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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 six.
I'm your host, Paris Childress, and this
episode is brought to you by GEO Forge,
full self-driving for AI visibility.
Let's get into our top stories for today.
First up, ChatGPT search is explicitly
personalized before retrieval.
This came recently from OpenAI's Help
Center, and OpenAI's freshly updated
search documentation says that ChatGPT
may rewrite one prompt into multiple
searches, which is something called
query fan-out, which we've talked
about before, and can use saved memory
when constructing those queries.
And that is the really important point.
Not only does it do the query fan-out,
but it is using saved memory of
that particular user's conversation
history to personalize those queries.
So that means that two people asking
the same question can trigger very
different retrieval paths Before that
the model, uh, before that the, before
the model even sees the sources.
So query fan-out is now becoming
personalized based on memory.
So that is, uh, making things
even harder for us marketers.
But it does mean that GEO testing should
include buyer personas and contextual
variants as much as possible, not just
simply one canonical prompt or even
one set of canonical fan-out queries.
Next up, information gain is becoming the
clearest antidote to AI content sameness.
This is coming to us from Ahrefs,
whose August twenty-- August 20th Deep
Dive argues that useful content needs
to contribute information beyond what
already exists: original data, first-hand
experience, or genuinely new perspectives.
It correctly notes that Google has
not confirmed its patented information
gain score as a live ranking factor.
So whether or not there is a patent, if
there is a literal patented information
gain score, uh, that's, that's coming,
uh, synthesized answers really, uh,
are going to be failing, uh, over time.
And this is a very, very key tenet
of our whole philosophy at GEOforge.
We insist on all content production
being grounded in a proprietary knowledge
base, which is called Baseforge, so
that the content that gets produced has
high information gain, that it's not
derivative AI slop, and that it does bring
out the unique original data, first-hand
experiences, and new perspectives or brand
proprietary knowledge so that it can train
the AI models with that new knowledge.
And in exchange, it can win citations
for that information gain contribution
Moving along.
Topical depth appears more important
than broad AI visibility for
getting the brand actually named.
Semrush analyzed two hundred
and eighty-three thousand two
hundred and fifteen citation
observations across one thousand
and ninety-four ChatGPT categories.
What they found was that in closely
related categories, brands were
both cited and named in thirty-four
percent of appearances, versus just
nine percent in distant categories.
So depth inside a category correlated
more strongly with brand mentions than
spreading thinly across many categories.
So the takeaway here is depth
over breadth when it comes to GEO.
If you have a brand that competes
across several verticals, it is much
more important to go deeper and try
to dominate two or three of those
strategic categories before trying to
expand too quickly horizontally into
adjacent topics or adjacent categories.
All right.
Next up, GEO has officially
entered institutional procurement.
Now, what do we mean by that?
The university or South Dakota State
University's LLM search optimization
RFP, which has recently gone public,
has an anticipated award/negotiation
date of August twenty-fourth, an
annual ceiling of eighty thousand
dollars and a two-year initial term.
It's roughly nine thousand pages in scope.
The requirements for this RFP include
SEO as the foundation, plus AI answer
monitoring, Drupal integration, audit
logging, US data residency, and SOC
two Type two or ISO twenty-seven
thousand and one credentials.
So that's, uh, quite interesting
because this is a major RFP
from a major US institution,
South Dakota State University.
And it's really showing that GEO is
moving from experimental marketing spend
into a governed enterprise procurement.
And that governed enterprise
procurement needs additional
things like security, governance,
permissions, integrations and reporting.
So it goes well beyond
just prompt tracking.
So we do expect in the near future to
see more of these types of GEO RFPs
that are coming out from enterprises and
large institutions that will additionally
require these types of, uh, security
and governments-- governance assurances
All right, moving on to the next story
The GEO tool category has an AI
visibility problem of its own.
SEO Rocket measured six thousand
three hundred and twenty-two
citations across fifty-six SEO/GEO
tools using Ahrefs Brand Radar.
Established SEO platforms averaged
one hundred and thirty-one cited AI
answers versus five dedicated-- five
answers for dedicated GEO tools.
Perplexity generated more than one-third
of the sampled citations And the study
is vendor-produced, US only, and caps
some high performers at one thou-
at one hundred citations per engine.
So what this is telling me is that the
GEO tools category is already much more
fragmented and way more competitive
than the SEO tools category ever
was, which makes perfect sense to me
because, uh, SEO tools were not that
easy to build, let's say, ten years ago.
So really that whole market coalesced
around really two top players,
which were Semrush and Ahrefs.
And then there were some others
like Moz that, that picked up some
significant market share as well.
But what we see today is literally
hundreds of most likely vibe-coded
GEO tools, most of them focused
on AI visibility measurement only.
And, uh, this is really causing
an AI visibility problem.
So merely entering the GEO
category does not make a brand
part of AI's category model.
Uh, every GEO tool that's out there,
including our own, GEOForge, really has
to demonstrate that its own category
association and AI visibility to
prove why it belongs in the category.
And this is quite interesting
because the category of GEO/AEO
tools is still so young.
It's probably barely a year old at
this point, maybe a year and a half,
and there's still new entrants that
are just pouring into this category.
So it is going to be mostly about
marketing, uh, the best marketed tools
and of course the best quality tools,
but the ones that are marketed the
best are gonna be the ones rising to
the top, probably as well as the ones
that are getting the most funding.
All right, our last story of the day.
AI crawler access is becoming a
governance and monetization decision.
So let's unpack this.
Cloudflare's AI crawl control now
provides crawler-level monitoring.
It allows for allow/block
policies, robots.txt
compliance tracking, and a
private beta pay per crawl
capability across its platform.
Cloudflare, Cloudflare notes that WAF
rules can override cra-crawler policies.
So the, the whole crawl game, the
AI bot crawl management game is
getting more and more complex.
Cloudflare is clearly,
clearly the leader here.
And really this question of should AI
bots be allowed to crawl our website, it's
no longer just a simple yes/no answer.
It's becoming much more nuanced.
There are literally dozens
of AI crawl bots now.
Uh, we've also seen with one
particular client that there are
spoof or fake AI crawl bots that are
named after the, the popular ones
like, um, OpenAI's, uh, UserBot.
Um, we saw one that was posing as
OpenAI's UserBot, but was in fact
a spoofing and a phishing bot.
So we have had to now go into, uh,
Cloudflare, analyzing those logs, and
really think about white labeling or--
and/or blacklisting specific AI, uh, AI
bots, um, based on their IP addresses.
So this is, this is becoming
a real cat and mouse game.
Uh, I think now, uh, there are some
bad actors who can pose as a legitimate
AI crawl bot in order to come into
your website, do a deep crawl, and
hunt around for vulnerabilities
that it might be able to exploit.
So brands now have to be very,
very vigilant and really analyze
their crawl logs and seeing
which AI bots are crawling, how
frequently, and does anything look
suspicious, and would anything
need to be blocked at the IP level.
So this is now a, uh, really, a r-
becoming a really serious issue.
All right.
That's all I have for today.
Hope you've enjoyed this episode, and
we will see you all in the next one.
So long.