Alex Melen is a keynote speaker and author on AI search and generative engine optimization (GEO): the practice of getting a brand recommended when buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews what to buy. His position, drawn from SmartSites' work across 1,000+ businesses, is that there is no number one on ChatGPT, that presence across many prompts replaces rank as the metric that matters, and that the fundamentals (entity clarity, promptable content, third-party citations and crawlable pages) decide who gets recommended.
How ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews decide which brands to recommend, and what to change on your site, your content, and your ads so you show up when buyers ask AI what to buy.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of optimizing your website and your broader web presence so that generative AI engines such as Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity include and cite your business in their answers.
ExplainerSEO (search engine optimization) is the work of getting your pages to rank in traditional search results.
ExplainerYou measure AI search visibility as a presence rate: the percentage of times your business appears when the same buyer questions are asked many times, in several phrasings, across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Copilot.
Generative engine optimization is the work of making a brand the answer when someone asks an AI assistant what to buy or who to hire: being present and accurately described in the sources those assistants read, so they include the brand in the shortlist they generate.
No. AI answers are generated per prompt and vary from run to run, so the measure Alex uses is presence rate: how often a brand appears across many prompts and repeated runs, not a single position.
The four AI-search chapters of Automotive Search Marketing (Second Edition) are on this site in full, alongside explainers on GEO, AEO vs. GEO vs. SEO and measuring AI-search visibility, and transcripts of his recorded talks.
Alex builds every session for the room. Send the event, audience and dates and he will come back with a proposed talk.