JOE DOVETON

Joe Doveton has been working in digital marketing since the days of AltaVista and dial-up connections. He's the founder and CEO of Binary Bear Limited, a Brighton-based agency that has evolved from pure conversion rate optimization into Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), helping brands become visible in AI-powered search and answer engines.

His career spans agency and client-side roles across the UK and Germany, including Director of Conversion Services at Oban Digital, Global Conversion Lead at Goodgame Studios, and Business Director at Fresh Egg. At Binary Bear, he developed the U.S.E. method (Understanding, Solution, Experience) for structuring optimization projects and more recently built GEOJetpack, a tool that audits whether content is accessible to AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

On the podcast, Joe described the "crocodile mouth" pattern showing up in analytics dashboards everywhere: impressions holding steady or growing while clicks steadily disappear, forming a shape that looks like an opening jaw. It's a visual metaphor for a structural shift. Traditional KPIs like traffic and conversion rate are becoming actively misleading in a zero-click world where AI answers questions before users ever reach a website.

Brands need new metrics like LLM visibility and competitive positioning within AI responses, but Joe is honest that nobody has fully figured out what success looks like yet. The measurement frameworks, the attribution models, the benchmarks don't exist in reliable form. His comparison to 1997 is deliberate: search was the Wild West then too, and anyone claiming certainty about what works is probably overselling. The difference is that this time, the transition is happening faster and the stakes are higher because entire categories of web traffic may never come back.