What we talked about
Leah Gabriel Nurik is CEO and co-founder of Brandi AI, a Generative Engine Optimization platform helping companies understand and improve how they show up in AI-driven search and answers. With over 20 years at the intersection of product, marketing, and go-to-market, she has worked with more than 400 growth-stage software companies. She also founded Gabriel Marketing Group, an award-winning B2B tech PR and marketing agency known for turning complex technology into clear, credible stories that drive growth.
Show notes
Leah Gabriel Nurik has spent 20 years helping B2B companies tell stories that drive growth, and she now argues those stories need to be structured not for human readers, but for the AI systems making recommendations before a human ever lands on your site. Her platform Brandy AI exists because if you don’t show up in an LLM’s answer to the right question, “you don’t exist” to the prospects who are asking it.
What we covered
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is not a replacement for SEO, Leah explains, but a new layer on top of it. Technical SEO still matters for indexability and findability, what changes is how your content gets read, summarized, and returned as an answer. The shift is from keywords to intent: the AI is trying to infer what a user actually needs, not just match text strings, so content has to be structured around “question-task alignment” rather than keyword density.
- She walked through how she used an LLM to choose Brandy’s payment processor, asking about integrations, credit card fees, startup suitability, and QuickBooks compatibility across one continuous conversation, narrowing from a broad field to a final decision in seven to ten minutes. Her point: the consumer is now in the driver’s seat in a way they weren’t when search returned ten blue links and made you do the research yourself.
- Brands that only check their AI visibility by going into ChatGPT once and typing a question are getting a misleading picture, because AI answers are non-deterministic, the same question asked two hours later can return a completely different response. Brandy monitors on a daily basis across multiple platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Mode) so clients can see their actual share of voice over time, not just a moment-in-time snapshot.
- She makes a sharp distinction between influencing AI answers and gaming them. The brands that are positioning well in AI results are doing it through authoritative, credible, accurately structured content, not tricks. Mission-driven companies that genuinely live their purpose and tell honest stories are the ones the AI rewards, because the algorithms are increasingly able to detect authenticity in a way that old keyword optimization never required.
- On PR’s evolving role, she cites Gartner Group’s projection that PR spend will double within companies in the next year, driven by the fact that earned media is being cited heavily in AI search results. A key insight from Brandy’s data: the publications that get cited vary significantly by geography, language, and market, so a campaign targeting Mexican Spanish speakers needs different outlet prioritization than one targeting Spain or Australia.
- GEO functions as a democratizer for smaller companies, she argues. A genuinely disruptive product, one that actually fulfills its promise, can now redefine how an AI describes an entire category through structured, authoritative owned content. That was nearly impossible when big brands could simply outspend smaller competitors on keywords. Now the question is whether your story is credible, not whether your budget is bigger.
About Leah
Leah Gabriel Nurik is CEO and co-founder of Brandy AI, a generative engine optimization and AI visibility platform. She previously founded Gabriel Marketing Group, a B2B tech PR and marketing agency that worked with more than 400 growth-stage software companies over two decades.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahgabriel
- Website: https://mybrandi.ai
Episode 141 of the PreVetted Podcast.