{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The GEO Show","title":"GEO Deep Dive: Building Citations Through Outreach","html":"<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"180\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" seamless src=\"https://share.transistor.fm/e/ad365c33\"></iframe>","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3133,"description":"Welcome to a bonus, live session of The GEO Show. This one's a conversation, not a solo digest: Paris Childress, founder of Hop AI and co-founder of GEOforge, sits down with Simon Young, founder of Question.Marketing, to work through where AI citations are actually coming from and what to do about it.\nIn this episode:\n🤖 A fake bot impersonating OpenAI's crawler gets caught in the wild Hop AI detected a bot on a client's Cloudflare setup using the exact same name as OpenAI's real crawler, but from a different IP address. Impersonating a known crawler name is trivial, and it's turning bot policing and selective blacklisting into a real part of the technical side of GEO.\n\n📊 The number: brand-owned sites get just 2% of AI citations A study analyzing 107 million AI answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews in the IT services vertical found 51% of citations came from community/UGC sources, 47% from independent editorial sites, and only 2% from brand-owned websites. Publishing on your own domain and hoping AI notices isn't a citation strategy on its own.\n\n✉️ Why \"add us to your listicle\" outreach caps out at a 1-2% reply rate Asking an already-published site to edit in a new brand rarely works, most people don't want to revisit something they've already shipped. The pivot: pitch fresh domains that haven't already covered the topic, and offer them something with real value instead of a favor.\n\n🎁 Information gain becomes the outreach currency Instead of a reciprocal link swap, give a target site an exclusive, high-information-gain piece of original research for free. They get a story with real substance. You get cited as the source, even without a backlink, in a strategy that reads a lot like classic PR pitching.\n\n🔗 Mentions now beat backlinks for AI visibility Answering a live audience question from Ashley Pearson, Paris and Simon agree that AI doesn't check domain authority or a dofollow attribute the way search crawlers once did. With a...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/7cDHOTKwTPJbamMzkSU5XMeYqbfRSPk5nMQ6zhbTeaI/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9kY2Ri/MGIyZjViNzJiODc5/ZGM5MmJhYmE4NmYx/MTVhYy5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}