Get Your Brand Recommended by AI: A Marketer's Playbook for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) @ ANA (Association of National Advertisers) Virtual 2026

Every AI answer is a shortlist, and if a brand is not in the consideration set it does not exist. In this ANA session Alex Melen covers how AI search is changing brand discovery, the 2026 AI-visibility ranking signals, and a seven-move GEO playbook marketers can start the same quarter without specialized tools: audit yourself in the AIs, write with promptability, nail entity clarity, build topical authority, get mentioned where AI looks, be technically ready for AI crawlers, and own your reputation. Closes with the new paid-ad inventory inside Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT.

What you'll take away

• Audit yourself: ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity "best [category] for [use case]" ten ways, ten times, and log who appears
• Write with promptability: question-based headers with the answer in the first sentence; cover "X vs Y" and "best for" comparisons
• Entity clarity: who you are, what you do, who you serve, stated identically across site, LinkedIn, GBP and directories
• Get mentioned where AI looks: listicles, review platforms and community threads drive a large share of AI citations
• Be technically ready: about a third of the average retail product page is invisible to LLMs; put critical content in crawlable HTML and don't block AI crawlers