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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, and welcome to the
first weekend edition of The GEO Show.
We are recording on Sunday, August
30th, and we are now on episode 11.
This show is brought to you
by GEOForge, full self-driving
for AI search visibility.
And I am your host, Parrish
Childress, the co-founder of GEOForge.
We've got some great stories to get into
this weekend, so let's dive right into it.
First up, this is from Search Engine Land.
Google is automatically
expanding some AI Overviews.
Google says that some AI Overviews
now expand automatically into full
answers, removing the Show More step and
pushing organic results further down.
Google says this happens when
its systems predict that the
expanded answer will be useful.
Okay.
So Google's now effectively moving more
of the standard search queries into
more of an AI mode style interface.
And of course, this is pushing those ten
blue links even further down the page and
the, the march towards AI mode continues.
So the traditional rank alone is becoming
an increasingly weak visibility metric.
Uh, what we really need to be doing is
tracking whether our clients or brands
are cited, mentioned, recommended, and
clicked inside of the AI layer itself.
Next story, also about Google Search
AI Overviews, comes from Organic KPI.
Uh, Organic KPI reran the same
one hundred and sixty commercial
queries six weeks apart
And AI coverage-- I'm sorry, AI overview
coverage rose from seventy-two point five
percent to eighty point six percent during
those six weeks, while total citation
slots fell twelve point five percent.
In its twenty-query B2B sample,
uh, B2B SaaS sample, AI overview
coverage reached one hundred percent.
Median source retention after
six weeks was just forty percent.
So there's a lot going on here.
But what we are seeing is that
AI overview coverage for B2B
SaaS queries continues to rise.
Now it's, according to this study,
at eighty percent, eight out of
ten queries, and in some cases,
coverage rose to one hundred percent.
But also what we're seeing is
a lot of variability and a high
degree of volatility among which
sources are retained, which
citation sources are retained.
So AI overview presence is expanding
while citation competition is becoming
even tighter and more volatile.
The lesson here is never to celebrate
winning a citation once, because
tomorrow you could be gone, and this
is nothing like securing a number one
ranking in Google in the SEO days.
Uh, you really need to measure
citation persistence over time.
Next up, first touch analysis
may miss eighty-five percent
of AI-influenced leads.
This is coming from Omniscient
Digital, who compared CRM attribution
with self-reported acquisition data.
Of one hundred and eighty-nine leads
who explicitly said that AI influenced
them, only 15, I'm sorry, only 28 of
those, which is 15%, were properly
classified as AI referrals in the CRM.
Most appeared as organic or direct.
It also found that 87% of its AI
citations mentioning the company
lived on third-party pages.
Uh, there's two really interesting
points that jump out at me.
Uh, first is that there is major
misclassification of attribution source
referrals in CRMs when it comes to
AI-influenced lead gen, and also that,
uh, of course, the vast majority of the
citations are coming from third-party
sites that mention the brand as
opposed to the brand's owned channels,
websites, and channels themselves.
So, uh, GEO may look commercially
insignificant if you're relying right
now on just GA4 or HubSpot or, or
your sale-- typical CRM source fields
unless you really make the effort
to do it the right way, which is
adding a "How did you hear about us?"
question on your lead capture forms,
also confirming that in sales call
analysis and really measuring the
brand search lift for GEO measurement.
I think this is still the only and the
best way to capture the true ROI of
an investment in AI search and GEO.
All right.
The next story also has to do with
CRMs and the biggest CRM, Salesforce.
Uh, this is a major story, uh, in the SaaS
world because Salesforce is now making
Claude an interface to its CRM Salesforce
and Anthropic launched CloudForce,
beginning with Salesforce and Claude.
Thirty-seven pre-built sales skills
that can interrogate CRM data,
evaluate pipeline, and take governed
actions directly from Claude.
Open beta is expected in September.
Uh, I think that this is a major, major
move from, uh, one of the absolute top
brands in SaaS, Salesforce, and I do think
that it will force the hand of many other,
uh, CRMs and other SaaS brands to follow
suit, which means that they are accepting
now that the AI layer has been wedged
between themselves and their customers.
And so if you can't beat
them, join them, as they say.
Uh, SaaS interfaces are starting
to become back-end infrastructure
for AI agents rather than
destinations that humans must visit.
So the next evolution after GEO is
agent discoverability and operability.
So these are things like APIs, Model
Context Protocol or MCP, documentation,
and permission-aware actions.
So this was a very interesting
move by Salesforce.
I think what they're, uh, admitting now
is that most people are going to want to
manage their CRM through an AI interface,
and Claude, of course, is lead-leading
the way here via its MCP technology.
Next story is similar because
SEMrush is doing the same thing.
SEMrush put its SEO intelligence
directly inside Claude.
They've launched an official Claude
connector on August twenty-sixth.
Customers can query its keyword, backlink,
competitive, and AI visibility datasets
conversationally and automate workflows
such as competitor analysis and reporting.
SEMrush says its connected dataset
includes twenty-eight point eight
billion keywords, forty-three trillion,
that's trillion with a T, backlinks,
and three hundred and seventeen million
large language model prompts All right.
That's a lot of data.
Uh, it's mind-boggling to try to
even imagine forty-three point twoรขยยฆ
I'm sorry, forty-three trillion backlinks.
But basically, uh, Semrush is effectively
handing over its entire, uh, database
to Claude via its Claude connector.
And, uh, th- its biggest competitor,
Ahrefs, has had a fantastic
connector for a long time now
that our teams use every day.
Uh, probably the competitive pressure
was on for Semrush to follow suit here.
But just like in the world of CRM
and SaaS, SEO dashboards are now
becoming data layers behind agents.
So routine keyword analysis and
reporting is commoditizing very rapidly,
and the human value here moves more
towards strategy, experimentation,
and business interpretation.
All right, let's move to the next story.
Publisher licensing may
influence ChatGPT citations
Okay.
A company called Press Ranger
and Otterly AI matched 129.3
million citations against 91 confirmed
AI publisher licensing agreements.
Publishers with OpenAI deals
averaged 48% more ChatGPT citations
per cited page, and OpenAI-only
licenses showed 112% difference.
Comparable home platform effects did
not appear for Google or Perplexity.
So not a big surprise here.
If you-- if a publisher has a licensing
partnership with ChatGPT, uh, then
those are gonna be sources that tend
to get cited more in ChatGPT citations
So the
citation ecosystem or citation ecosystems
may be partly shaped by commercial
content access relationships, not
just purely page-level optimization.
So keep this in mind when you prioritize
the publications that you go after
for citations, especially for ChatGPT.
And, uh, it, it's really-- uh, it's better
to do that rather than just to treat
all earned media as interchangeable.
This is a major factor In fact, it
actually makes me think that, uh, our--
in Site Forge, in our product, GeoForge,
Site Forge is the citation module.
We have a priority score, and I think we
might wanna bake that in to the priority
score, which is, does this publisher
have any licensing deal with OpenAI?
Okay, let's move on to the
next story coming from arXiv.
A controlled experiment finds that Google
AI answers reduce publisher clicks.
Uh, this sounds like a big
duh, but, uh, here's the data.
A pre-registered field experiment
with eleven hundred participants
found that removing A-AI overviews
and AI mode increased publisher
click-through rates, unsurprisingly.
An AI mode-only experience reduced
publisher traffic and also lowered
reported user experience and trust.
So this is just providing more stronger
causal evidence that most SEO studies,
uh, more cau-causal evidence than most
SEO studies that AI search can change
click behavior, not simply correlation.
So, of course, when forecasting clicks
with AI, uh, we have to, uh, or we
should assume that just because organic
clicks are declining, it doesn't mean
that visibility is also declining.
In fact, visibility can even rise
while organic sessions decline.
All right, next story comes
to us from none other than
the Boston Consulting Group.
BCG reported on August twenty-sixth that
nearly one-third of surveyed customers now
use AI somewhere in the purchase journey.
More importantly, AI introduced users
to brands that they otherwise would not
have considered in roughly sixty-three
percent of AI-assisted journeys.
So AI is actively changing which brands
even enter the consideration set.
It can alter the competitive shortlist
itself, and particularly for SaaS brands,
and I would include cybersecurity here,
uh, I think it's very important to measure
where the brand appears in these real
bottom-of-funnel comparative prompts,
like best X for Y or alternatives to
X and which vendor should I shortlist?
Because people now are turning to LLMs to,
uh, really as a shortcut to a short list.
So something that in the past might
have been many, many different Google
searches and dozens of clicks into
websites to build a comparative table.
Now they're just, uh, taking a
shortcut and having LLMs do that
right away, and then moving right
from the shortlist into those, uh,
branded search-driven website visits.
All right.
We're now on the last story of
the day, which is another GEO
platform is moving from monitoring
towards recommended actions.
This is a company called Cairrot,
and this is spelled C-A-I-R-R-O-T.
And I have no idea if I'm pronouncing that
correctly, but I'll just call it Cairrot.
Cairrot 2.0
on August 28th has added more than 20
AEO/GEO capabilities and an insights
engine, which is intended to turn
visibility data into prioritized SEO
and answer engine optimization actions.
So as we have seen several times
and talked about a lot on this
show, the GEO software category is
quickly moving from dashboard to
diagnosis to prescribed execution.
So pure monitoring will be very difficult
to defend as a premium agency service.
It's becoming more and
more of a commodity.
And the moat now here is increasingly
about proprietary knowledge,
offsite authority, implementation,
testing, and revenue attribution.
This is where agencies should focus
their GEO service efforts, not on
monitoring and delivering only dashboards.
All right.
That wraps up episode 11.
Hope you all have enjoyed
this weekend edition, and
we'll see you on the next one.