FOF 146 | Generative Engine Optimization. Meet GEO. with Karl-Gustav Kallasmaa.

Today’s guest is Karl-Gustav Kallasmaa; founder, engineer, and one of the sharpest voices thinking about how AI is changing search, visibility, and attention on the internet.

He’s built search systems from the ground up and now helps companies understand how they’re discovered by AI, not humans.

We’ll talk about AI retrieval, startup lessons, and what founders are getting wrong about visibility today.

Let’s dive in.

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00:00:00 Introduction to the show and guest Carl Gustav Calamar
00:01:04 From engineer to founder: mindset shifts when leading a startup
00:02:47 Distribution vs product quality for early-stage founders
00:04:41 Search evolving into AI retrieval instead of traditional SEO
00:06:57 Why brands don’t show up in AI answers despite ranking on Google
00:07:19 Semantic clarity and writing content for LLM discovery
00:10:11 Lessons from building trustworthy AI search systems
00:11:41 Edge cases, data cleaning, and why humans still matter
00:13:58 The hidden costs of AI: scraping, search, and scale
00:15:29 Reducing AI costs with smaller models and better prompts
00:17:00 Monitoring AI systems and optimizing with engineers
00:17:57 How startups can benchmark AI search visibility
00:20:10 The future of AI search and browsing behavior
00:22:22 Regulation, content ownership, and the role of platforms
00:23:14 Writing for models, voice search, and the future of the web
00:25:28 Final reflections on search, AI, and long-term visibility
00:25:51 Closing and farewell