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Daily Mail Trials GEO Content Ahead of AI Visibility Product
The Daily Mail is running 12 to 15 GEO tests with brands across the U.S., U.K. and Australia, ahead of turning its AI visibility work into an official product early next year.
By Roomer Editorial · · 4 min read
What is the Daily Mail testing?
The Daily Mail is piloting generative engine optimization, or GEO, work with brands before packaging it into a formal product early next year. Carly Steven, the publisher's director of SEO and editorial ecommerce, said at Digiday's Media Strategies London event that the company has between 12 and 15 tests running across three markets. Brands are approaching the Daily Mail directly, she said, asking how to appear in AI-generated answers.
Steven described the opportunity as more than defensive. "We look at this as actually quite an exciting new potential revenue opportunity," she said, framing it as a new business area rather than just protection against AI search eating into traffic.
How does the testing process work?
The team starts by mapping the prompts a consumer might type when researching a brand's product or service. From there, they track how those prompts perform across AI platforms over time, log which sources get cited, and build branded content where there's an opening to improve a brand's visibility.
Steven noted that large language models are probabilistic, so the same prompt can return different results hours apart. That's why the Daily Mail tracks prompts over a long period to establish a baseline before claiming any lift.
Not every topic has room for a publisher to move the needle. Where government or medical sites dominate citations, Steven said, there's less space for branded content to shift outcomes. The Daily Mail looks for topics where publishers already carry a large share of citations and a brand is underrepresented — that's where they see an opening.
What results has the Daily Mail seen so far?
In one early test for an unnamed personal finance brand, visibility across tracked prompts rose from about 50% to nearly 75%, with the content cited for most of those prompts.
Measuring the payoff is harder than running the test. Steven said someone might see a brand mentioned in an AI answer, then search for it later rather than clicking through — which breaks standard referral attribution. One brand she cited found Claude made up just 0.1% of referral traffic in its analytics, but after adding a simple "how did you hear about us" form, Claude-linked conversions came in around 11%. Steven pointed to that gap as the reason referral data alone can't capture AI's effect on a brand.
Who else is building AI visibility products?
The Daily Mail isn't alone. Steven said the idea took time to gain internal traction, partly because the team had to figure out how to explain the pitch — interest picked up once brands started asking the commercial side directly. Building the offer meant pulling together commercial, commerce, native advertising, product and editorial teams, with any new work still weighed against protecting the publisher's journalism and IP.
Future's GEO product already has more than 30 clients and has secured renewals. Ziff Davis says it has multiple GEO clients running. Nina Gould, Forbes's chief innovation officer, said the publisher's AI-visibility push began inside its Vetted product-review arm — the team logged citations, refined content, and passed findings along to brand partners. That groundwork, she said, has helped Forbes secure better affiliate commissions, sponsorships and native-ad deals. Forbes is also testing branded-content products, sold alone or bundled, that would gauge how a brand's visibility shifts before and after a campaign runs. Gould said this work is still taking shape rather than ready to launch.
Rob Bradley, group svp of digital advertising and operations at CNNIC and Warner Brothers Discovery, said his team has no official product yet, but the topic now comes up in most client meetings.
Roomer Editorial's take
This is a publisher story, but the mechanics matter for any travel creator with their own site. AI answer engines cite pages, not platforms. A video sitting on a social app isn't indexed the way a page on your own travel site is, and it can't be cited the way a Forbes or Daily Mail page can.
Roomer turns your videos into a travel site, which gets indexed — Roomer has around 1 million pages indexed on Google. That's not an AI visibility product, and we're not claiming it is one. But the logic the Daily Mail is testing — that content living on an indexable page has a shot at being cited where a locked-away post doesn't — is the same logic that makes owning your own site worth more than it used to be.
Roomer Editorial's view: don't wait for a creator-specific GEO product to show up before you start owning a page that search engines and AI crawlers can actually read.
Roomer Editorial's view: if you're deciding what to move first, start with the content tied to actual bookings — a hotel review, a tour recommendation, a bookable itinerary page — rather than general vlogs. Those are the pages most likely to get cited when someone asks an AI assistant where to stay or what to book, and they're the pages where a citation can turn into a reservation through your own bookable links.
Action: audit which of your travel content exists only inside a platform app versus on a page you own — then start moving the content that drives bookings onto something indexable.
Source: Digiday — The Daily Mail tests GEO with brands ahead of AI visibility product
