From Top of Mind to Top of Machine – and Why the Real World Is Making a Comeback

The keyword is Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO. SEO and digital agencies are already adding GEO to their service portfolios. Their business model is simple: preparing brands in a way that AI assistants can understand, filter, and recommend them. Because by 2030, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar systems will act as gatekeepers between people and brands.

“Top of mind” is becoming “top of machine”, as diffferent and Syzygy put it in their white paper Marketing 2030.
At the same time, we are seeing a renaissance of the analogue. Not as nostalgia, but as a strategic necessity. Half of all people are already actively rationing their screen time. Pop-up stores are evolving into multi-sensory installations. Premium brands are investing heavily in tactile, physical experiences.

The real world is becoming the last truly creative stage, because the digital world is losing its power to surprise as AI increasingly talks to AI.

Brands are now forced to operate in two completely opposing worlds at once: machine-readable for AI agents, and emotionally compelling for real human encounters. That is the new masterclass.

Imagine the year is 2030. Nobody googles “best running shoes for marathon” anymore. Instead, someone says to their AI assistant: “I’m training for my first marathon, budget 200 euros, I have overpronation.”

The AI agent knows the user’s running history from their smartwatch, understands previous injuries, compares product data, analyses reviews, and recommends three specific models.

The crucial question is not whether the products exist. It is whether your brand even appears in that decision set.
This is not science fiction. The shift is already underway. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews all fundamentally change how people search for information and make decisions. And that creates a new marketing discipline: Generative Engine Optimization.

Classic SEO aims to rank in search engine results. GEO goes one step further. It structures content so that AI systems can understand it semantically, classify it correctly, and reuse it in their answers.
In practice, that means:

• Structured product data instead of flowery marketing copy.
• Clear terminology instead of creative wordplay that only humans understand.
• Consistent narratives across all touchpoints.
• High-quality, trustworthy sources, because AI systems continuously cross-check brand promises against real-world feedback.

This is where the link to Newsletter #8 becomes obvious. At a time when brands jump from project to project and fall into the “solo artist trap”, long-term strategic frameworks become essential for AI systems. An AI agent cannot work with “this year emotional, next year rational”. It needs consistency to understand a brand at all, let alone recommend it.

The Content Renaissance: this is where things get genuinely interesting. The last few years were dominated by “content at scale”. Now the dynamic is reversing. AI systems compare brand claims with actual user feedback. If a brand fails on Reddit, it has little chance with an AI assistant. Thought leadership matters again. Valuable, substantial content is making a comeback. Quantity loses relevance. Credibility wins.

But GEO is only half the equation. There is a concept the marketing industry is only beginning to grasp: Agent Experience, or AX.

For years, User Experience focused on how well humans interact with a brand. Now the question shifts: how well can AI agents interact with your brand?

This is not theoretical. Very concretely, it means:

• Are your product data accessible via APIs for AI systems?
• Do you offer open interfaces that allow AI agents to check availability or place orders?
• Is your information structured in a way that enables semantic understanding?
• Can you deploy a branded AI agent, a digital representative of your brand that communicates with your customers’ personal assistants?

By 2030, Agent Experience will be a key differentiator, not User Experience. As the white paper puts it, marketing will become “not louder, but more technical”. This is not dystopian. It is the logical consequence of AI agents becoming the primary interface between people and brands.

The second core insight of the white paper is cultural rather than technical. As AI agents take over the digital sphere, the physical world gains relevance.

The underlying mechanism is simple. When digital environments are curated by AI, when AI talks to AI, when texts are machine-generated, we become numb. The white paper describes this as a gradual saturation. The digital world loses its ability to surprise.

That leaves the real world as the only place where brands can still genuinely surprise. Not as retro romanticism, but as a cultural statement against digital anaesthesia.

This is why smart brands are investing heavily in physical experiences:

• Analog experiences are identified by Dentsu Creative as one of the five major trends for 2026 under the label - “Analog Futures”. Forty-five percent of Gen Z say the online world is so stressful that they actively want to disconnect. Around half of all respondents already ration their screen time.
• Tactile premium experiences are gaining strategic importance. Sephora is redesigning all 700-plus stores in North America, the largest project in its history. Inditex, owner of Zara, plans five percent retail space growth between 2025 and 2026, backed by 1.8 billion euros in investment. Physical space delivers value that digital channels cannot replicate.
• Pop-up stores have become a mass phenomenon. Lululemon staged its Glow Up Collection as an immersive fitness pop-up with celebrity classes. Pink Floyd opened pop-ups simultaneously in six cities from London to Milan to mark the 50th anniversary of an album. The global pop-up market is expected to reach 95 billion dollars by 2025. The message is clear: we are not everywhere, but when we show up, it is an event.

The deeper reason is biological. We are physical beings. Touch is our first mode of communication as children. Physical stimuli, combined with visual input, are processed more intensely and activate the brain regions responsible for emotional bonding.

This is the real challenge. By 2030, brands must be ambidextrous.

AI agents need a clear, consistent framework to understand and recommend a brand. But when a human actually encounters the brand, in a store, at an event, in the physical world, it must surprise, move, and inspire.

The brands that will win understand one thing clearly: Top of mind becomes top of machine. But top of heart remains analogue.