Media Insights · Episode 2 · August 20, 2026 · 27 min
From SEO to GEO: How AI Is Rewriting Brand Discovery
With Gabriela Henault , Chief Marketing Officer, Third Bridge. Hosted by Jordan Mitchell.
In short
AI makes high-quality, attributable sources more valuable, not less. That is the core argument from Gabriela Henault, Chief Marketing Officer of Third Bridge, on Media Insights Episode 2. Her team doubled down on SEO and generative engine optimization (GEO), rebuilt Third Bridge's website and blog so large language models can read and cite them, brought in outside experts, and saw strong results within four to five months.
Gabriela's rule for content teams is that AI is there "to remove friction but never to replace thinking." She also explains how CMOs can win AI budget by framing it as a revenue enabler, not only an efficiency tool.
“AI is there to remove friction but never to replace thinking.” Gabriela Henault, CMO, Third Bridge
Key takeaways
- AI raises the value of quality sources. As people pull information from more places, the quality and attribution of a source matters more, because AI tools can surface hallucinations and irrelevant data.
- Third Bridge doubled down on SEO and GEO, revamped its website and blog strategy so LLMs can more easily read its content, and hired outside expertise for the new skills. It saw strong results within four to five months.
- Being early is a brand asset. Moving first on GEO gave Third Bridge an edge over slower competitors and reinforces its position as an innovative, AI-first firm.
- Earned media feeds AI visibility. Links from high-profile, well-respected publications support both SEO and GEO, so PR belongs in a multi-channel strategy, not in isolation.
- Use AI for the early work (brainstorming, first drafts, analysis), then have humans edit and fine-tune. Every team at Third Bridge, not just marketing, works this way.
- Employee advocacy turned marketing into a firm-wide activity. Professional investors are discerning buyers, and people prefer to buy from people rather than faceless logos.
- Make the AI budget case two ways: as an efficiency tool, and as a revenue enabler. Third Bridge builds Claude skills for its clients, which Gabriela compares to investing in customer success or account management.
Chapters
- Gabriela's background and what Third Bridge does
- Why AI makes quality sources more valuable
- Employee advocacy over a faceless brand account
- AI content: remove friction, never replace thinking
- What Claude skills are and how Third Bridge builds them
- Data privacy guardrails and MCP
- From SEO to GEO: how AI changed brand discovery
- Earned media, PR and LLM citations
- The brand value of being an AI first mover
- How CMOs can unlock budget for AI
- Lessons from founding Calenda
- Career advice for the next generation of marketers
- 2027 predictions for AI in media and marketing
- How to reach Gabriela
About the guest
Gabriela Henault
Chief Marketing Officer, Third Bridge
Gabriela Henault is Chief Marketing Officer at Third Bridge, a global research provider whose clients include hedge funds, consultancies and corporates. She has more than 20 years of experience in brand and commercial marketing, including 13 years at brand consultancy Prophet, where she was an Associate Partner and head of the Brand & Experience practice in EMEA, and a role as Global CMO of AlphaSights. She was named to Management Today's 2026 Women in Leadership Power List, guest lectures at London Business School, and founded Calenda, an AI-enabled platform for parents.
Jordan Mitchell
Host, founder of Growth Stack Media
Jordan creates content about AI's role in media literacy, deepfakes, creator rights and emerging trends in marketing, PR and advertising. His work has been covered by Forbes, Marketing Dive and MediaPost.
FAQ
What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of making your content easy for AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI summaries to find, understand and cite, while SEO targets traditional search rankings. Gabriela Henault says Third Bridge doubled down on both: it revamped its website and its blog strategy so its content performs better and is more easily read by LLMs, because that is how many people now discover the firm.
How long did it take Third Bridge to see results from GEO?
About four to five months. Gabriela says the team had to bring in outside experts because the skills were new to her and her team, and that it was "totally worth it," with incredibly good results in that window and a first mover advantage over slower competitors.
Does earned media help a brand show up in AI answers?
Yes. Jordan Mitchell notes that LLMs draw on third-party validation from trusted domains, trade publications and business publications. Gabriela agrees: links from high-profile, well-respected publications are "wonderful for our SEO and GEO performance," which is one reason Third Bridge invests in PR as part of a multi-channel strategy.
How should marketing teams use AI for content without losing authenticity?
Third Bridge's philosophy is that AI should remove friction but never replace thinking. Teams use AI to brainstorm topics, write first drafts and run analyses, then humans do the editing and fine-tuning. The same approach applies to newsletters, blog posts, email campaigns and client-facing content from commercial teams.
How can a CMO make the case for AI budget?
Gabriela describes two arguments. The first is efficiency: AI saves costs or gives people more leverage. The second, less common one is revenue: Third Bridge builds Claude skills that help clients use its content inside their own LLMs, so AI tooling can be positioned like an investment in customer success or account management.
What are Claude skills?
Gabriela explains that a prompt gives an LLM a simple instruction, while a skill packages multiple pieces of logic and requests ("if A then B and C") along with context and an information source. Third Bridge builds custom skills for its own departments and for clients who access its insights through an LLM.
Full transcript
Jordan Mitchell and Gabriela Henault · about 4,400 words Hide Show
Generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability (filler words and false starts removed). Click any timestamp to play from that point.
Gabriela's background and what Third Bridge does
Jordan Mitchell
So, Gabriela, you've spent 20 years in brand and commercial marketing, 13 years at Prophet, and previously you were the global CMO at AlphaSights. You're now CMO at Third Bridge. Can you tell us a little bit about what Third Bridge does and more about your background?
Gabriela Henault
Yeah, of course. So Third Bridge is a global research provider and our clients are people who work at hedge funds, consultancies or corporates and if you think about their research workflows, we actually come in when the data runs out essentially. So when they've read all of the different analyst reports that they can, when they've read, you know, everything they can on FactSet and Bloomberg and all these other places, they come to us when because they need human insights from people who have actually lived in the businesses that they're trying to research that have real life experiences in the industries that they're trying to learn about. So that's where we're in a very specific field of business research, which is very much about the human layer and the human expertise.
Why AI makes quality sources more valuable
Jordan Mitchell
Okay, great. Can we talk a little bit more about the human expertise? When you're operating in a world where AI is changing automation and the production of information so quickly, how does that shape your philosophy on marketing?
Gabriela Henault
Yeah. It's a really good question. Actually it's one of the reasons why I was so excited to be at Third Bridge at this moment in time because AI is absolutely revolutionizing how everybody is accessing business research right and it really doesn't matter who the provider is right if the provider is a legacy name or a company like Third Bridge but essentially what AI or my view is that what AI really enables people to do is to access infinite amounts of information and synthesize that information more effectively, more cheaply and in less time, but you still need high quality information, right?
Otherwise the access is completely useless, right? And if anything, it could be dangerous, right? Because it could lead you to the incorrect conclusions. And so that's why I think it's like a really there is a tension of course because in but we're benefiting from the tension rather than suffering from it because as people are consuming more data from more sources the value in the quality of the source becomes even more important, right? People are trying to sift through the hallucinations, right? They're trying to sift through data sources that are not relevant to them or not attributable to a valid sort of a piece of source material. So AI is actually a huge enabler of our business because it just highlights the importance of quality.
Employee advocacy over a faceless brand account
Jordan Mitchell
Absolutely. And we were talking about data sources and the importance of quality. Another thing that Third Bridge does is employee advocacy over necessarily just like a faceless branded account. Can you talk more about the choice behind that and how that might actually help build trust with your audience?
Gabriela Henault
Yeah. Yeah, of course. So there again, you know, the I mean I think fundamentally, you know, advocacy strategies on social media are super important in any industry because people like to buy from people, not just from faceless logos, right? And so and that's very much true in our industry with our target clients of professional investors who are incredibly discerning individuals, right? The in addition to that right I think that one of the other wonderful side effects about employee advocacy strategy is that it's turned sort of marketing into a we activity into an into a firmwide activity.
It's no longer that you have the marketing team posting on social media and trying to grow our following and engagement all by themselves in a corner. We now have so many individuals in the business. The individuals with all the contacts with the experts, the contacts with the clients, right, with the prospects who are participating with us, right, in this great adventure of trying to share our knowledge and our value prop with the world, right? So it's also been like a really fantastic sort of culture shift in the business to kind of involve everybody in this task.
AI content: remove friction, never replace thinking
Jordan Mitchell
Okay. Culture. That's that sounds super important. Keeping up and seeing how it's impacting the actual culture as well. What about the culture of AI-generated mass content and how that erodes trust? Can you speak to that at all and just how you're trying to decide where AI adds value in your workflows versus where you want to avoid using it so you can maintain that authenticity?
Gabriela Henault
Yeah. So, we're a very AI forward company when it comes to using AI to produce content. It's not just the marketing team that's using it. It's literally every single team in the business that is using AI to produce content. And the philosophy is pretty simple. It's that AI is there to remove friction but never to replace thinking. Right? So AI, what that means concretely is that AI is going to help you write the first draft or it's going to maybe you'll have a great brainstorming session, right, with Claude or something to identify topics and you can identify topics after having uploaded data into your LLM, right?
So we use it in those ways to yeah to brainstorm, to write a first draft, to maybe run analyses that we're going to put into content, right? But essentially to do a lot of sort of the early work or the grunt work and quickly land on a decent draft and then the humans really have to come in and do a lot of editing, right? And a lot of fine-tuning. So that's the way we've been using AI for content creation and that's true whether it's marketing for newsletters and blog posts and email campaigns but also for our commercial teams right who are client facing and who are constant who are using similar tools or skills that we build for them in order to create really value additive tailored pieces of content for their clients.
What Claude skills are and how Third Bridge builds them
Jordan Mitchell
Yeah, there was a few things that you brought up there that I think would be interesting to expand on. So and I don't want to lose anything. The first thing was the actual skills you mentioned skills. Not everyone listening might understand like what Claude skills are. Do you mind elaborating on that a little bit because I think a lot of people understand the basics of prompting but like skills are kind of the next level to that. So can you speak to that?
Gabriela Henault
Yeah, of course. So I'd say the way I always try to explain it is if when you prompt, you're basically giving the LLM like a very simple piece of direction with maybe very little very simple logic as in please do please execute A. When you're doing when you're writing a skill, it's like a longer sentence, right? It's multiple pieces of logic, multiple requests. So if A then B and C, please consider all of these variables and come up with an answer, right? So essentially a skill is a more complex request that you make of an LLM, right?
But just like every request that you make of an LLM, you need to provide context and you need to provide an information source that the LLM can query it so that it can execute on it. So we you know and there are a lot of great skills that the LLMs offer off the shelf. At Third Bridge, we build a lot of custom skills for our people to use in different departments. And we actually also even build skills for our clients, right? So that our when our clients are accessing our information through an LLM, they can use our skills to sort of get the ball rolling and to start engaging with our insights through an LLM interface.
Because as you pointed out, right, people are still it's still pretty nascent technology, right? So people are at different levels of comfort and adoption. Yeah.
Data privacy guardrails and MCP
Jordan Mitchell
Yeah. Now, how does like policy come into place here? Is it, you know, are you kind of like when you're talking about using it as like a first iteration or a sparring partner, is that do you have policies in place of like the types of information that you're able to put in? Are you just using it freely? Is it information that's already public? Like how are you making considerations to consider like the data privacy aspect of things?
Gabriela Henault
Yeah. So I think the first thing is like of course you need to be on an enterprise version of an LLM, right? So you need to make sure that your data is protected that way and you know at least our infosec team take that very seriously and they make sure that we're all engaging with the right with the with certain LLMs and not others and that we're engaging with them on an enterprise version. In addition to that, yeah, we definitely do have some guidelines around content that we can upload and content that we cannot, right?
In our industry, one of the key nos is to not upload any personal information because we have a ton of personal information about our experts, right? And we need to make sure that we protect that and that it doesn't get used in the incorrect way. The other thing that we do is because we have an MCP product in market, we actually are able to connect the LLM that our employees use to our product to our MCP so they can access the full richness of our Third Bridge content library but in a safe way in a compliant way because it's all of those compliance rule markers about what level of detail can be shown to who do which details might have to be edited out. That's all been accounted for in the development of our MCP product essentially.
From SEO to GEO: how AI changed brand discovery
Jordan Mitchell
Okay. Yeah. Very cool and very important. We're going to shift the conversation a little bit to how AI has impacted brand discovery and search. So y'all have reported that 45% nearly half of your website traffic comes from organic search and direct brand searches rather than paid. How does AI play a role in that? Knowing for Google Chrome for example you see AI summaries or people are going to these RAG chatbots to do kind of their initial research you know how is that impacting your brand and then what are some of the trends you're seeing there.
Gabriela Henault
Yeah so it's definitely impacted our marketing strategies for sure and we really doubled down on SEO and also GEO and really revamped our website to be optimized for that and we also completely absolutely revamped our sort of essentially our blog strategy on our website in order to perform better or to be more easily scraped by LLMs, right? So acknowledging the fact that is how a lot of people are going to discover us. So it's caused us to have to hire different types of talent, right, to implement these strategies as well.
These were new skills which you know I didn't have and people in the team didn't have and so we had to bring in some external experts to really help us figure out how to implement it. But it was totally worth it. I mean we within four to five months we were seeing incredibly good results. And I think the I guess it paid off for us because also in our industry some of our competitors weren't as fast moving so it really gave us a nice edge right. We got that first mover advantage there.
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Earned media, PR and LLM citations
Jordan Mitchell
Okay. Yeah, first mover advantage. That's awesome. Yeah, super important. It seems like y'all have kind of gotten ahead of this and there's a lot of brands that are still trying to figure it out. From our side, we see earned media is like is a big part of it too. So, getting those articles and the third party validation from very trusted domains and trade publications and business publications to help source what the LLMs are citing. So, we definitely see that there as well.
Gabriela Henault
And actually just to that point, right, like we also we spend a lot of effort as well on PR, right? And to your point and one of the reasons why we invest a lot of time and energy on PR is first of all we have like these amazing sector analysts in our business who are who all the journalists always want to have on their programs and interview and you know and that's a fantastic asset for us and is great for brand like amplification etc. But also as you pointed out having those really having those links from really high-profile well-respected publications is wonderful for our SEO and GEO performance right so it's I think you know you really can't think about it just in isolation it has to be part of a you know omni channel marketing strategy or at least a multi-prong marketing strategy.
Jordan Mitchell
Yeah I think it's been really interesting you know, from like a traditional SEO perspective, just kind of following, you know, what Google's move to AI search, like how they were going to handle cookies and like how pretty much their iterations that they're rolling out were kind of upending how a lot of brands approached paid search and organic search. And I just left to wonder like if what the LLMs cite, you know, like who's really controlling that and eventually will it shift to other sources. So, right now we're getting that benefit from earned media.
And I don't want to I don't know the exact percentage, but there is a good portion that like comes from Reddit, YouTube, for example. So, I just wonder if over time, it'll either equalize out from all the different sources it's pulling from across the internet, or we're going to see like a big shift towards another source outside of earned media, which is something that keeps me up at night personally because on a day-to-day, a lot of what we're doing is the earned media side of things.
The brand value of being an AI first mover
Gabriela Henault
Yeah, I think you also brought up a really interesting point when you first phrased the question was what is the impact on brand and I think you know going back to my comment about we were the first we were sort of in the first mover group for our industry I think that there is a brand benefit to that as well right so we're trying to position ourselves within our industry as very innovative and very AI first and So there are brand equity advantages also to investing in these strategies because it helps you know you have the you have the discoverable you know the discoverability element which is a plus but you also have the brand equity benefit which is just showing our customers our clients that we are truly innovative when it and AI first when it comes to our own business strategy and what we implement.
How CMOs can unlock budget for AI
Jordan Mitchell
Absolutely. How can if you're just zooming out for a second, how can CMOs and other senior level marketers advocate for AI and just unlocking budget to use AI at their company? And like what should they prioritize first for a company that maybe even if it's their big gap might be security or compliance if they were able to get over that hurdle and unlock some budget to leverage AI for their marketing efforts how could they go about that conversation and like where should they start?
Gabriela Henault
Yeah, that's a really interesting question and I've been so fortunate to not have the budget constraint at Third Bridge. I would say that so I kind of think about it in two ways. You can approach budgeting conversations about AI as an efficiency tool. So a workflow efficiency tool which essentially means you're building a case about how you're going to save costs, right? And or you'll empower humans to do more by essentially giving them leverage, right? So you have that sort of line of argumentation. The other line of argumentation which I think is it hadn't dawned on me until we were actually maybe 6 months into our AI enablement strategy at Third Bridge is that you actually have an opportunity to really educate clients, right?
And so I was mentioning we build Claude skills as well for our clients, right? And so what we've learned from experience is that you can actually position AI tooling as a revenue enabler in the same way that you might discuss investment in customer success or account management, right? Or functions like that, right? So I think that's also a very interesting way to make the budget case and one which when I speak to other CMOs is less obvious. Is not necessarily the path that everyone is used to taking yet, but is certainly one which I've observed internally as being incredibly just factually true, right?
Jordan Mitchell
Absolutely. I mean, you're talking about also like you really have to stay on top of everything that's out there and be kind of thinking with a with an open mind about, okay, this week, you know, maybe the models are changing, but new tools are popping up and just constantly trying to figure out how can I fit these into different portions of my workflow, where do I, you know, still need to do a lot of the heavy lifting and it's really amazing just to see how much that's shifting week to week.
And so that's another goal of this podcast is to get experts on that are really kind of sharing like you know what are these workflows, what's working for them, what tools are they using. So I really appreciate you sharing more about that and you're also the founder of an AI enabled platform Calenda. Can you tell us about that and what you're working on there?
Lessons from founding Calenda
Gabriela Henault
Yeah, so Calenda is essentially a kids activity platform. So, it's kind of like what ClassPass did for adults taking gym classes and things like that, but a version of that for children. And unfortunately because I took the role at Third Bridge, I had to put Calenda on pause. So I wasn't I'm no longer actively running it, right? Because I just bandwidth, right? I couldn't do two things at the same time. But I'm so glad that I did it before I joined Third Bridge because I think that experience is what helped me sort of add value in a different way at Third Bridge than I had in my previous CMO mandate.
I mean essentially I went I did you know the first year of a startup going from concept to building a product from scratch, launching the product, having users figuring out how to incorporate AI in the middle of my first year because it went from being kind of irrelevant and to being a key access channel. So I learned a lot and more crucially I literally learned how to build a thing and take it to market which is something I had never had to do before. And I think that's made me a better CMO now.
Jordan Mitchell
Yeah. I think that's really unique experience because you know a lot of times when you're getting in that senior leadership position some of the execution work and if not a lot of it on the day-to-day might be delegated to your team but you're actually learning you know in the trenches doing the reps seeing how every single facet and every single cog in the wheel is working. So when you're also coming to this new CMO position you're able to take all that learning and that unique experience and say like hey this is what worked for me this is also what we could avoid to save time.
So that's definitely invaluable. You've also been named Management Today's Women in Leadership Power List for this year and you're also doing guest lecturing at London Business School. So for the next generation of marketers and media leaders that are coming up and trying to earn a seat at the table. What's your advice to them?
Career advice for the next generation of marketers
Gabriela Henault
Gosh it's always hard to be really crisp right when people ask you this question. So I have I think probably my two biggest pieces of advice and the first one, I'm going to warn you, it's not particularly like politically correct. It's not a very popular one, but okay. I so I'm you know I'm a CMO, but I'm also a mom and I'm also a wife, right? And I happened to have married like very young. And I think I've had so much luck in my career and I've had so many opportunities and I've had so many great mentors but I wouldn't have been able to take advantage of any of that if I hadn't had you know my husband if I hadn't had that particular life partner.
He has been a tremendous enabler to my career. In you know he's taught me technical things. He's given me advice. He's made sure to really help me carry the load of parenting and just adulthood and the complexities of life. And he's made sure that I never felt an ounce of guilt for having to work really hard. Right? So, I know that it may not seem like the easiest advice to take, but honestly, I think the person I decided to marry, the person I decided to build my life with, that was probably the most impactful career decision I ever made.
Jordan Mitchell
Yeah, I mean, I can definitely appreciate that. My wife is also my business partner and helped me grow this thing. So, you know, we're definitely partners in all aspects of life and there to support each other. So, I know how much that really makes a difference. And they're seeing, you know, all the hours you're putting in and you're also like working towards things together. And it's good to have two different brains working on the same problem and getting that insight from each other. So, that's super cool. We just have a couple more questions.
2027 predictions for AI in media and marketing
Jordan Mitchell
Yeah. And this one I'm thinking ahead a little bit because around you know October, November tends to be kind of the prediction season for the following year. So I'd love to know we're a little early but what is your 2027 prediction for AI's impact on media and marketing?
Gabriela Henault
Oh gosh. Yeah. So on media what I'm very interested to see is if we all start consuming media as in news through LLM essentially right and then if that then evolves into using AI to synthesize news for us right so this isn't something which I think is very prevalent yet and I you know I love consuming media and I love visiting different media publications, websites, and I love listening to different podcasts and things like that. But I do appreciate that when I contrast my personal media consumption habits with my let's call it data and information consumption habits in the world of work, one is like going in one direction of efficiency and the other one is going in the direction of leisure.
And so I'm wondering if actually some of my more leisure orientated habits of media consumption are going to start changing. So, I guess that's one thing I don't know if it'll happen next year, but that's something that I personally am really curious to keep an eye on and see if we see patterns shifting. And then when it comes to marketing, I think we're going to see a lot more people just getting a lot savvier about how to work well with the LLM. I think everyone's just kind of been figuring it out, trying stuff.
Some things work, some things don't, you know, and I think next year people are going to start to like really understand. You're start, you know, paid is going to come out on some of the LLMs, right? People are going to start experimenting with that, right? They're so yeah, that's my prediction for next year. Marketers are going to start to kind of know what they're doing, whereas this year I don't think any of us really know. We're just experimenting.
Jordan Mitchell
Yeah, there's a lot of like testing and just seeing what's working. I'm also seeing like a lot more blending where whereas you know in the past there was a lot of silos between you're a PR agency or marketing agency or creative agency you're an influencer marketing agency at the end of the day we're trying to find out where our audience's attention is and get those eyeballs. So you mentioned omni channel earlier in the conversation. I agree with you. I think that the habits are going to continue to shift. There are a couple things that came to mind.
So there's a an LLM. So Perplexity, I think, from like a news side. They're kind of an example that's a little bit further ahead in terms of how they kind of aggregate news sources and we'll give you summaries. So that's something to look at. But just in terms of like pulling out an app on your phone and getting like a very curated digest, of everything you like and multimedia from different sources, that's super interesting to me. And so we'll definitely be on the lookout for that. And so what are the best ways for our listeners to reach you?
How to reach Gabriela
Gabriela Henault
The best way to reach out is LinkedIn. I'm very I'm always very responsive on LinkedIn. And one of the advantages of reaching out to me on LinkedIn is then you can learn a little bit more about Third Bridge and what we do and consume some of our content. So please reach out to me there.
Jordan Mitchell
All right. Great. Thanks for coming on the show, Gabriela.
Gabriela Henault
You're welcome. Thank you so much for having me.