What is Generative AI?
Generative AI is software that produces new content rather than retrieving existing content: it writes text, generates images, drafts code. Large language models are the text-generating branch, and they power the assistants that now answer buyer questions directly.
Why marketers hear about it constantly
Two reasons. Teams use it to produce content, and buyers use it to consume answers. The second one changes distribution: when an assistant writes the answer, it also chooses which brands appear in it. That selection process is what GEO and AI visibility monitoring exist to influence and measure.
The pieces that matter for visibility
- The model: learned knowledge with a training cutoff
- Retrieval: live web results grounding the answer
- The product layer: system prompts, citation formats, safety rules
Each layer can change independently, which is why AI answers about the same brand drift over time even when the brand does nothing.