Here’s a number worth sitting with. SparkToro and Datos reported that 58.5% of Google searches in the US now end without a single click. Not a misread. More than half of all searches just, stop. The user gets what they need right there in the results page, or increasingly, from an AI chatbot that synthesizes the answer for them.
For most of the digital marketing world, that stat is still abstract. In Southeast Asia though, a handful of agencies have started to move. And the conversation isn’t really about SEO anymore.
It’s about something called generative engine optimization.
The Shift Nobody Fully Prepared For
The concept isn’t complicated. Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the practice of optimizing content so AI platforms, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, actually cite a brand in their responses. Traditional SEO chases rankings. GEO chases something different: being the answer.
The academic foundation came from a 2023 paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and researchers at IIT Delhi and Princeton, published on arXiv and presented at KDD 2024 in Barcelona. Their findings showed GEO techniques could boost content visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%.
But here’s where it gets practical. Indonesia, with 229.4 million internet users according to APJII data, represents one of the largest digital populations on the planet. Consumer behavior is shifting fast. TikTok has become a search engine for younger demographics, AI chatbot usage is climbing, and the old playbook of ranking on Google page one is starting to feel incomplete.
An 18-Year-Old Agency Bets on AI Visibility
PT Arfadia Digital Indonesia, a digital marketing agency founded in Jakarta in 2008, has operated long enough to watch several paradigm shifts come and go. The company now employs over 120 professionals across offices in Jakarta, Bandung, and Bali.
In 2023, Arfadia formally positioned itself around GEO. Not as an add-on service, but as a strategic pivot.
“We recognized early that the way consumers discover brands was fundamentally changing,” said Tessar Napitupulu, Arfadia’s founder and CEO. “When more than half of searches end without a click, and millions of users are asking AI for recommendations instead of scrolling results, you either adapt or become irrelevant. There’s no middle ground.”
Napitupulu’s background is unusual for an agency founder. Before starting Arfadia, he worked as an IT consultant on projects for Indonesia’s Ministry of Social Affairs, then served at UNDP’s Bappenas placement on a national development program. That institutional experience shaped the company toward large-scale, process-driven delivery.
RoGEO: Building a Measurement Framework from Scratch
One of the bigger challenges with GEO adoption globally has been measurement. How do you quantify whether a brand is being “seen” by AI? Arfadia’s answer is a proprietary framework they call RoGEO, short for Return on Generative Engine Optimization.
“RoGEO evaluates three core dimensions,” Napitupulu explained. “Citation frequency, how often the brand appears in AI responses. Reference depth, how thoroughly content is pulled into those responses. And revenue attribution, the actual business impact traceable to AI visibility. That last part is what the industry has been missing.”
The framework is still evolving, Napitupulu is candid about that. But the thesis that answer engine optimization needs its own measurement stack, separate from traditional SEO metrics, aligns with what researchers like Aggarwal have argued. Visibility in generative engines is about citations, not rank positions.
Training Enterprises to Build In-House GEO Capability
What’s arguably more interesting than the agency’s client work is its training arm. Arfadia runs a GEO Training Workshop designed for enterprise marketing teams, available as in-house corporate training with professional certification upon completion.
The curriculum covers five pillars: Semantic Strategy and Prompt Mapping, Technical GEO Architecture (JSON-LD, llms.txt), Authority and E-E-A-T Engineering, Financial ROI Modeling through the RoGEO framework, and Leadership and Change Management.
That last pillar is notable. Getting a marketing team to shift from SEO-centric thinking to AI visibility-first strategy requires more than new tools. It requires leadership buy-in, and most technical training programs skip that entirely.
“Not every company wants to outsource their entire GEO strategy to an agency. Many prefer to build internal capability,” Napitupulu said. “Our training program is designed so that a corporate marketing team can plan, execute, and measure GEO independently. The certification gives them a standardized competency baseline that didn’t exist before in this space.”
The Broader Ecosystem Play
Beyond agency services and training, Arfadia has built a diversified ecosystem including media properties (Andalannews.com, Wartawan.id, Duniawanita.id) and proprietary software like SIDIA, an edtech platform deployed across dozens of Indonesian municipalities through government education funding.
The company’s approach, which it calls Search Everywhere Optimization or SEOv2, extends beyond Google and AI chatbots to TikTok, YouTube, and voice search. It’s an omnichannel visibility thesis betting on discovery fragmentation.
Yohan Agustian, who joined as co-investor and advisor in 2024 through MEA Digital Marketing, sees the training component as a market accelerator. “The GEO market in Indonesia is still very early stage. Education is the key bottleneck,” Agustian noted. “Companies that build GEO literacy now will have a significant competitive advantage when AI-driven search becomes the default consumer behavior. And that shift is coming faster than most people realize.”
What Comes Next
GEO is still nascent, globally and especially in emerging markets. The metrics aren’t settled, best practices are still being written, and ROI proof points remain thin compared to traditional SEO or paid search.
But the directional trend is hard to argue with. SparkToro’s Q1 2025 data shows organic click-through dropping from 44.2% to 40.3% year-over-year. ChatGPT crossed 800 million weekly active users. The question isn’t whether AI will reshape how consumers find brands. It’s whether marketing will be ready.
“The agencies investing in GEO infrastructure now, the frameworks, the training, the measurement systems, will define this category,” Napitupulu said. “Everyone else will be playing catch-up. And in this industry, catch-up is expensive.”
Disclosure: Arfadia is a digital marketing agency based in Jakarta, Indonesia, with offices in Bandung and Bali. More information at arfadia.com.
