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All things Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). A breakdown of all that's happening in the world of AI search.
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the GEO Show. We're recording on Friday, August 21, and this is the first episode of the GEO Show. I'm Parrish Childress. I am the founder of Hop dot ai, also cofounder of GEO Forge, and I'm gonna be the primary host of the show. And bear with me in this first episode because I'm just getting my footing here.
Paris:But the format for this show is gonna be that I am gonna be reading through some top stories of the day as it relates to SEO and GEO, primarily GEO. I've got a really great brief coming in with some top stories and I'm gonna make some comments on how I feel that marketing teams and agencies are impacted by some of these stories and just give my overall response and reaction to some of these interesting stories. And that is gonna be the predominant format of this show. So let's get started. I have some top headlines that I wanna run through and and we'll see what this all means.
Paris:The first comes from Demandbase and the headline is that ChatGPT referral traffic to b to b sites is accelerating sharply. It's confirmed by Demandbase who analyzed more than 11,000,000,000 visits across 1,584 customer instances, and they found that ChatGPT referred visits rose from 645,000 in June of last year to 2,600,000 in June of this year twenty twenty six. So that's an increase of over 300% year over year. So this is major and I think that what this is telling me is that the referral traffic game in GEO is really changing. That's a three x increase in just one year for ChatGPT alone.
Paris:And I do think that it it's a reflection of maybe a couple of factors. Number one is that users are starting to click through more often and maybe that's because they're starting to substitute ChatGPT for Google and use it more in the mindset of a search engine where they're intending to get an answer and then pursue that answer deeper through a click. That's one factor is the user behavior side. The other factor I think is that ChatGPT in its user interface is probably making some changes that makes links more visible within the answers themselves and that's something that I've been noticing too. So if citations are appearing as clickable links within the answer, think that those are going to get a higher click through rate than citations that would appear on a sidebar that users would have to, you know, take their attention away from the answer to view and scroll through separately.
Paris:So that's really interesting and I hope that trend continues because that is gonna more and more position GEO as a performance channel the way that SEO is has always been positioned as a performance channel, meaning that it is responsible in part to drive actual traffic to a website. Alright. Let's move on to the next topic, and that's coming from g two. And the headline here is that AI chatbots are now the number one shortlist influence for many software buyers. G two confirmed through a survey of over a thousand b to b software buyers that 71% of respondents use AI chatbots for software research.
Paris:51% start with AI chatbots more often than Google, and 69% said that AI surfaced information that led them to choose a different vendor than expected. So this is also really a major shift in the way that software buyers are conducting their journey. The classic journey for b to b SaaS for at least the last ten to fifteen years has been that you go on Google, typically you search for a keyword, you get the results many times g two and their software profile pages and their category pages will rank competitively in Google. So you may find yourself clicking through g two, but that search was the dominant research journey, the starting point for the dominant share of b to b software buying journeys, and now it's shifted in a major way to chatbots. So 71% are using AI chatbots for software research.
Paris:So that has major implications for SaaS marketers. And I would say for those SaaS marketers who are doing SEO but not yet fully bought in and fully invested into GEO, I think it's time to really reconsider going GEO first due to that fact. And it doesn't really surprise me that much, actually. Alright. Let's move on to the next story.
Paris:OpenAI in its help center explicitly is now stating that it's documenting something called search query fan out. And what search query fan out is is that it takes the user's prompt and then it repurposes that prompt into a series of search queries that it then takes into search engines like Google and Bing in real time. So this process is called query fan out and ChatGPT has said now publicly in its help center that it may rewrite one user request into one or more targeted searches, inspect initial results. I suppose those are the search results, and then issue additional searches to other providers. So they are really now forecasting and and really admitting to something that I think the industry has known for a while now, which is that when real time search happens in LLMs, meaning if an LLM cannot immediately generate a reply, from, you know, a predictive reply from its pre training dataset, it goes out and does a real time search or it in fact, it goes out and does several real time searches using this query fan out method.
Paris:And one of the tactics that we've been exploring here in our agency is to go through Bing Webmaster Tools which does surface the query fan out queries by page and to look at those queries and then figure out how we can take those query fan out queries and build them back into the pages that have already gotten citations to further strengthen them. So that's one interesting tactic, and I'd love to hear some feedback if anybody else is doing something similar. Alright. Moving on to the next story. Let's see here.
Paris:Let's talk about Pinterest. This is kind of a GEO slash SEO story. Pinterest has published rare production evidence that GEO can drive actual organic growth. So now most people have been talking about zero clicks and that GEO is kind of living in a world of zero click, meaning that GEO works not because it drives traffic, but it works because it makes your brand visible and causes people to then start looking for you in other places. But Pinterest has confirmed through research a deployed system, a deployed GEO system that uses vision language models to predict search queries and then with that, create semantically coherent collection pages and build authority aware internal links across billions of assets.
Paris:So let's break that down and repeat it. So the first thing that they do is they have vision language models that predict search queries. So I presume that these are gonna be GEO search queries or they're gonna be Google search queries maybe that may pull up AI overviews. And what they're doing is now using that model of predicted queries. They're creating Pinterest collection pages that match.
Paris:I guess they're kinda creating landing pages semantically based on those search queries, and then they're interlinking all of those collection pages. So that to me sounds like programmatic SEO with internal linking. So the result was 20% organic traffic growth and which is really major for Pinterest. A multi million monthly active user impact. So this is one of the stronger examples of GEO behaving like an engineering or a search discipline rather than a citation hacking exercise.
Paris:I found that really, really interesting and I think that this is gonna be a tactic that people are gonna start using as well through what we discussed earlier through that Corey Fanout approach where you can take a, you can take up a set of query fan outs and then use that to try to predict the type of the type of page that you're missing and, and then do that at scale. But, of course, Pinterest, is one of the rare companies that has the ability to do this at such a massive scale. Alright. And moving on to what I think is gonna be the last story of the day, and that is from Microsoft Bing. And it says Microsoft is drawing an explicit policy line around manipulative GEO.
Paris:So this is the first time that I have come across that term, manipulative GEO. We've heard manipulative SEO and black hat SEO for maybe, the better part of two decades now, but this is the first time that I've really come across a publication like Microsoft using this phrase manipulative GEO. So it's acknowledging the fact, actually, that GEO can be manipulated. So Bing's webmaster guidelines now explicitly discusses generative engine optimization, GEO, and states that abusive tactics can lead to reduced rankings, suppressed grounding visibility, loss of grounding eligibility, or delisting. Interesting.
Paris:Bing says traditional crawlability, consolidation, clarity structure, and trust signals support both SEO and AI grounding. So So that sounds very similar and very familiar to what Google stated officially about a month ago, which effectively said that GEO is SEO, meaning that if you want GEO results, then just keep doing good SEO. And it's interesting that Microsoft has now followed suit and maybe taking it even a step further by acknowledging, by stating this term manipulative GEO, and then saying that there are penalties involved with manipulative GEO without actually saying what is manipulative GEO. Is it scaled AI generated content? Is it scaled citation building?
Paris:Is it something else? We're not really sure yet because we do know that manipulative SEO does have to do with scaled low quality content and automated link practices for example. So I find this very interesting, but I do tend to disagree with both Google and now Microsoft in their implication that GEO is just SEO. I think it is very different while, of course, there is overlapping aspects to both. I think the biggest area of overlap between SEO and GEO is the on-site technical factors.
Paris:So you still need to have a website that performs really well, that's easy to crawl with content that's very accessible by all sorts of crawlers, and to have a well organized and logical structure and hierarchy of information. So information architecture is is key there. I think that's that's the biggest overlap. The other overlap that I see between SEO and GEO is with content quality and content uniqueness. What the acronym EEAT, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, I believe that that was the gold standard for SEO content and now I believe that is a that has evolved into a concept called information gain which we strongly subscribe to with GEO Forge.
Paris:An information gain is basically the degree to which your content can provide new learning material, new training material to LLMs and to AI crawlers. So, basically, can you teach AI crawlers new information by providing it with novel data and proprietary knowledge that it has not already crawled and ingested across the Internet? So that concept is information gain. And I think that the content that comes out that has high information gain grounded solid solidly in some sort of a knowledge base that is also very, very similar to the older concept of EEAT, EEAT friendly content because it naturally brings out a person or a company or brand's unique experiences and perspective and expertise on a subject matter. So I guess Microsoft has now put its flag in the ground along with Google saying we don't want anybody doing manipulative GEO.
Paris:You should all just be doing SEO as you have been doing for many years and you'll expect good GEO results as a result. So, alright, I think that's gonna wrap up this session. This was the first episode of the GEO Show. I am gonna try to start to do this as often as possible. I'm gonna aim for daily, and I'm gonna try to keep bringing you every day the top stories, the top news within the GEO space with my own commentary.
Paris:And I'm looking forward to hopefully building an audience behind this and getting your involvement and your feedback. Thanks for listening, and until next time.