Valtech at Opticon London 2026

Valtech was proud to sponsor Opticon London 2026, Optimizely's flagship event, where our own Mike Maxwell, VP Strategy & Consulting, and Thomas McCallum, Lead GEO/SEO Strategist, took to the stage to challenge how marketing leaders think about search, brand and AI. Their session, "Your website is dead. Put your money into GEO," tackled one of the most urgent questions in digital marketing today: as AI agents and chat interfaces reshape how people discover brands, is your website strategy keeping up?

The challenge: Marketers are asking the right questions

In the run-up to the session, our team spoke with marketing leaders across industries and heard the same concerns again and again: declining organic search traffic, uncertainty about how to measure GEO's value, whether to build separate experiences for AI and human visitors, how much budget to shift towards GEO and how to keep content production sustainable at scale. These questions set the stage for the session's core argument.

The framework: Two pillars of a future-proof website

Mike and Thomas framed the path forward around two pillars that every brand now needs to balance:

Rich brand experience: an emotional connection is seven times more effective at building brand than rational benefits alone and emotionally inspiring brands are trusted 20% more. Owned brand experiences also let you capture first-party data for retargeting and keep control of your messaging, at a time when organic reach on social platforms has fallen to just 1–3% of followers.

Machine-readable layer: 68% of Google searches now end without a single click and AI agents already account for over 60% of all web traffic. Winning here means fast, crawlable sites, plain language over marketing verbiage and content structured to earn citations. By 2028, Gartner predicts 90% of B2B buying will be AI-agent intermediated.

3 key takeaways from the session

A distinct brand matters more than ever. In a world flooded with AI-generated “slop,” a strong, recognizable brand is how you stand out, earn PR and build the trust signals both people and AI systems rely on.

Finding the balance is key. Brand storytelling and technical performance aren’t competing priorities, they’re both essential. Expect trade-offs and be deliberate about where you upweight or downweight brand expression versus machine readability.

GEO isn’t a hack. Organic traffic isn’t coming back. If AI can’t read your content, it can’t recommend you. That means rethinking content supply at scale and building the measurement and reporting to prove GEO’s value.

Next steps: Let's talk GEO

Want to know what to do with your website strategy or GEO? Get in touch with Mike and Thomas or reach out to the Valtech team to talk through what a balanced brand-and-GEO strategy could look like for you.