When was the last time you Googled a product recommendation instead of asking ChatGPT or Claude?
That behavioral shift is the premise behind "The Peacock's Echo," a new book by Marcos Viladomiu, a senior marketing executive at Bang & Olufsen. His argument: traditional SEO and brand awareness metrics are becoming less relevant as AI systems increasingly mediate purchase decisions. What matters now is whether an LLM can accurately describe your brand and recommend it in the right context.
Viladomiu calls this "Generative Echo Optimization" (GEO) - the practice of structuring your brand's digital footprint so AI models represent you accurately when users ask for recommendations.
The Shift from Discovery to Recommendation
Traditional marketing optimizes for human discovery. You rank on Google, you show up in social feeds, you buy display ads. But when someone asks Claude "what's the best project management tool for a 5-person agency," the answer doesn't come from an ad auction. It comes from whatever the model learned during training - your documentation, reviews, comparison articles, and structured data.
This creates a fundamentally different optimization problem. The book's framework includes AI visibility audits (how do LLMs currently perceive your brand?), positioning documents designed as structured evidence for AI consumption, and "friction audits" that identify where your digital presence creates confusion for AI systems.
What This Means for Marketers Using AI Tools
The practical question is whether you can actually influence how LLMs talk about your product. The answer is a qualified yes. Models are trained on web content, so the clarity, consistency, and structure of your public-facing materials do affect AI-generated recommendations. If your pricing page contradicts your feature comparison page, an LLM will reflect that confusion.
Several startups have already emerged in this space, offering "AI search optimization" dashboards that track how often brands appear in LLM responses across different query types. The concept isn't entirely new - it's essentially the SEO-to-GEO evolution that marketing teams have been quietly discussing since ChatGPT hit mainstream adoption.
The book itself is available on Kindle and uses a fable format with animal characters to illustrate its points, which is either charming or annoying depending on your tolerance for business parables. But the underlying framework - treating AI perception as a distinct marketing channel that requires its own audit, optimization, and measurement process - is a real strategic consideration that most marketing teams haven't formalized yet.
For anyone running content marketing or SEO for AI tools specifically, the irony is rich: the products you're marketing are the same ones reshaping how marketing works.