Chicago has always been a city built on discoverability

One theme shows up again and again: helping people find the right thing faster.

Grubhub reinvented restaurant search.

Groupon reshaped how people discovered local businesses. Tempus is essentially a discovery engine for genetic insights.

Our Open Data Portal helps people see data on the city.

Even our trading firms are discovery machines constantly surfacing the right price at the right moment.

This instinct is everywhere in Chicago’s economy because we’re home to industries where visibility matters.

Almost every sector here depends on being discoverable at the exact moment a customer starts searching.

That’s why the shift from SEO to GEO (generative engine optimization) is so important.

GEO in short means optimizing how AI models mention and surface your brand when people ask questions.

This matters today because Google search results are down for the first time in a long time, which means people are finding answers through AI models now and how companies and people come up in those results will define the future of search.

Businesses that don’t adapt to this new search landscape will face rising acquisition costs and a potential loss of market share to competitors who did adapt.

If you’re a Chicago company and you’re not mentioned in that AI-generated answer, you disappear.

So the question becomes: How do you stand out in a world where the search box has become a conversation?

We invested in a company called Yolando that will solve this. The platform helps businesses show up in the right way on AI models.

The founder, Matt Bogoroch, wants to meet with anyone in the community who wants to understand how LLM search is reshaping customer acquisition.

Matt is also the founder of BirdseyePost, another company in Drive’s portfolio.

We’re hosting a dedicated Chicago GEO meetup this Wednesday with Stephen Spiewak, Matt from Yolando, and The Yard, where we’ll go deeper on how brands can influence AI-generated answers and why this shift matters for Chicago’s economy.

If you want to be part of the early conversation, come through.

And if you want to meet Matt, respond directly to this email so I can set it up!

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