The GEO Show

Welcome to The GEO Show, the briefing on Generative Engine Optimization and AI visibility. Brought to you by GEOforge.
In this solo roundup, Paris Childress, founder of Hop AI and co-founder of GEOforge, covers ten stories from the week in AI search and closes with his case for why GEO will dwarf SEO.
In this episode:
  • 🔄 Google's September 2026 spam update can move AI visibility
    Google began its September 2026 spam update on September 24. It applies globally and may take up to two weeks to roll out. Because most prompts rely on real-time search retrieval, a shift in rankings changes which sites get cited, so we recommend annotating core updates in AI visibility tracking.
  • ⚡ Perplexity rebuilds retrieval with Photon
    Perplexity says Photon now serves all production traffic, with P99 retrieval ranking latency down from roughly 800 milliseconds to 65 milliseconds and 68% lower estimated model plus search cost across six agentic benchmarks. These are Perplexity's own benchmarks, but retrieval infrastructure is now a variable in GEO measurement.
  • 🤖 "AI blocked" is too coarse to diagnose discovery
    Citation Works classified 302 of 500 S&P 500 robots.txt files and found zero blanket blocks for OpenAI search bot and Claude search bot, two for PerplexityBot, five for GPTBot, and four for ClaudeBot. Robots directives do not prove crawler behavior, so track how each AI bot actually crawls your site.
  • 📋 Getting cited is not the same as getting named
    In category roundups cited by AI answers, established vendors corroborated by other sources were named in 64 of 78 citing answers. Newer vendors that ranked themselves first in their own roundups were named in only 8 of 85. A listicle alone is not enough: outside category recognition turns citations into brand mentions.
  • 🔌 First-party knowledge becomes agent callable
    Stravito launched an MCP server on September 24 for permission-scoped, source-cited company research, and Eventia followed on September 25 with a native MCP server for its event data. Proprietary brand knowledge is moving from crawlable pages to resources agents can query directly.
  • 🚗 Automotive GEO verticalizes around shopper intent
    CarLocal expanded its automotive AI answer engine offering, citing Cox Automotive's Q2 study: 63% of in-market shoppers plan to use AI during their next purchase, while only 29% of dealers say they are adjusting for AI-powered search.
  • 💸 $14 per month now buys a GEO plus SEO stack
    Easy Fetcher's starter plan bundles AI visibility, citation tracking, SEO analytics, audits, and MCP access for $14 per month billed annually. The low end is commoditizing fast, but AI visibility tracking is sampling: we run 30 to 40 runs per prompt to get the margin of error below plus or minus two points.
  • 📈 GEO case studies shift the sales battle to outcomes
    Growthner reports a cloud GPU client grew from 30 to 120 AI brand mentions and 200 to 500 cited pages, and a design SaaS client reached roughly 1,000 monthly ChatGPT referrals. No control groups are disclosed, but publishing volume looks like the driver.
  • ⚠️ Profound discloses another data incident
    Profound's status history records a September 24 incident affecting Perplexity and Google AI Overviews data collection, with six hours and thirty-seven minutes of degraded service. Collector health is now part of measuring AI visibility.
  • 🧭 Why GEO will dwarf SEO
    Agencies are rebundling AI search into SEO service tiers. Paris argues that is the wrong mental structure: SEO is performance marketing, GEO is brand marketing, and over time GEO will dwarf SEO.
Subscribe to The GEO Show wherever you get your podcasts. Full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TM2WJfs_ZOU
💬 Question: Is GEO a layer on top of SEO, or a bigger discipline that will outgrow it?

What is The GEO Show?

The GEO Show is about generative engine optimization (GEO) and AI search: how B2B brands win AI visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Each episode breaks down what is changing in the way AI assistants and answer engines find, cite, and recommend brands, and what marketers should do about it.

The show is built for B2B SaaS marketers, SEO and content leads, and founders who want their brand to show up when buyers ask AI for answers instead of scrolling a page of blue links. If you own organic growth, demand generation, or brand, you will come away with practical GEO tactics you can test, a clear read on the latest AI search news, and better ways to measure AI visibility when traffic alone no longer tells the whole story.


Episodes mix a few formats:




  • Solo deep dives on GEO strategy, from how large language models choose which sources to cite to how content, earned media, and brand mentions shape AI answers.


  • News breakdowns on the latest moves from OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, and the rest of the AI search landscape, and what each change means for your pipeline.


  • Expert guests, including SEO and GEO practitioners, content and PR leaders, agency operators, and founders building for AI search.


  • The Friday catch-up with regular co-host Simon Young of Question.Marketing, where the two unpack the week's biggest AI search stories and debate what actually works.


Your host is Paris Childress, CEO of Hop AI and co-founder of GEOforge. Paris brings a practitioner's view of GEO and AI visibility, focused on what B2B teams can apply right away, not hype.


Learn more about GEOforge at https://getgeoforge.com.


Subscribe to The GEO Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen so you never miss an episode, and share it with a teammate who is figuring out AI search.