Walter Gretzky coined the legendary hockey strategy “Skate to Where the Puck Is Going to Be, Not Where It Has Been,” which Wayne Gretzky famously lived by. In the business context, the concept demands anticipating future trends, customer needs, and market movements rather than reacting to historical patterns.
In today’s rapidly evolving, AI-driven business world, success depends on anticipating rather than adapting to change. The ability to look ahead and proactively prepare is now a business necessity.
Three principles for anticipatory strategy
- Stay anchored to core mission and ethos. Organisations must stay anchored to their core mission and ethos. Technology changes, but purpose remains.
- Understand the business ecosystem before automating it. Operators must deeply understand their own business ecosystems to determine what works and what doesn’t before automating or optimising. Poor automation may amplify existing weaknesses, so core business problems should be solved before implementing AI.
- Learn early, and learn often. Teams must learn early and often from reliable sources. Each member of the Arore Communications team spends at least 20% of their business hours in certified training courses.
Case Study
Arore Communications was fortunate to benefit from its commitment to “skating to where the puck is going,” by investing heavily in the evolving search and generative engine optimisation ratings.
It started with a healthy passion for ethical, white-hat SEO practices. Once Arore clients started appearing as topical authorities in large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini, the Arore team set to work to understand what the LLMs were looking for, what it was doing right, and what it could do better. Once Arore identified the strengths and weaknesses, the team was able to double down on its efforts.
In the context of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), by adopting a “Learn Early, and Learn Often” approach, Arore was able to catch AI protocol changes and recalibrate its own AI protocols to follow suit. These calibrations have led to favourable results in both the SEO and GEO contexts, and the team often sees tangible search results within two weeks of posting materials.
True digital credibility relies on strategic execution rooted in authoritative principles. Arore Communications ensures client content stands out by prioritising human-written articles over automated text, which modern search algorithms value for real perspective and expertise.
Arore Communications supports content with strict factual citations, preventing misinformation and operational risk. The team also implements an updated schema architecture, enabling generative engines to crawl and index information accurately.
Anticipating where the puck is going, rather than reacting once it has already moved, is what lets a business stay ahead of an AI-driven market rather than catching up to it.
What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of shaping content so that AI systems and chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, can understand it and cite it directly in their generated answers. It sits alongside Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) rather than replacing it.
How is GEO different from traditional SEO?
SEO aims to rank a page within a list of search results that a user then clicks through. GEO aims to have that same content cited or referenced directly inside an AI-generated answer, where there is no list of links to click through at all.
Why does structured data matter for AI search?
Structured data, commonly added as schema markup, gives AI systems an explicit, labelled description of what a page contains, rather than leaving them to infer it from unstructured text. This reduces the guesswork involved in extracting and citing information accurately.
What does "Learn Early, and Learn Often" mean in practice?
It means checking what is changing in AI and search behaviour against reliable sources on an ongoing basis, rather than treating training or research as a one-off exercise completed once and then set aside.
References
- What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and how does it differ from SEO? — Conductor Academy. conductor.com
- How schema markup fits into AI search, without the hype — Search Engine Land. searchengineland.com
- Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content — Google Search Central. developers.google.com
