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All things Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). A breakdown of all that's happening in the world of AI search.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome back to The
GEO Show, episode five.
We've got some great stories
to run through today, so
let's dive right into it.
I'm your host, Paris
Childress from GEOForge,
and I do hope that at some point,
you will have a look at GEOForge
for your AI visibility needs.
So story number one is about ChatGPT Ads.
Very recently, ChatGPT Ads has added
view-through conversion reporting
with a one-day view-through conversion
window, which means that when someone
converts after seeing but not clicking
an ad within one day, OpenAI is going to
report that as a view-through conversion.
So people that have done advertising,
paid ads, especially on platforms like
Meta or other s- paid social platforms,
you're probably familiar with view-through
conversions, and I think this is very
appropriate for OpenAI and ChatGPT Ads.
So OpenAI is clearly now building
the measuring stack that's needed
for serious performance advertising.
Uh, that's probably gonna even muddy
the waters further when it comes to
attribution because you will certainly
have a case where you have, let's
say, one conversion that is claimed
as a last-click conversion from your
Google Ads paid search account, as a
view-through conversion from, let's
say, from Meta or maybe even from
LinkedIn ads, and also as a view-through
conversion from OpenAI's ChatGPT Ads.
So as always, we always recommend that
you ask that lead when they come through
the door in that first form that they
fill out, "How did you hear about us?"
And ask them to select among a few
options, one of those being AI chatbot.
And it's not perfect, but that will give
you a directional sense for your ROI
and your investment in GEO or AI search.
Let's move on to the next story.
GEO is becoming a dedicated
in-house growth function.
Uh, we have now seen Cisco Careers
has an ad, a job ad that's posted
with the title SEO/GEO Content
Strategist, whose remit includes
establishing its Generative Engine
Optimization, GEO, and Search Engine
Optimization, SEO, content practice.
Also, we have seen and observed
that Replit is recruiting an
AEO/GEO/SEO lead tasked with growing
AI referrals, winning citations,
running experiments, and tying AI
visibility to sign-ups and to revenue
So we have clear evidence now that
large enterprise companies like
Cisco are hiring for GEO roles
with GEO in the job description.
And it is interesting now how many
slashes there are because we're still
trying to decide among the acronyms here.
But Cisco's job ad has SEO/GEO
content strategist, which you could
argue is actually three roles in
one, and then Replit's role is
AEO/GEO/SEO.
So they really can't decide here,
but just casting a wide net.
So I think what we're gonna see is
that, you know, more and more of
these roles are gonna be insourced.
So, uh, for those of you who are
agencies that are listening, uh, just
be aware it's similar to in-house SEO
roles that, that sometimes compete
with, with agency, uh, engagements.
All right.
The next story is: A field test
gives one of the clearest warnings
yet about JavaScript-heavy sites A
forty-one-day test across roughly a
thousand pages logged thirty thousand
one hundred and eighty bot requests.
Googlebot and other-- and Google Other
traversed JavaScript-injected links.
GPTBot, Claude Bot, Perplexity,
and others, other tested crawlers
researched zero pages accessible
only through those links.
After the links were converted to HTML,
GPTBot discovered two hundred and fifty
pages, the first within forty-eight hours.
So what is this telling us?
I think that this is telling us that
JavaScript is not a friendly language for
crawlers, uh, both for SEO and for GEO.
Now, in the SEO world, um, it was,
uh, more or less established years
ago that Googlebot could crawl and
render and understand JavaScript
so that JavaScript websites and
JavaScript elements on pages were not
penal-penalized in any way, or they
were not at a particular disadvantage.
But now I think we are resetting
this in the age of GEO, and the LLM
crawlers are certainly struggling to
understand and to ingest JavaScript.
So the advice here is if you need to
use JavaScript for the human experience,
fine, but make sure that you have,
uh, a non-JavaScript and HTML page,
ideally even with some JSON structured
data as well in that page so that LLM
bots can crawl it and read it as well.
So it almost kind of, uh,
harkens to the days of, of double
serving or cloaking in a way.
But, uh, just know that if you're
JavaScript only, you're gonna have a
tough time with GEO On to the next story.
We have a new entrant that we're
watching in the GEO software space,
and they are collapsing monitoring
and execution into one single product.
So the company is called
Surva, S-U-R-V-A.ai.
And in their newly updated documentation,
they describe a single platform that
spans ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini,
and Google AI Overviews with visibility
tracking, competitor analysis, answer
gaps, organic search data, content
generation, and referral measurement.
So this is a full workflow of
monitor, diagnose, and draft content.
So this workflow, I know in a previous
episode, we talked about how AI search
visibility tools that are reporting
only, read-only, are quickly becoming
commoditized with even new entrants
that are offering it entirely for free.
But now we're also moving towards the
commoditization of the fully integrated
workflow, the more vertical workflow,
where it's not only about monitoring your
share of voice and your AI visibility
and diagnosing it, but it's also about,
uh, doing something about it, taking
action with targeted content production
Next story.
Fresh analysis reinforces that
AI search should be organized
around tasks, not keywords
Google's own AI mode data shows that
the average query is three times
longer than a traditional search query.
More than one in six US searches use
voice or images, and planning-related AI
mode queries have grown eighty percent
faster than AI mode queries overall.
Brainstorming queries have
grown thirty percent faster.
So a new analysis published today from
Google and p- and posted on Google's blog
argues that content architecture needs
to reflect those multi-step behaviors.
So, uh, this is interesting now
because we're no longer trying to get
a page ranked for a single query, but
we're anticipating a longer journey
with an initial prompt followed
by follow-up prompts or follow-up
questions in that conversation.
And what we wanna do is try to build
out assets for that entire journey as
opposed to a single page, uh, that can
serve as a great landing page for a
particular search query or a keyword.
So content briefs should really model
these sequences that go through this,
this whole pattern or this process
of exploring, comparing, validating,
and then implement-- implementation.
And they ought to have, if it's going
to be a full content brief, that should
contain sections that are capable of
independently answering the buyer's second
and third and fourth questions and so on.
So that is a major shift in the way
that we are planning content production.
And for those who are still doing content
briefs, uh, I think that's something
very important to keep in mind, the
full journey, including follow-up
questions and follow-up prompts.
On to the next story.
We have some strategic analysis
from Search Engine Journal that says
the real geo-opportunity set may be
smaller than the keyword universe.
Duane Forrester argues, Duane Forrester
from Search Engine Journal argues that
AI systems collapse many phrasings
of the same need into relatively
small consideration sets, making
is this category still contestable
potentially more valuable than tracking
dozens of semantic keyword variants?
He explicitly discloses a commercial
interest through citation IQ, so this
should be treated as a hypothesis
rather than settled evidence.
Uh, that is interesting because we
have a-also taken a stab at trying
to estimate, uh, prompt volume around
a particular topic or a category.
And, uh, bottom line is there
are no tools that do this.
There are no equivalent keyword research
tools that can tell you that this
particular prompt or this question has
been posed to ChatGPT X number of times.
Uh, that doesn't exist.
So what we need to do, and what
we have been doing, uh, in, in our
consulting work, is we are using
keyword volume for those same
topics as a proxy, keyword search
volume as a proxy for prompt volume.
But this is t- this research is kind of
turning that assumption and that mode of
operation on its head, and, uh, I think
rightly so, because a lot of keyword
queries, it, it does make sense that
they're collapsing into longer phrases
so that if you have a keyword that has,
I don't know, five thousand searches
per month, you can't just convert that
into a question and say that this is
now a prompt that has five thousand,
uh, queries or, or prompts per month.
So GEO strategy really may ultimately
resemble more category ownership
than long-tail keyword capture.
And that is a very,
very different mindset.
Category ownership, meaning trying
to figure out all the, the topics and
problem statements around a particular
category vertical rather than doing
that long-tail keyword research.
All right, moving on to the next topic.
At the same time, interactive tools
are massively over-indexing in actual
referral-- AI referral traffic.
StudioHawk's Lawrence Hitchens analyzed
one point two million AI referral sessions
across six hundred plus businesses and
found interactive tools, templates,
and calculators earned seven point five
times their share of AI traffic relative
to how many such pages existed overall.
How-to content, definitions, comparison
pages, and guides also over-indexed.
Standard blog posts, not
surprisingly, under-indexed.
So the tools are not dead.
I know that in a previous episode,
we talked about that, uh, AI mode
and AI overviews from Google are
now building their own interactive
tools right into the answer.
But still, these tools are over-indexing
on their share of AI referral
traffic, and so they are still a
very good idea to invest in building.
And now building these interactive
tools is easier than it's ever been with
the dawn of vibe coding and tools like
Lovable and Replit and of course Claude
All right, moving on to the next story.
Gemini citation behavior looks radically
less stable than traditional rankings.
This is not a big surprise.
Steady Demand analyzed fourteen thousand
four hundred and seventy-two citations
from fourteen hundred and eighty-seven
local queries across fifty US metro areas.
Nearly sixty percent of Gemini
citations pointed to businesses'
own websites, but repeated identical
queries shared citation sources only
about forty percent of the time.
Google returned the same top business
only seven percent of the time, versus
ninety percent for Google's local pack.
Gemini and ChatGPT cited the same
domains only eight percent of the time.
So this is about local search,
and this is how local search
translates to AI search visibility.
And what we're seeing here is that
there is very little overlap between
getting ranked in the, the classic
Google local pack, which is the maps
results, and having your business
cited in Google AI Overviews.
So just because you are ranked in the
local pack, and maybe you've been there
for a long time and you have a solid
position there, that is no guarantee that
you will be mentioned, uh, and recommended
accordingly in AI Overviews as, uh,
either as mentions or as citations.
So as always, we should think about
AI ranking more as probability
distribution rather than
something that is deterministic
Next story.
First-party Search Console data can
look spectacular while producing
essentially zero human traffic.
I don't know if some
of you have seen this.
We certainly have.
Uh, Ivris Tech reports two pages
that have accumulated five hundred
and forty-two thousand six hundred
and fifteen Google impressions at an
average posis- average position of
three point six, but only seven clicks
between March 19th and August 11th.
Queries of seven words or more
generated four hundred and fourteen
thousand three hundred and fifty
impressions, but only eight clicks.
Crucially, these authors explicitly
say that Search Console cannot prove
that these impressions come, has,
have came from AI systems or synthetic
agents or rank trackers or Google
testing or any other machine activity,
but those cannot be ruled out.
So I think what we're seeing here
in this zero-click world is not only
that the click-through rate from
your search impressions is going down
dramatically, but that the volume of
impressions is now getting really, uh,
muddled and inflated potentially by
bot traffic and, uh, and agent traffic.
So for those who have reported on rising
search impressions as a primary KPI for
SEO, I don't think that's a trustworthy
metric anymore just because so much of
that, uh, so much of those impressions
are coming from bots and not from humans.
All right.
Story number 10.
A new GEO product launch shows
technical AI readiness audits
are commoditizing quickly.
A Romanian startup called Human AI Labs
launched Blindspot, which evaluates
websites against 70 deterministic
criteria spanning AI crawler access,
structured data, semantic clarity, citable
content, authority, and trust signals.
The company said its beta
audits averaged 48 out of 100.
Those scores and criterias have
not been independently shown
to cause higher AI visibility.
So the audit business, uh, is,
uh, similar with, with SEO.
I, I think now SEO audits are have
really moved to AI, and it's very
difficult really to, uh, p- to
package an SEO audit as a service.
I believe now that what this
is telling us is that the same
thing is true for a GEO audit.
And many SEO agencies that we have
seen who are making the transition
from SEO services into GEO services
are taking that same audit concept
from SEO into GEO, and I believe that
it's a mistake actually because I think
that a GEO audit can be done very, very
thoroughly, um, almost instantly with AI.
And we even have a tool that, that
does a, a pretty good job of this.
So I, I just think it's gonna be very hard
to, to charge for that and have that as
kind of an initial project that precedes,
uh, a long-term retainer with GEO clients.
I just think that this is now part
of the proposal stage where you,
you give them, uh, you give the,
the prospect a, uh, GEO-- a full
GEO audit and then try to start off
right away with, with a long-term,
uh, execution plan and a retainer.
All right.
Finally, the last story of the
day today is that EU AI content
transparency rules are now
operational and no longer theoretical.
It's confirmed that Article 50 of
the EU AI Act has applied since
August 2nd of twenty twenty-six.
Providers of generative systems face
machine-readable marking requirements.
Deployers must disclose certain
deepfakes and AI-generated text on
matters of public interest when it
lacks human review or editorial control.
Penalties can reach fifteen million euro
or three percent of worldwide annual
turnover, depending on the violation.
Uh, so three percent of worldwide annual
turnover for a company like, uh, OpenAI
or Anthropic is massive, massive revenues.
I think that, uh, the latest number
that I heard was that the run rate,
A-Anthropic's, uh, revenue, uh, ARR or
their annual recurring revenue run rate
is now approaching about seventy billion,
and they'll probably end the year at
over a hundred billion dollar run rate.
So three percent of that is a huge
number, and that is why you're seeing
that Anthropic has now come out and, uh,
taken this, this issue seriously, and they
have announced their, their watermarks.
And I think that it has shaken up the, uh,
the conversation around GEO quite a bit.
But I think that as long as, uh, content
that is generated through AI or with the
assistance of AI focuses on information
gain and proprietary knowledge coming
from the brand source, then I think
that there will not be a penalty or a
suppression whatsoever, and in fact,
that content will still thrive, um,
regardless of the degree to which it has
been assisted by AI in its production.
All right.
That'll do it for today's episode.
Thank you all for listening, and
we'll see you on the next one.
Bye.