The global search advertising market was estimated at approximately $196 billion in 2025, with forecasts reaching about $556 billion by 2033.
Enter – Hybrid Engine Optimisation (HEO)
According to Sharad Agarwal, CEO of Cyber Gear, “The core idea is to stop treating Google rankings and AI visibility as two separate marketing channels. We need to measure them as one system. If you optimize aggressively for AI citations and your Google traffic collapses, you have made yourself worse off. If you optimize only for Google and never appear in ChatGPT answers, you are missing where buyers increasingly start their research. We believe that HEO is a genuinely new idea, and also the most defensible one.”
Did you know, LinkedIn is now the 2nd most cited domain by LLMs?
That should tell you something important.
The internet is shifting from:
“Who ranks best on Google?”
to
“Who is consistently talked about, referenced, and trusted across the web?”
When someone asks ChatGPT a question, AI is looking for:
- Discussions
- Opinions
- Testimonials
- Reviews
- Expertise
- Experience
- Trusted sources
- Case Studies
- Real human insights
Bottomline: Make your content machine-readable, clean HTML, schema markup, llms.txt, accessible to AI crawlers. Dump the ‘bells and whistles’.
The game is changing from:
“Who can publish the most content?”
to
“Who can become the best answer everywhere?”
Download the report at https://www.heo.ae