Your Food Brand’s Search Strategy Has an Expiration Date: What You Need to Know About AI Search and GEO

Nearly 60% of Google searches now end without a click. ChatGPT has captured roughly 17 percent of overall search share. And Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) has gone from a buzzword to a line item marketers are scrambling to figure out.

AI has already rewritten the rules of search. 

But if you’re a food marketer spending 15-25% of your budget on search, the story of AI search is more nuanced and interesting. Here’s what you need to know – and how to take advantage of the extra runway the CPG food industry currently enjoys. 

Food Search Is Different (For Now)

Google still commands about 78% of all searches. But for transactional queries (the kind with purchase intent, which is where most CPG brands live) that share jumps to roughly 90 percent, with ChatGPT at only about 5 percent.

According to McKinsey, the vast majority (roughly 80%) of food and beverage shoppers don’t rely on AI in any meaningful way when making purchase decisions.

Why the gap?

Part of it is practical. Shoppers still can’t complete a grocery purchase inside an LLM. If you’re buying food online, you’re going to a retailer’s site or app. That transactional step keeps food search anchored to traditional platforms in a way that, say, software research or travel planning, isn’t. (Notably, some AI models have started attempting to make purchases on behalf of users, and retailers like Amazon are already pushing back.)

Food marketers have more runway than other categories before AI search reshapes their world. But that’s not a reason to wait.

What Food Brands Should Do Now

The extra runway CPG food brands enjoy is an advantage, but only if you use it to get ahead of the curve. Right now, most brands aren’t.

The average company is currently spending less than 1% of their marketing budgets on GEO, according to Neil Patel. For most food brands, that number needs to go up. The question is where to focus.

The good news: much of what you’ve been doing for SEO still applies. GEO and SEO share a lot of the same DNA. The shift is less about tearing up your SEO playbook and more about adjusting your goals and expanding where you show up.

Rethink How You Measure Search Success

Page rankings and site traffic have been the primary SEO KPIs for years. With the rise of GEO, visibility and trust matter as much or more. 

Are you showing up when someone asks ChatGPT about your category? Is your brand being cited as a source in AI-generated summaries? That’s the new version of ranking on page one. 

Measurement tools are still catching up; no single platform has emerged as the standard. But an AI brand audit (more on that below) is the place to start.

For Paid Search, Shift Your Focus Downward

AI overviews and LLMs tend to absorb the informational, top-of-funnel queries. But they’re much less effective at handling specific, high-intent, lower-funnel searches. That’s where your paid search dollars work hardest right now. 

Double down on long-tail queries with clear purchase intent. And take a look at your ad copy. Conversational language tends to perform better in an environment where AI is setting the tone of the results page.

8 Steps to Make Your Food Brand Visible to AI

Beyond adjusting your SEO and paid search strategies, there are concrete steps you can take to improve how AI platforms find, read, and reference your brand.

1. Start with an AI brand audit. Systematically search for your brand and category on Google’s AI Overviews and LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Your goal is to find out which sources are being cited and whether your brand is among them. This manual check gives you a baseline for where you stand and where to focus your effort.
2. Remove technical barriers to AI access.JavaScript‑only rendering, aggressive security/CDN rules, and login‑only pages can prevent AI crawl bots from seeing or using your material. Review your most important pages to confirm that their core content is exposed in plain HTML, publicly reachable, and well structured so AI systems can read and understand it.
3. Lead with original information. AI platforms favor content they can’t find elsewhere. Proprietary research, exclusive data, original benchmarks, and unique recipes all give your brand an edge. 
4. Structure content for how AI reads. Front-load answers. Frame content around questions that mirror how people actually query AI tools. Use lists and tables where appropriate. The easier your content is for an AI to parse and cite, the more likely it is to show up in a summary.
5. Invest in third-party presence. AI pulls heavily from community platforms and user-generated content. For food brands, Reddit and YouTube are among the most relevant channels. Recipes, product discussions, and longer-form video content tagged with the right keywords all increase the chances your brand gets picked up. 
6. Prioritize customer reviews. For food products, purchase decisions often hinge on what other people say about taste, quality, and value. That makes reviews one of the most influential inputs AI can pull from. Note that AI summaries can surface trending sentiment in real time, which means a wave of negative reviews might show up in an AI response before you’ve even had time to respond through traditional channels.
7. Don’t overlook your own site and your retail partners. McKinsey found that Google AI sources 80% of its AI Overview responses for ecommerce from brand and retail websites. That’s a strong signal: invest in your .com content, and make sure your presence on retailer sites is detailed and current.
8. Think multimodal. People are searching with images and video more than ever. Make sure your visual content is tagged, described, and structured in ways that AI can index.

Food Brands Have a Window. Use It.

AI search is still evolving. The specifics will keep shifting, but the direction is clear: AI is becoming a primary filter between your brand and the people looking for products like yours.

Because AI search adoption is slower among food shoppers, the CPG marketing landscape for food brands has a valuable window of advantage right now. The smartest move is to use it.

Start with an audit. Shift some focus from click metrics to visibility metrics. Invest in the content and third-party presence that AI actually draws from. And keep your paid search working hard on the high-intent queries where it still delivers.

At EvansHardy+Young, we help food brands stay ahead of shifts like this. If you’re ready to assess where your brand stands in the new CPG marketing environment, let’s talk.