For two decades, the marketing world obsessed over a single question: how do you land on the first page of Google? The answer birthed an entire industry of search engine optimisation consultants, keyword tools and link-building agencies. Now the question is changing shape. Increasingly, Australians are not scrolling a page of blue links at all — they are asking ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews or Perplexity for a straight recommendation, and taking the machine’s word for it.
That shift is the backdrop to a new initiative from Somantra, which has launched an AI Search Challenge aimed squarely at Australian university students. The premise is simple enough: give students a real problem — helping brands get recommended inside AI-generated answers — and see who can crack it. For a young field with almost no established playbook and a severe shortage of experienced practitioners, it is as much a recruitment funnel as a competition.
What the challenge actually is
The discipline Somantra is chasing goes by several unlovely names: generative engine optimisation (GEO), answer engine optimisation (AEO), or simply “AI search”. Where classic SEO tried to rank a web page, GEO tries to influence what a large language model says when a user asks a question. Does ChatGPT name your accounting software when someone asks for the best option for a small Australian business? Does Google’s AI Overview cite your explainer when a customer asks how novated leases work? Being the answer, rather than a link the user might click, is the new prize.
Somantra’s pitch is to route that problem to students. By framing it as a challenge, the company gets fresh thinking on an unsolved problem, a shortlist of talent it can hire, and marketing collateral demonstrating results — all at a fraction of the cost of a consulting engagement. Students, in turn, get a live brief, exposure to real brands and a line on the CV in a field where almost no one can yet claim ten years of experience because the field did not exist ten years ago.
Why brands are worried
The anxiety driving this is not hypothetical. As AI-generated answers absorb more queries, the click that used to flow to a business’s website may never happen. Analysts have warned for over a year about “zero-click” search, where the answer is delivered in the interface and the user never visits the source. For a brand, being omitted from that answer is close to being invisible.
There is also a control problem. With traditional SEO, a business could at least see its ranking and tune towards it. AI models are opaque, non-deterministic and updated without notice; the same prompt can yield different recommendations on different days or to different users. That unpredictability is exactly what makes GEO both valuable and, to sceptics, dubious.
Two views on whether this works
Proponents argue GEO is simply the natural evolution of SEO and that the fundamentals still apply: clear, authoritative, well-structured content that models can parse and trust tends to get cited. On this view, structured data, credible third-party mentions, and content that directly answers real questions genuinely move the needle inside AI answers, and businesses that ignore it will be left behind just as those who ignored search were.
Sceptics counter that much of the emerging GEO industry is selling certainty it cannot deliver. Because model providers such as OpenAI and Google do not publish how recommendations are generated, and because outputs shift with every model update, any agency promising to “guarantee” a spot in ChatGPT’s answer is overreaching. There is a real risk that GEO becomes the snake oil of the AI era — a repackaging of ordinary content marketing with a premium attached. The honest middle ground is that good content and strong brand signals probably help, but nobody can promise a specific outcome from a system they do not control.
A challenge run through students sits interestingly across that divide. It could surface genuinely novel techniques from people unencumbered by SEO orthodoxy. It could equally produce confident-sounding tactics that happen to work once and are impossible to reproduce.
What it means for Australia
For Australian businesses, the stakes are concrete. The local market is dominated by small and medium enterprises that cannot afford large marketing teams, and many rely heavily on being discoverable online. If AI answers reshape how customers find a plumber in Parramatta, a café in Fitzroy or a bookkeeper in Fremantle, the businesses that adapt early stand to benefit disproportionately — and those that do not could quietly lose enquiries without ever knowing why.
There is also a talent dimension that matters nationally. Australia has a well-documented digital skills shortage, and the country’s marketing and tech sectors have long competed for scarce specialists. A pipeline that trains university students in a brand-new, in-demand discipline is the kind of thing policymakers and universities have been urging industry to build. Programs that give students paid or credentialed exposure to real commercial problems help address both youth employment and the local capability gap in AI-adjacent skills.
Students should go in clear-eyed, though. Challenge-based recruitment can blur the line between learning and unpaid labour, particularly when a company gains usable work and marketing value from participants. The fair versions of these programs offer genuine mentorship, transparent judging, real prizes or pathways to paid roles, and clarity about who owns any intellectual property produced. Australian students weighing this up should ask those questions before committing weekends to a brand’s growth problem.
What’s next
The broader trajectory is not in doubt: AI-mediated discovery is growing, and the pressure on brands to appear inside those answers will intensify. What remains unsettled is whether GEO matures into a rigorous, measurable discipline or stays a grey zone of plausible claims. Initiatives like Somantra’s will be an early test — not just of which students can solve the puzzle, but of whether the puzzle has a reliable solution at all.
For now, the smartest move for Australian businesses is to watch closely, invest in genuinely useful content, and treat anyone promising guaranteed placement in ChatGPT with healthy scepticism. And for students, it is a chance to get in early on a field where, unusually, everyone is still learning the rules — including the people writing them.
Sources: EIN Presswire via GNews
