Think GEO Is Global? China Says Otherwise

GEO might be one of the biggest conversations in marketing right now, but much of that conversation is still shaped by Western platforms and assumptions. Here, Steven Proud from Brandigo China explains why the GEO landscape looks very different in China, and why that matters for agencies working with global brands.

Agencies are testing how brands appear in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI-powered search and answer platforms. Clients are asking about AI visibility, new tools are emerging to measure it and, inevitably, a whole new industry of GEO specialists is appearing alongside them.

But there is an assumption buried in much of this activity that deserves challenging: that GEO is inherently global.

China suggests otherwise.

For international agencies working with global brands, China provides a useful glimpse of what GEO may increasingly look like as the discipline matures. The principles might travel. The platforms, sources and signals that matter often don’t.

There is no single global AI ecosystem

Most Western GEO strategies currently focus on a relatively familiar digital environment: Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Reddit, Wikipedia, authoritative media and the wider open web.

China has developed a very different ecosystem.

Baidu has ERNIE. Alibaba has Qwen. ByteDance has Doubao. Tencent has Hunyuan. Then there are platforms such as Kimi and DeepSeek, the latter increasingly embedded within other applications and services.

These aren’t simply Chinese alternatives to Western AI platforms. Each sits within a different digital and commercial ecosystem, with access to different sources and different signals of authority.

Baidu connects AI with its established search infrastructure and platforms such as Baidu Baike. Alibaba sits within an enormous commercial and enterprise ecosystem. ByteDance connects AI with a content universe that includes Douyin and Toutiao. Tencent brings WeChat and WeCom into the picture.

For marketers, that fragmentation matters.

A brand can be well represented in one AI environment and virtually invisible in another. And strong visibility on ChatGPT or Gemini internationally tells you surprisingly little about how the same company will appear when a buyer in China begins researching it using local AI tools.

Your owned channels may have a completely different value

One thing that hasn’t changed is the importance of a brand’s official website. If anything, GEO is making it more important.

For international B2B brands in China, having an active, regularly updated Chinese-language website is becoming increasingly crucial. Chinese LLMs are increasingly able to cite and rely on official brand websites as authoritative first-party sources, making the website an important part of establishing exactly who the company is, what it does and where its expertise lies.

But the owned ecosystem in China doesn’t stop with the website.

WeChat is a good example of why simply exporting a GEO playbook from one market to another doesn’t work.

International marketers have traditionally viewed a WeChat Official Account primarily as a communications and content channel: somewhere to publish articles, build followers and maintain a direct relationship with audiences in China.

That remains true. But its role is evolving.

As Tencent integrates AI more deeply across its ecosystem, a well-maintained WeChat presence also becomes part of the wider body of information through which a brand can be understood, validated and surfaced.

Suddenly, an owned social channel has implications beyond engagement metrics.

The same principle applies elsewhere. Baidu Baike, Zhihu, Chinese industry media, local commercial platforms and Chinese-language technical content can all contribute signals that don’t necessarily exist, or carry the same weight, in a Western GEO strategy.

GEO cannot become SEO circa 2012

There is another lesson from China that should sound familiar to anyone who has worked in digital marketing for long enough.

Where there is a new optimisation discipline, content farms will quickly follow.

We are already seeing GEO strategies built around publishing huge volumes of AI-generated or lightly adapted content, seeded with keywords and brand references, then distributed across as many sites as possible.

It is essentially an old SEO playbook with some new terminology.

But generative engines need more than volume. They need information they can trust.

For B2B brands in particular, substantive technical content, original research, credible case studies, consistent company information and genuine third-party references are far more valuable than hundreds of near-identical articles sitting on low-authority websites.

That is ultimately what GEO should be about: not trying to trick an AI into mentioning your brand, but building enough genuine digital authority that mentioning your brand becomes a logical answer.

Global strategy still matters. Local intelligence matters more.

None of this means every market needs an entirely separate GEO strategy.

Global brands still need consistency around who they are, what they do, the categories they compete in and the expertise they want to own. Strong original content can, and should, provide the foundation for visibility across multiple markets.

But the way that authority is established and distributed needs localisation.

China makes that particularly obvious because its digital ecosystem is so distinct. But it raises a wider question for agencies everywhere.

As AI-powered discovery becomes embedded into more search engines, social platforms, marketplaces, enterprise tools and local digital ecosystems, how many other markets will develop their own combination of trusted sources and signals?

The answer to global GEO may therefore not be one universal playbook.

It may be a connected model: global brand authority supported by local expertise about the platforms, sources, behaviours and signals that matter in each market.

And that is where international agency networks have an interesting opportunity.

The agencies that succeed at GEO globally won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest centralised GEO teams. They may be the ones best able to connect global thinking with genuine intelligence on the ground.

GEO might be a global marketing discipline.

But that doesn’t make GEO the same everywhere.