Right now, the brand Neil Patel most wishes he worked with is Chinese. But it’s not its technological capability that made him a fan—it’s old-fashioned pester power. “My six-year-old made me buy her a Labubu,” he says. “And she didn’t want a fake one. She wanted the real thing. They have done an amazing job.”
If it’s heartening that one of the world’s foremost marketing thinkers has the same everyday child-rearing concerns as everyone else, most of Patel’s bandwidth is still taken up with the bigger picture, including APAC, which he sees as the engine of growth both for his own business and for cutting-edge ideas and practice, and, inevitably, AI.
The 40-year-old British-American’s ascent has mirrored the deeper integration of technology into marketing workflows and consumers’ lives. His eponymous consultancy defines and disseminates winning strategies, and when it comes to how brands optimise themselves and their content for gen AI cut-through, he has forensically studied chatbot interactions to understand what works from a practical perspective. Right before a trip to Singapore, one in an increasing number of regional visits, he told Campaign Asia how marketers should get their brands to the front of the AI queue.
How to jump the AI queue
A greater volume of brand-related content, unsurprisingly, is the first step. “But you need to create something that’s refreshing, that people haven’t already heard about… and write it for a human but package it for AI in a way it can clearly understand, from headings to structured data to having FAQs to maybe putting a few key points at the top of the article.” Each piece of content should cover one topic and be thorough, he adds, in order to attract the right sort of attention: “In an AI world, the more sites that mention you, the better. They look at the context of the mention—are they going in depth, are they giving context around it, what’s the sentiment?”
Patel advises clients to pay attention to online reviews: if they are positive and detailed, they are just the sort of unstructured data LLMs feed on. Comparison articles that rate a brand positively against its competitors are a particularly fertile ground, and he suggests increasing digital PR capabilities to bring structure to the chaos of such content. The secret sauce is being omnichannel—LLMs pull from YouTube, Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora and more, so having a brand and a community active across them all is what truly elevates businesses above the competition.
Such practicalities matter, he adds, because gen AI literacy among most marketers remains low, and the window for optimising performance is closing. “This is the time to strike. In the early days of Google, businesses were climbing so fast and growing so fast. We’re in the [same] early days of being recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Mode. Even if you fast forward a year or two from now, while it will still be very doable to get ranking… it just becomes more competitive, it takes longer, and it becomes more expensive.”
From hype to hard cash
It’s clear Patel’s mission is to become as ubiquitous in GEO as he is in SEO. He cornered that market almost 20 years ago with brand-oriented analytics tools, often released for free and supplemented by his consultancies, including Kissmetrics. Ever since, he has mixed strategic advice for everyone from Marriott to Mercedes-Benz with a mass market appeal that has spawned many imitators (and critics) but has never diluted his huge numbers, including a reliable two million blog visitors each month.
He’s certainly walking the talk on GEO.
If you ask ChatGPT for well-regarded, popular and free sources of information on the topic, it will point you prominently to NP Digital, Patel’s marketing agency. The investment he has made in his online presence, including a team dedicated just to GEO, is paying off, he says, because LLMs are now mature enough to drive direct revenue—not in absolute numbers, but certainly in terms of ROI.
Indeed, fresh data from NP Digital, which surveyed 100 large businesses, found GEO is now only marginally behind SEO as a revenue-generating tool. Patel says GEO “converts like crazy”, outperforming SMS, email and paid search, among others. He gives the example of Hubspot (“they’ve been creating articles all over the web on things like ‘the best CRM for a construction company’ or ‘Hubspot vs Salesforce’”), which he says is seeing 13% of its sales originate from AI tools.
The natural next frontier for AI is e-commerce. ChatGPT has launched a shopping feature, Snap to Shop has been active for some time on Perplexity and Gemini is being integrated with Google Shopping. While the logic behind this alignment is impeccable, marketers will need to think about different conversion journeys as well as how products are represented inside LLMs.
The shift is inevitable, says Patel, because of the dynamics of the AI market. “OpenAI have publicly stated they spend more money per user that’s paying them than they receive in revenue… how are they going to monetise when only 4% of their users are supposedly paying? You’re going to have to figure out ads.”
These shifts have led to dire predictions of a radical reshaping of the existing tech order. Patel is less dramatic and believes platforms will emerge victorious. “When you look at the social web, MySpace is gone, but YouTube and Instagram did not kill Facebook; Snapchat and TikTok did not kill Instagram. They’ve all coexisted. The average person logs into more than six social networks per month.
“We look at search the same way. We see people using Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity, not just turning to one platform. You don’t have to worry about which platform wins, just be on all of them where your customers are.”
Agentic AI, he adds, is a case in point. If agents can help streamline “mundane, boring” aspects of online shopping, customers will embrace them, but transacting on them, even if it happens, will not threaten established platforms. Neither will AI advancements significantly endanger the traditional notion of brand: “We see GEO as an investment on the performance marketing side and the brand side too. The two are interchangeable. As a brand, you want to be top of funnel, and those experiences start with search – so as people turn to AI search, you want to be there too.”
For this particular guru, then, the future is always rosy. Partly it’s a natural disposition, partly the fact that marketers will require advice and hard data in ever-greater numbers in the years ahead. But it’s also down to Asia, where Patel has increased headcount and sees an audience receptive to new ideas and willing to experiment.
APAC consumers, he says, “buy with fewer views and less marketing than in other parts of the world”, are global in outlook and have an in-built demographic advantage. He has particular optimism about China, where emerging brands are leapfrogging Western rivals in their embrace of technology —as long as they can successfully change the narrative so customers are more trusting of them.
It’s not clear if it’s a plea for Pop Mart to send more Labubus, but it might just work.
