planned terminations, saying that the additional unintended layoffs were due to a coding error. The CDC layoffs are part of a new round of mass layoffs that have reduced core parts of the federal government, including the Treasury Department, the Education Department, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which houses the CDC. In August, CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired after refusing to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives or fire health experts on her team, according to her legal team. Many of the CDCs top leaders followed her departure, resigning in protest and deepening the chaos roiling the nations public health agency. Life-and-death stakes Dismantling the CDC is clearly a top priority during Trumps second term, but the risks are huge. The agency, which was largely regarded as uncontroversial and essential until the COVID-19 pandemic, is tasked with protecting Americans from infectious diseases and other public health threats, both domestic and global. CDC employees involved in the response to the domestic measles outbreaks and an Ebola outbreak in central Africa were among those who were fired during the shutdown, but they have since had their layoff notices reversed. Other CDC workers werent so lucky, including analysts working to monitor biological and chemical threats, and members of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response who work with U.S. intelligence agencies on biodefense issues such as pandemics and weaponized pathogens, The Washington Post reported. Other employees in the same department ran biodefense drills and monitored natural disasters, infectious disease outbreaks, and cyberattacks on health facilities. HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said late last week that all fired CDC employees were designated as nonessential, defending the decision to further diminish the agency. HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administrations Make America Healthy Again agenda, Nixon said. In a joint letter from the Infectious Diseases Society of America and other organizations focused on epidemiology, public health experts condemned the firings as a completely reckless act that may compromise the health of all Americans. For nearly eight decades, CDC has worked around the clock to protect Americans from a growing range of health threats, from rabies to food safety to Ebola, the organizations wrote. The agencys support of state and local health departments and healthcare professionals is the backbone of our nations public health response. Fighting the layoffs Two unions representing federal workers, the AFGE and AFSCME, filed a lawsuit to halt the layoffs and will await a San Francisco district judges decision after preliminary arguments on Wednesday. The unions argue that the Trump administration is “using federal employees as pawns to put political pressure on its political opposition, and they have asked for a temporary pause on the most recent firings. In previous government shutdowns, employees faced furloughs but were never fired en masse. “These illegal firings of our union members during a federal government shutdown are a callous attack on hardworking Americans and put the livelihoods, health, and safety of our members and communities at great risk,” AFGE Local 2883 President Yolanda Jacobs said in a call with reporters. Over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance defended the mass firings on NBCs Meet the Press and blamed Democrats for the layoffs and the government shutdown. Vance misleadingly characterized the layoffs as necessary to keep other parts of the government funded and running, but many federal workers arent being paid during the shutdown. We have to lay off some federal workers in the midst of this shutdown to preserve the essential benefits for the American people that the government does provide, Vance said. That story conflicts with Trumps own. The president has hailed the shutdown as a golden opportunity to slash departments and programs that he doesnt agree with. “We’re ending some programs that we don’t want, Trump told reporters over the weekend. They happen to be Democrat-sponsored programs. But we’re ending some programs that we never wanted, and we’re probably not going to allow them to come back.
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E-Commerce
Owning a home sounds like a dream, sure, but a majority of Gen Z Americans feel discouraged about whether they can make this sort of lifetime goal a reality. To blame? Housing just isnt affordable. While two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 27 say that homeownership is a lifetime goal, 82% of people in this generation believe that actually buying a home is more difficult for them than older generations, according to a new survey of 1,000 Gen Z adults released today by Realtor.com. Things are so bad, in fact, that 16% of Gen Zers rate housing affordability as one of their top life concerns. And its not just a feeling: Younger generations have been largely locked out of the housing market in recent years because of the affordability issue thats made worse by a few influencing factors, according to Hannah Jones, senior economic research analyst at Realtor.com. In addition to a lack of new housing inventory, the elevated home prices for existing homes and high mortgage rates mean that homeownership really is out of reach for many would-be buyers, she says. Its really, really challenging to be a first-time homebuyer in this market, Jones tells Fast Company. But there are definitely ways to go about it, and creative ways to approach homeownership. 33% OF GEN Z SAVING FOR A DOWN PAYMENT Thats because the survey results, while largely showing how discouraged Gen Z feels, did reveal something that Jones finds encouraging: Nearly three-quarters of respondents have already started saving for a down payment. While respondents predict theyll need about $54,500 for a down payment, which is far less than the $85,000 necessary for a 20% down payment on a home with the national median listing price of $425,000, its nearly double the most-recent average down payment of $30,250. By proactively saving, even if they worry about affordability, this underscores just how much of a priority owning a home is for younger people and that theyre still optimistic its possible, provided they save enough money, Jones says. Even though Gen Z views homeownership as unattainable, theyre thinking about it and saving for it. Respondents said theyre interested in dependable ways to grow their wealth or cut costs to save for a down payment rather than betting on the potential for making money from riskier bets on stocks or cryptocurrencies. And theyll make some sacrificeslike going back home to live with their parents, living with roommates, buying homes with friends if theyre unmarriedso they can overcome that affordability hurdle, Jones says. MARKET SOLUTIONS NEEDED But some solutions that will help this generation are far beyond their control: More new homes need to come on the market, including the construction of more starter homes and multi-family homes that are available at different sizes and price points for generations that arent yet earning a lot, Jones says. And while much has been made of the so-called great wealth transfer, in which trillions of dollars will be transferred from older generations to younger generations, would-be homebuyers will benefit more immediately from a dip in mortgage rates. About 80% of home owners with outstanding mortgages are locked in at rates below 6%, so that will serve as an important psychological boundary that may help unlock some housing inventory, Jones says. The national average rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is currently 6.19%, according to Nerdwallet. Realtor.com hasnt yet forecasted mortgage rates for 2026, when its possible that theyll dip below 6%, but thats coming in the relatively near future and once it does, it will bring a wave of people who are ready to move and will bring more housing inventory to the market. Lower mortgage rates will unlock a lot of housing so it can boost housing affordability, Jones says.
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E-Commerce
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