MGS 2026 Recap: GEO Strategy and How AI Cites Brands
You keep publishing blog posts, so why doesn't your brand come up when people ask ChatGPT or an AI search engine? When AI doesn't have enough to cite, it fills the gap with community posts or its own guesses.
The daglo marketing team attended Modern Growth Stack (MGS) 2026 in Seoul, a growth conference hosted by AB180 under the theme "Stack AI, Rewrite Everything." This post recaps "AI Brand Citation Patterns from 200+ SEO/AEO/GEO Projects," a PLAY HALL session on July 21, 2026 by Kyungsang Cho of NNT. The talk drew on more than 200 SEO, AEO, and GEO projects in Korea plus internal and external research. We transcribed it with daglo and pulled out what you can use right away.
What is a GEO strategy? An extension of SEO
GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of getting AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to cite your brand in their answers. The speaker's conclusion: a GEO strategy isn't separate from SEO but an extension of it. A URL ranking first on Google has a better than 40% chance of being cited by AI.
| Research finding | What it means |
|---|---|
| The #1 Google URL is cited by AI more than 40% of the time | Correlation, not causation, but search rankings are AI citation assets |
| About 30 domains account for roughly 70% of all citations | Outside that group, you compete with countless URLs for what's left |
| AI scans many pages but adopts very few | Sending steady trust signals (Trust Optimization) matters |
| Competition varies by industry | Diagnose how crowded your category is first |
In the 2020s, an AI layer has landed on top of media buying, search ads, and mobile stacks, and GEO was by far the most asked-about topic among marketers in 2026.
Breaking "we want to do GEO" into four areas
Saying "we want to do GEO," the speaker said, is like saying "we want to do marketing." Motives vary widely, so he split the work into four areas: sales, marketing, PR, and tech.
| Area | Goal | Key activities |
|---|---|---|
| Sales | Directly drive revenue | Naver price comparison, Google Merchant Center, ChatGPT product recommendations |
| Marketing | Distribute content | Human-written content hubs and high-quality programmatic pages |
| PR and communications | Frame how AI talks about you | Close the gaps in what AI can cite |
| Tech and operations | Access, citation, trust | A checklist of 24 actions in 3 categories with a 4-stage roadmap |
In sales, IKEA secured official certification on Naver, Korea's largest search and shopping portal, which lifted sales and was named a global best practice. A luxury brand, usually bought in department stores, also saw sales growth, proving the approach works even where direct-to-consumer matters less. The tech checklist covers access for AI crawlers, citation optimization, and trust optimization together.
Content hubs and programmatic pages: your own data is the moat
Mass-publishing AI-written pages as they are can wreck your site's credibility and bring penalties in indexing, ranking, and citation. Even when you automate, mix in data only you have to keep quality high.
Human-written examples included a global website for Buldak, which had no official .com site, and LG U+, whose discounted streaming subscription now appears as an option in AI answers to searches like "how to watch Netflix cheaper." The speaker calls a blog a content hub, because anyone who clicks into a post has shown clear intent.
- Use those visitors as data seeds for performance marketing.
- Build lookalike audiences from visitors to a given URL.
- Show related products through in-app messages.
In one programmatic project, the team avoided "benefits of X" pages, which carried legal risk, and mass-produced "calories in X" pages instead. Since AI can easily generate calorie facts, they added live product lists from a search API and real customer reviews. Purchase conversion differed by 8 to 9 times before and after reviews were added.
PR is now AI framing: closing the information gap
AI gathers scattered information and returns it as a single answer. Manage the information you can control, the speaker argued, and you can shape how AI describes your brand.
One global brand handling sensitive topics wanted AI to show at least neutral information, but there simply wasn't enough for AI to cite. ChatGPT and Gemini fill such gaps with community posts or inference. His suggestions:
- Distribute press releases in a form AI can easily cite.
- Ask whether coverage must come from local media. AI isn't confined to one region or language.
- Maintain your Wikipedia presence.
- Work legitimately with bloggers to publish content in the direction you want.
Writing rules for AI citation, and takeaways
AI reads from top to bottom and may not reach the end. Put your main claim first, then the evidence, then the details.
- Lead with the key point.
- Put facts in the second paragraph.
- Use confident, declarative language where you can.
- Use a question-and-answer structure.
- Pack in product names, people, and specific numbers.
Good content, he said, has a distinctive point of view, data only you have, and a very specific persona: not "a woman in her 30s" but "32, earns 95 million won a year, car budget of 80 million won, 15 km commute each way, camps about once a month." His closing question was which activities become more valuable as AI improves. The answer: content that is genuinely valuable to human readers.
- Ask the major AI tools how they describe your brand.
- Don't plan GEO separately from SEO.
- Attach your own data, such as reviews and usage stats, to your content.
- Check Wikipedia, press releases, and official docs for gaps in your brand information.
For recordings where it matters who said what, such as sessions with several speakers, daglo's Speaker ID is a useful feature. It remembers voices and fills in real names instead of "Speaker 1" from the next recording on, and daglo is the first service in Korea to offer it to every user. Learn more about Speaker ID
For the other sessions we attended, see our full MGS 2026 recap. Event details are on the official MGS 2026 site.
#MGS2026 #ModernGrowthStack #GEO #AEO #SEO #AISearch #ContentMarketing #daglo
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