Beyond Google: Shanzila Ahmed on AI Search, GEO, and How Businesses Get Recommended by ChatGPT

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another inspiring episode of Telling My Story, the podcast where we uncover the journey behind remarkable people and explore the experiences, ideas, and lessons that inspire personal and professional growth. I'm your host, Henry Chuetelu, and today's conversation takes us into one of the biggest changes happening in the digital world. What happens when people stop searching and start accessing AI? For years, businesses have focused on Google on google ranking keywords websites and seos but today customers are increasingly accessing platforms like chat gpt gemini and perplexity which businesses they should choose and that raises an important question if ai doesn't recommend your business does your google ranking still matter Today, I'm joined by Shanzila Ahmed, an AI search visibility and generative engine optimization expert and co-founder of Reach LLM. Shanzila helps businesses understand how AI systems describe, compare, and recommend their brands and how they can improve their visibility in this rapidly changing search environment. In today's conversation, we'll explore AI search, GEO, SEO, brand visibility, AI recommendation, digital marketing, and the future of customer discovery. Shanzila, welcome to Tell My Story. It's a pleasure to have you here with us today.

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

All right, Shanzila, let's start with your journey. What first interested you in AI search visibility and generative engine optimization?

So in my last startup, we got some clients and we were and got some funding and we were trying to do our SEO because we were making the website, improving it. And the natural question that came around that time was like, okay, what about AI search answers? Because that's where a lot of the people search now. This was, I think around May last year. And then we came across the term GEO. We tried to find some tools, but one, they were very expensive and they were just visibility tracking tools. And as a young startup, we knew our visibility was bad. So naturally we wanted to improve it and there was no tool helping us do that. So we built a tool. In seven days we did our GEO and then we actually launched that tool on Product Hunt and it ranked top five. So we realized that this market is big and that kind of got us into GEO itself. We started getting more into it. We got some clients. and at that point it was just a tool like we pivoted later on but we were having calls with all our customers every single week and by having calls with them analyzing the data that was coming on our platform we kind of realized like why some companies who are using our platform are actually growing much faster than a lot of the other ones what is working for some companies, what is not working for others. And another thing we realized was that this is not an era of tools. Most people don't want another tool nowadays because they'll have to learn it and then the tool changes because GEO itself changes. So we pivoted to becoming an AI native agency. and we've had a lot of success since in what what we do now is like we don't just give you a tool we learn that people need outcomes so