In-Ear Insights: What is Generative Engine Marketing (GEM)?

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss generative engine marketing, or GEM, the AI equivalent of SEM. Just as SEO became GEO, so too is SEM likely to become GEM. Learn what it is, how it might manifest, and what you should be considering. Watch the video here: Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here . Listen to the audio here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-what-is-generative-engine-marketing-sem-gem.mp3 Download the MP3 audio here . Need help with your company’s data and analytics? Let us know! Join our free Slack group for marketers interested in analytics! [podcastsponsor] Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode. Christopher S. Penn: In this week’s In-Ear Insights. Welcome back. Happy new year. It’s 2026. I have just begun to realize as I was cleaning out my pantry over the holidays, oh yeah, all these things expire in 2026. That’s this year. A lot happened over the holidays. A lot of changes in AI. But one thing that hasn’t happened yet but has been in discussion that I think is—Katie, you wanted to talk about—was SEO for good or ill, sort of centered on this GEO acronym, Generative Engine Optimization, and all of its brethren: AIO and AEO and whatever. SEO’s companion has always been SEM, also known as Pay Per Click marketing, and that has its alphabet soup like rlsa, remarketing lists for search ads, and all these acronyms, part of the paid version of search marketing. Well, Katie, you asked a very relevant… Katie Robbert: …question, which was, when is GEM coming? So as a little plug, I’m doing a Friday session with our good friends over at Marketing Profs on GEO and ROI, which I have to practice saying over and over again so I don’t stumble over it. But basically the idea is what can B2B marketers measure in GEO to demonstrate their return on investment so that they can argue for more budget. And so what we were talking about this morning is that GEO is really just an amped up version of brand search. If you know SEO, brand search is a part of SEO. And so basically it’s like how well recognized is my brand or my influencers or whatever. If I type in Katie Robbert or if I type in Trust Insights, what comes back? And so all of the same tactics that you do for branded search, you do for GEO plus a little bit more. So it’s the same end result, but you need to figure out sort of where all of that fits. So I’ll go over all of that. But it then naturally progressed into the conversation of, well, part of brand search is paid campaigns. You pay money to Google AdWords, if that’s still what it’s called, or whatever ad system you’re using, you put money behind your branded terms so that when someone’s looking for certain things, your name comes up. And I was like, well, that’s the SEM version of SEO. When are we getting the paid version of GEO? So basically GEM, or whatever you would want to call it, the way that I k

Listen