Let’s Talk About “Consideration Sets” in the Context of SEO/GEO: A Hamsterdam Marketing Lesson

By Ethan Lazuk

Welcome to another edition of Hamsterdam Marketing! 🐹

This is a project where we examine marketing topics to learn about their fundamental concepts and apply them to the context of SEO/GEO.

This time, we’ll be looking at consideration sets.

The concept of consideration sets connects directly to how consumers use ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI assistants to discover and evaluate brands.

When an AI assistant recommends a handful of brands out of potentially hundreds of possible options, it may influence which brands consumers seriously consider purchasing from, and which brands they never evaluate at all.

What Are Consideration Sets?

A consideration set is the relatively small group of brands or products a consumer seriously evaluates when making a purchasing decision. Essentially, consumers balance the benefits of evaluating additional brands against the time and effort required to do so. The ones they choose form their consideration set.

It’s important to remember that being aware of a brand isn’t the same as considering it. A consumer might recognize 20 SEO tool brands but evaluate only three or four.

The SEO/GEO Connections of Consideration Sets

While traditionally consumers might form their consideration sets through advertising, word of mouth, personal experience, online research, and their existing familiarity with brands, now we have AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

Rather than presenting every available brand, the AI assistant might recommend four or five options, explaining why each would suit the user’s needs. This dynamic introduces an interesting change in how consideration sets form: the AI assistant isn’t merely helping the consumer evaluate their existing consideration set, but it may also help determine which brands enter that consideration set in the first place.

There are three potential effects worth examining:

• Inclusion: An unfamiliar brand recommended by an LLM may become a serious option for someone who wouldn’t otherwise have considered it.
• Exclusion: A relevant brand omitted from the response may never enter the consumer’s evaluation process, particularly if the consumer doesn’t research additional options.
• Prominence: A brand appearing first, described as the best fit, or supported by a persuasive explanation may receive greater attention than other recommended brands.

Researchers even found in 2024 that ChatGPT can influence consideration sets. Their study found that trust in the recommendation system and recommended products played an important role in consideration. Other research suggests related findings, like that the first recommendation may receive disproportionate attention.

Just an important takeaway: the brands an LLM recommends and the brands a consumer seriously considers aren’t necessarily the same group. But they may be related.

Practical Takeaways

LLMs are becoming another intermediary between consumers and the brands they consider. That creates implications beyond traditional rankings and website traffic.

Here are SEO/GEO considerations along with their practical applications:

SEO/GEO Consideration	Practical Application
Brand Inclusion	Measure whether a brand appears among AI-recommended alternatives for relevant category queries.
Recommendation Prominence	Track whether the brand appears first, third, fifth, or receives a particularly favorable description.
Consumer Needs	Test prompts reflecting actual customer budgets, requirements, use cases, and buying situations.
Brand Positioning	Clearly communicate the brand’s relevant strengths and use cases across its website and credible third-party sources.
Competitive Visibility	Identify which competitors regularly appear in recommendations when the brand is omitted.

For SEO/GEO professionals, the lesson is that visibility in AI-generated recommendations isn’t just about earning mentions or citations. It’s also about the potential to influence which brands consumers seriously consider purchasing from.

As AI assistants become more involved in product discovery, understanding where and how a brand appears in these recommendations becomes an increasingly important part of evaluating its competitive visibility.

See you next time!

I hope you’ve found this discussion around consideration sets helpful for your SEO/GEO strategy.

Stay tuned for a new Hamsterdam Marketing lesson soon.

And if you want a hand with your SEO/GEO strategy, get in touch with me. I’m an independent consultant based in New York City.

Until next time, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing!