MAgNIFIER O M NTHLY OCTOBER 2026
ISSUE 46
The New Age of Discoverability Understanding GEO and How to Plan for It
CONTENTs 1 2
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR.................................. 3 The Cream Always Rises to the Top
CURRENT EVENTS DIGITAL TRENDS...................................................... 5 A Look at the Macro Picture
SOCIALTRENDS........................................................ 7 The Hot Format of the Month
AI TRACKER............................................................... 8 The Latest on AI
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DIY DIGITAL STRATEGY SECRETS............................................... 9 Building Discoverability
USEFUL BUSINESS GADGETS.............................. 9 Tracking Discoverability
MONTHLY PUZZLE..................................................10 Mapping Discoverability
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laughs MEME OF THE MONTH.......................................... 13
Cover image by Magic Media
THE CREAM ALWAYS RISES TO THE TOP We interrupt our regularly scheduled AI service updates to bring you information on the hottest new trend to plague the digital space: GEO, aka generative engine optimization. I know that last month, I was all like “oh, I have big updates for you, oh, I’m launching a new AI service, stay tuned everyone” et cetera et cetera, but this topic is too hot hot hot to not not not say something. GEO is all over the place. It’s wreaking havoc on digital marketing strategies, causing Reddit to completely change its business model, and prompting entirely new lines of research from web service companies (see: Digital Trends section). It’s simultaneously the new frontier and the Wild Wild West—it opens up a ton of new opportunities for business visibility, but it hasn’t been around long enough to have tried and true strategies like SEO. Generative engine optimization is the daughter of search engine optimization (SEO), a digital concept as old as search engines themselves. With SEO, your aim is to improve your visibility in an internet search by way of key words and web pages. The software that crawls the web in a search will pick up on hyperlinks and then evaluate various signals to index and rank the results page in order from most helpful to least helpful. GEO, on the other hand, goes beyond keywords. Your aim is to optimize for AI crawlers, which crowd-source information from the entire internet and evaluate opinions and commentary from internet users as part of their generated summaries. It’s estimated that AI agents are now over 50% of internet traffic, which means that there’s a new formula for how people are discovering brands. Rather than going directly to a search engine, they’re going to their agent and typing in prompts like “I’m currently using XYZ platforms to run my business, but I don’t really need all the features and I’m wasting money. How can I reduce costs without losing the functionality I need?” The agent then scrapes the internet for both factual information (pricing, features, capabilities) and user input on those platforms (reviews, opinions, forum commentary)
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A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR to give a robust recommendation with links to the source of information. This obviously begs the question: How do I get my business cited in an agent search result? I’m glad you asked. It all comes down to what I call organic chatter. The more places you can show up on the internet the better. But don’t just ‘show up’ by getting mentions; the technology of AI agents is designed to read and interpret language, so simply getting mentioned on the internet isn’t going to cut it. You need to be talked about, loved, respected, vouched for. This is what I find beautiful about GEO. It will separate the mediocre brands from the ones who are delivering genuine value; comments sections are the most honest places on the internet and can’t be tricked by paid clicks. We’ve come full circle and put the power of the internet back into the hands of its people, marketing slop be damned.
Which brings us to the issue at hand... Flip through these pages to learn about the nuances of AI-era discoverability and how to position your online brand for optimal visibility.
Madelyn Veith is the editor of Magnifier Monthly. Each month, she sifts through the news in the digital space and hand-curates this newsletter to keep readers on their A-game.
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DIGITAL
Trends
Ads Get AI-ified Last month, OpenAI (owner of ChatGPT) announced that it had begun testing business-sponsored sponsored agents after clicking an ad in ChatGPT. Instead of going directly to a website, their first click takes them to a chat with a business’ AI agent to ask questions before they take the next step. In the same update, OpenAI rolled out a suite of tools for creating ad campaigns with AI as well as new integrations with HubSpot and Shopify that allow businesses using those platforms to connect their account with ChatGPT Ads accounts.
MAROVE ANALYSIS: This is a likely signal that the digital advertising landscape is about to experience a pretty major shift from clicks to conversations. Historically, the school of thought around consumer purchasing is the Rule of 7, that a potential customer must encounter a brand’s message at least 7 times before taking action or making a purchase (although in the digital space, it’s more like the Rule of 20). Consequently, the brand must patiently wait between repetitions and hope that in the meantime, the consumer will do some extra thinking and researching on the product. Directing potential customers to a chatbot instead of a link to purchase does away with ambiguity and accelerates the consumer’s interaction with the brand, allowing them to explore the product efficiently. The logic is sound and it’s worth a try, but advertisers beware: The human capacity for robot interactions on a daily basis may have a limit.
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There’s No Average AI Traffic Kinsta, a platform that provides WordPress website hosting, recently published a report that sampled 5,000+ WordPress sites to examine how differently AI traffic hits each site. In sum, the results show that fleet-wide averages for AI traffic say very little about any individual site (the data was quite skewed: a very small percentage of websites experienced the bulk of the AI traffic, while most sites experienced little to none at all). Additional results showed that AI crawlers ask more of the server than humans do (mostly in requesting dynamic or uncacheable content). Also, in a Kinsta consumer survey, 44% say they always or mostly visit a company’s website after an AI recommendation while 61% associate website quality with the quality of the company’s products or services. The report concluded that websites are still the ultimate destination in discoverability and that businesses should measure their own site’s AI traffic and where it goes before deciding whether to monitor, optimize or intervene.
MAROVE ANALYSIS: Kinsta’s results may only represent one portion of websites on the internet, but the data is still informative. It’s not news at this point that an increasing percentage of website traffic is now AIdriven, but it is news that not all AI traffic is created equally. Kinsta’s advice is sound: Observe your data with caution and refrain from making big optimization moves until you have insight into how much AI crawlers are actually interacting with your site.
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Reddit Locks Down Its Data Reddit announced that because of the increase in AI internet traffic, it will retire RSS feeds on November 13 and phase out its public API access, ending in March 2027. RSS Feeds and public API access were the technical pathway for AI tools to access and use content on Reddit (Reddit is one of the most frequently-cited sources in AI summaries). Once API access closes, those agents/platforms will need commercial deals to keep accessing the data.
MAROVE ANALYSIS: As the article notes, “the decision to kill Reddit’s RSS feeds comes at a time when the site’s treasure trove of usergenerated content in its forums has become a profitable side business for the company in the form of AI licensing deals.” In other words, Reddit knows it can be making money off of all of this user-generated data that it was originally giving away for free. There may be a short-term effect where the platform is free of marketing bots, but beware longterm enshittifcation: What was once a platform of pure anonymous chatter will now be flush with licensing deals to buy up and sell private data. Don’t put all your GEO eggs in the Reddit basket.
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“this is what autumn feels like” by chilledpigmusic [static unedited images that match the description of each slide]
how I completely transformed my home into an elegant space without breaking the bank
“Static Storytelling” Carousels on Instagram October 2026
Social
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Just a few days left of this trend... get it while it’s hot!
TRENDS
AI TRACKER
Keeping an eye on AI...
The Big Story The big news in the AI world this month was Meta’s launch of its own AI agent, Muse, and subsequent Muse Wonder models that the company pitches as delivering “state-of-the-art performance on personal and professional agentic tasks,” ultimately pushing towards “personal superintelligence.” Meta positions Muse as a secure, private, personal AI agent built to act as the consumer’s multi-step digital or executive assistant, transitioning from a reactive chatbot model to a proactive, goal-driven "personal superintelligence.” It does things like tedious tasks (booking travel, buying groceries) and goal-oriented action (managing a budget with a long-term plan). It was the fastest AI assistant platform to reach 5 million downloads (22 days, compared to second place ChatGPT at 56 days).
What the Experts Say As a functional assistant that offloads tedious tasks, the user feedback is generally positive. But, as NPR puts it, “Muse could change the way we experience the internet, it'll just need a whole lot of your personal data first.” Cybersecurity expert Paul Walsh notes that “Unlike conventional social media tracking, Muse can read private correspondence, access connected accounts, execute transactions and communicate with other people without someone approving every individual action. It can also continuously analyse private information and build profiles of people who never agreed to use the service.” Walsh believes that this is problematic for a company with a documented history of abusing personal data.
Just One Opinion It’s hard to argue with 5 million downloads in 22 days. People want easy, and Muse delivers. But, the data access situation is cause for concern and basic regulation could wipe out its entire business model. A second opinion: This will sunset that genre of rom coms where the overworked executive assistant finally quits and the sexy boss realizes how much the assistant actually did and humbles him/herself to get the assistant back.
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STRATEGY
SECRETS
ECOSY N A D L I U B
STEM
The new age of discoverability by AI means that simply being present online is no longer enough. You must be omnipresent—mentioned or featured across multiple platforms and channels.
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ON ORGANIC C
HATTER
Faking the spread of your presence will only serve to hurt your brand; people—and AI agents—don’t trust slop. Online mentions must come from The People and they must be motivated to write reviews of their own volition (or encouraged by your business).
USEFUL BUSINESS gADgETS
AI VISIBILITY TRACKING Until recently, tracking foot traffic on your website has been straightforward: Direct vs. indirect, mobile vs. desktop, and so on. With the rise of AI agents as a search method, there's certain to be an increase in AI foot traffic (people who come to your site by way of AI search), which means it’s time to track your AI discovery with AI visibility tracking. You can use dedicated software to track AI traffic, a built-in tool on your website host’s analytics page, or the AI referral tracking feature in Google Analytics.
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“Did you get that one over there?”
T H N L O Y M
Puzzle Solution on next page...
SCAVENGER HUNT ORGANIC CHATTER The new way to get noticed is to get cited in an AI search. And the best way to get cited is to get people talking about you. Find the places where chatter occurs and AI scrapes for research.
CLICK TO PLAY 10
FINAL
SOLUTION SCAVENGER HUNT
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OF T M ON HE
13
H T
E M E M
Marketers who have been flooding the zone with disingenuous content on Reddit attempting to pivot as their strategy blows up in their faces with the end of RSS feeds and API access
THE REFERENCE
SPONGEBOB SHORT CIRCUITS
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S IS A THI
PUB LICATION
Get to work, sleuths!