Leslie Ann Hall of Iced Media on optimizing for AI search and GEO, and why half of shoppers check Reddit before they buy. 

Over half of Redditors do a "final check" on Reddit before they make a purchase. That one habit shows how much the path to purchase has changed, and Leslie Ann Hall, Founder and CEO of Iced Media, has a plan for brands that want to pass the check for AI search and win the discovery battle.

Recorded live and in person at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville, Ricardo sits down with Leslie a few hours after her panel, Designing New Approaches to Digital Discovery, with speakers from Reddit, Depop, and Brunt Workwear. Iced Media works where beauty, media, and commerce meet, and beauty brands tend to be first in line for new tools. That makes Leslie an early read on generative engine optimization (GEO), the work of earning a place in AI search answers.

Her starting point: AI search sits underneath every channel a brand runs. In her words, "AI search is a mirror for what the world thinks about your brand." If your paid team, PR team, and Amazon team each tell a different story, AI search notices. That's why she thinks GEO gives indie and challenger brands their best shot in years at beating legacy brands that spent decades building up SEO.

Ricardo and Leslie also get into why most brands don't deserve to rank for all 200 of their products, the spending habit Iced Media calls bottom funnel bloat, and the new path to purchase Leslie calls vibes to validation.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• Why Leslie treats AI search as the foundation under every marketing channel.
• How GEO differs from SEO, and why fresh content gives smaller brands an edge.
• Leslie's three rules for winning in AI search, starting with a handful of hero products.
• What bottom funnel bloat is, and what it costs brands looking for new customers.
• Why over half of Redditors run a final check before they buy, and which other sources AI engines cite for beauty brands (16:46).

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Featured guest.

Leslie Ann Hall. https://www.linkedin.com/in/leslie1hall/

Founder and CEO, Iced Media. https://www.icedmedia.com

Leslie Ann Hall is the Founder and CEO of Iced Media, an independent, women-owned agency helping brands grow at the intersection of beauty, media and commerce. Over two decades, Leslie has built Iced Media into a trusted growth partner for global brands including L’Oréal, Walmart, LVMH and Moroccanoil. She has emerged as a leading voice on how technology is reshaping what shoppers discover and buy.

Leslie saw the potential of social commerce early, leading Iced Media to become one of the first TikTok Shop partners in the U.S. The agency is also a badged partner with TikTok, Google and Meta. A frequent speaker, Leslie explains how social media, search and AI are changing shopping, and what those changes mean for brands, retailers, advertisers and consumers.

Chapters.

00:00 AI Is Already Judging Your Brand

00:27 Show Intro 

03:41 Meet Leslie Ann Hall, Iced Media's AI Search Pioneer 

05:08 Inside Iced Media: Where Performance, Social & AI Search Collide 

06:34 GEO vs SEO: Why Indie Brands Can Finally Beat the Giants 

08:44 The 3 Rules for Winning in AI Search 

13:45 Bottom Funnel Bloat: The Trap Killing Brand Growth 

15:19 From Vibes to Validation: The New Purchase Journey 

16:21 Why Reddit Became the Internet's Most Trusted Source 

20:26 Show Close

Meet your hosts.

Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026 and a Top AI Leader for 2027. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader inCareers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also awarded him an Elite Expert Certification in Retail, a Master Expert Certification in Management, and named him a Certified Expert in AI, Marketing, and Digital Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024, 2025 and 2026. He is an advisory council member at the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Episode Music.

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.