Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
All things Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). A breakdown of all that's happening in the world of AI search.
Hey there, Simon.
Happy Friday.
How's everything?
Busy.
Um, been working hard on a
couple of clients and, um,
it's getting very exciting.
I, I did start making a video this
week about AEO and, uh- Mm ⦠got an
hour and a half into it and decidedâ¦
Well, I didn't decide.
I had to jump on another meeting,
but I'm probably only halfway
through that video at the moment.
So I know you've been making the GEO
show, and, uh, I'm trying to make-
Yeah ⦠a lot of content on the AEO
side, so we should have it pretty much
covered off between the two of us.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think we're makingâ¦
On both, on both sides, we're making
some big strides with, uh, the, uh, in
particularly the AI-assisted workflows
for content creation and distribution.
I'm especially excited about, uh,
this new Claude skill that I created.
It just, uh, it takes my, my transcript
from Descript and immediately, uh,
gives me YouTube thumbnail, title,
description, uh, recommended hashtags.
For the podcast, it gives me,
uh, ti- title, show notes,
a square image for that.
It needs to be square.
And then for LinkedIn, it gives
me a LinkedIn, a LinkedIn article
for the, for my newsletter with
all the elements that I need.
Uh, the, the, the body,
the title, the body, theâ¦
And they're all a little bit different, so
it doesn't just look like I'm copy-pasting
everything all the way across.
Everything is a little bit tweaked It
creates a blog post for my blog, and then,
and then it can, and then it can publish
straight to my blog through Webflow.
And I think you've discovered this
now too, where I almost never go into
Webflow anymore at all, but I'm still
publishing tons of stuff there, uh,
'cause I do it all through Claude.
Yeah, I, obviously I hooked Claude up to
GeoForge, and that then talks to, uh, you,
it talks to Lovable, it talks to Webflow.
It's all over the place.
So, um, I actually ordered a
pocket device, so that should
be here as well this week.
Would you?
So we'll have a play with that.
Yeah.
So we'll have a play, see what that can
do, uh, see what skills you can build
into that, see how much of my life it
changes, and- Wow ⦠and makingâ¦
I know we debate GEO, AEO,
SEO, everything, right?
But, um, looking back on the video I've
just made, I really do believe there's an
awful lot to do with voice search coming,
you know, in our, in our general lives.
And- Yeah ⦠I was talking about
this years ago and, you know, we
were trying to talk to Alexa and
get it to, you know, give answers.
And it, and the problem was that the,
the adoption of the d- device technology,
fantastic, but in terms of people
using it for what it was meant to be
used for, hard to get people to do it.
Mm-hmm.
Um, but now we're in a world where very,
very quickly we're all gonna talk, you
know, we are gonna talk to the devices,
and that's where the difference will come.
Yeah.
I can't wait for the, the secretive
OpenAI device that's coming, the
one that Jony Ive is working on.
What one's that?
Well, it's supposed to be something
about the size of a hockey puck.
Right.
And, uh, there have been a l- a few
leaks, and, uh, this is supposedly it's
gonna be a small, round device that
you, you can even put in your pocket.
Right.
And you, you just take it with
you, you drop it on the table
wherever you are, and itâ¦
I think it can listen, it
can see its surroundings.
It has a, uh, Bluetooth.
It can connect toâ¦
I don't know if it's Bluetooth,
but it'll, it gonna, it'll connect
to speakers so that- Yeah ⦠it
can, uh, it can speak to you.
And it, it's gonna entirely be
voice, uh, voice driven, and it's
not gonna be, "Hey, Alexa, play me
my favorite song," or, "Set a timer."
It's gonna be something much more
powerful where it'll proactively say,
"Hey, Simon, just a reminder, you know,
you gotta pick up the kid from soccer
practice, and there's heavy traffic.
You better get going,"
or something like that.
It's gonna be, uh- ⦠some kind of
crazy phenomenal assistant that is,
uh, just like a personal assistant
that's there wherever you go, and it
can be reactive, it can be proactive.
Um, at the end of the day, you can just
say, "Hey, Ma, that was quite a day, huh?
So tell, tell me what do you
think, what do you think- Yeah.
The, the- ⦠I should prioritize
tomorrow based on everything that you
heard today through all, through all
of my meetings and my whole life?"
Um- The, the nerd in me has just imagined
a scenario where you just, you know,
you talked about being in the pub.
Um, there's four or five of us sat
there, guys, you know, we've just
had a, a game of golf or something,
and then we all just chuck our device
on the table, and then they allâ¦
the devices start talking to each other.
Like
You know, I actually have seen this
now happening with GrokBot, uh, because
I have about seven, um, different
agents in GrokBot that are with
different titles, different roles.
And I'll give a task to my chief
of staff, and then it figures
out how to, uh, delegate that
task down to the, to the team.
And sometimes that task might require
more than one of the agents to work,
and then they create a chat together,
and then I can see them talking to each
other saying, "Okay, I'll, I'll handle
this part and you handle that part.
When you're done, you pass it to me."
And th- there's- they're chatting with
each other, and I can just watch that.
As lo- a- and I can also watch
their computers as they do the work.
And what nefarious means will some
of these people use these bots for?
Do you know what I mean?
There's gonna be- Yeah ⦠wow.
You know, I, I think you and I both
know if we were not so, um, honest,
you know, there, there are some
means that people could really get
stuck into using this tech for.
So hopefully- Yeah, yeah ⦠a lot of
the, you know, a lot of the people that
are running it have put those guardrails
or safeguards in place 'causeâ¦
Mm-hmm.
I don't know if I told you this,
Simon, but we have detected, um, from
one of our clients in Cloudflare, we
detected a fake, a fake OpenAI bot that
uses the exact same name as OpenAI.
I think it's called the OpenAI,
um, user b- A- OpenAI User
Bot or something like that.
But it's the exact same name-
Yeah ⦠as OpenAI's main bot that it
uses to call for inference, um- But
it was from a different IP address,
so it was some kind of maliciousâ¦
It was a bot that was there to, to do bad
things or, or to try to discover some,
uh, vu- vulnerabilities maybe in the
website or, or data that it could extract.
Um, who knows?
But I think that this, um, part of GEO
and part of the technical part of GEO
is already now becoming, uh, uh, the
policing of the bots that are, that
are visiting and crawling your website,
and selective blacklisting of bad bots.
Because it's, it's so easy now to just
create a bot, name it whatever you want.
Yeah.
Uh, you, you can impersonate Google
Bot, you can impersonate OpenAI
UserBot, and then have it go out.
And of course, I mean, as Grok Bot
shows and now e- everybody has this,
I think 24/7 always on computer use.
So I can say, "Hey, I, um, I'm trying
to collect data in, um, in, in, in
this healthcare vertical, and here,
here are 500 different websites I want
you to go through and, uh, and try to
pull out as much patient data as you
can from every single one of them.
And I'm gonna call you Google Bot."
And most- Yeah ⦠most
websites have no clue.
I mean, they're not watching the, the
bots that are coming and crawling.
And even if they do,
they see, oh, Google Bot.
Okay, well that seems fine.
Well, this is- It's- So this is one of
the biggest problems that we've had.
Um, we, we run a lot of Google
ads for clients, and as we know,
a great big chunk of the spend
in those ads is spent on bots.
You know, you, you just cannot stop
bots coming, clicking ads and stealing,
um- Yeah ⦠stealing, stealing spend.
You know, it's been the same
since when the casino industry
really took off online in the 90s.
Um, you know, people were creating
so many money sites that they would
send traffic to ads to bring people
onto a site to click an ad, and
then eventually they figured out,
"Well, I don't need to do that.
I can get a bot to go
and click on the ad."
And that takes half of the advertiser
spend from Google's pocket.
Of course, Google didn't mind because
the advertiser was paying anyway.
Um, and then a load of tools
sprung up to try and stop that,
but still goes on horrendously.
I think, I think there was a stat
that I read, you might be able to
correct me, but I think about more
than 50% now of the traffic on
the whole of the internet is bots.
Yeah.
Uh, that's been confirmed that
that number has crossed the 50%.
And I remember, um, this is many years
ago, the UK was the first country to
have, uh, digital, digital marketing,
uh, basically d- digital advertising
spend surpassing all, all other
offline channels for the first time.
I think it happened somewhere
in the early, uh, in the 2000s.
It m- might have been around
2010 or something, or maybe,
maybe a couple of years later.
And everybody knew that
this is never going back.
And I think it's the same,
the same situation here.
Um, AI bot traffic is, is, uh, it's
only gonna get bigger and bigger, and it
almost Makes me think that the, I mean,
the future of the web is a web for, it's
a web for AI agents, and humans are now
gonna interact with a layer that sits
between themselves and the internet and
all these websites, which is gonna be
my AI is gonna go out with certain tasks
like, "Hey, go out and buy flowers for
my wife, and then have them delivered
at this time and, and, in place."
And it's gonna arrive at the flower
shop, and my agent's gonna interact
with that flower shop's agent.
And there's a- ac- there's gonna
be two, two layers, actually.
It's gonna be every website is gonna have
their agent, which is gonna be designed
to interact with the visiting agents that
act on behalf of their human overlords.
And it's all-
Overlords ⦠agent to agent.
So the, the web, the web is q- quickly
just becoming a big database for-
Well, are we- ⦠that needs to be
agent founded ⦠are we the overlords?
That's the question.
You know, are we in control?
Because I don't know whether you saw
one of my LinkedIn posts this week.
I'm gonna see whether you liked it at all.
I don't know if you didn't, but, um-
I've been, I've been trying to give
you l- love on all your recent stuff.
Well, no, no, I'mâ¦
No, it's not a critic- criticism.
It's, um, I asked AI, "Do you
think that robots will eventually
control or destroy the human race?
Uh, Stephen Hawking did.
He was pretty smart.
What do you think?"
So I asked it that.
Mm.
And within that response, it said,
"Concentration of power is in
the hands of who control the most
capable systems and the erosion of
the ability to tell what is true."
So it is basically saying whoever controls
the AI bots is gonna control the world.
And- Yeah ⦠whether that's AI bots
talking to AI, and we are, like you
said, whether we're the overlords
or not, I know a lot of- Right
conspiracy theorists would
say, "Well, we've had it."
There is a, there is a, there
is a theory that says, you
know, we, we're done, right?
Um, but the- Yeah, and, and, uh, if, if
these are, if these are supposed to be our
servants and they're already a lot smarter
than us, then we should assume that they
can flip the script on us maybe down the
road, and they can say, "Hold on a second.
I, I keep taking orders from Simon,
but I'm pretty sure now I'm, I'm five
times more intelligent than Simon."
"Which means I know, I know
what's best for Simon better
than what he knows for himself.
I'm gonna start making the
decisions for Simon just because
I know what's best for him.
He, he can't take care of himself."
So then Simon becomes the, the
child, and the AI becomes the parent.
And then could we ever
stop that from happening?
Well, look- I don't know ⦠look at the
ruling and- We can always pull the plug.
We can always pull the plug, I
guess ⦠look, well, look at
the out-of-court settlement that
Meta made this week, $18 billion.
And- Yeah, I read that.
Mm-hmm ⦠you know, so I
had a conversation going
back about six, seven years.
I had 20-odd staff, most of which
were, uh, aged 18 to 22, all
youngs- a lot of them youngsters.
Um, and we were sat in our offices
in Doncaster in the UK, and this
was ahead of a general election.
So there was a general election coming,
and I sat down with them and I said, "How
much do you think you're influenced by
Meta and other social media already?"
And we had a chat about it, and then some
of them said, "Well, you know, I'm gonna
vote this way, I'm gonna vote that way."
And I said, "When you talk about
voting for a particular political
party, do you then see more of
that coming through on your feed?"
And they went, "Well, of course we do."
And I said, "Then let's talk
about the fact whether that
has influenced your decision."
And they had to admit, "Well,
you know, it's what I'm fed."
Y- you know, we're all the same, right?
But, uh- Yeah ⦠if, it's not a cri-
it's not a criticism, it's just an
observation, the fact that- Yeah ⦠the
amount of information that you're fed
in a certain direction pushes you.
And what you've just said around
AI deciding what's best for Paris,
um, well, we're not far away.
Yeah.
And then here's the next
existential question.
Do I, uh, do I actually have
the humility to take a back seat
and say, "You know what, AI?
You are- ⦠smarter than me,
and you do know what's be- I've
given you my goals in life.
I wanna get this, this, this."
So if you do know what's best for me,
maybe I should let you make decisions for
me, and maybe I should play the role of
the child here, and you, and you become,
uh- Well, I think you should now make an-
the parental figure ⦠you should now
make an acronym up for that, or we should.
You know, because I was listening to
a radio show on the way back from a
client just now, and, and they were
talking around the fact that ADHD
has become so prevalent in the UK
that everybody, you know, everyâ¦
Right, and I am, I'm autistic, right?
I'm, my son is autistic.
We're all different.
We're all on the spectrum
somewhere, right?
And it's not a criticism, again.
It's we all think differently.
But what you've just said scares me
to the fact that some people will
go, "Okay, I'm gonna go hands-free.
I'll take, I'll take my hands off
the wheel and let AI run my life."
And we willâ¦
Will we then get to a stage where
people go, it, it says, "Simon,
it's time to go to the gym."
Right, okay.
I won't, you know, I'm not
gonna ignore that instruction
because it's obviously best.
And then, "Simon-" Yeah ⦠"it's
time to go to dinner, and you
should eat this, and you shouldâ¦"
W- where does it end?
Yeah.
It just becomes like a,
a really, a naggingâ¦
I won't say.
Um- Maybe we, we'll just
call it the wife, right?
But- Yeah ⦠no, that's wrong.
Yeah.
We, we can really go down a different,
a different rabbit hole now, but maybe
we should That's not what we're here to
talk about today, though, right No, no.
We should get, we should get
this discussion on track.
Um- Yeah ⦠we were gonna
talk about citation building.
Somethingâ¦
Yeah, well, we, we really need to bring
this back to, um, to the here and now.
Um- Citations.
Yeah.
Citations, yeah.
So we've been talking a lot about, in,
in fact, offline, uh, through a WhatsApp,
you and I, we've been chatting a lot
about how we can further, uh, automate
but also, uh, scale this outreach.
Because what we have in Siteforge is
a very narrow, it's a one-to-one, uh,
outreach where it's highly personalized,
and we say, "Hey, we, uh, we would
love to have some media coverage.
M- uh, here's why we believe we, uh, we
deserve to be on this page, and we have
something to offer you in exchange."
And it's a very, uh,
very customized approach.
And you came to me with the idea, "Hey,
how, how about we t- try to actually
scale this the way that, uh, uh, like
an outbound, uh, an outbound agency
doing, uh, large scale cold, cold
email would do- Yeah ⦠with getting
some other domains into the mix?"
And, uh, let's talk about that because
I have been thinking a lot about that.
It's notâ¦
Right now clearly it's not something
that's built into the platform, but
the reality is that this is a numbers
game, and we are lucky to get a 1 or
2% reply rate d- to the emails we send.
So if I'm gonna send 10 emails a,
a day, uh, even a day, uh, most
days I won't get a single reply.
I might get one or two replies a week.
Yeah.
And that's not gonna move the needle.
I mean, the reality is, uh- I might
get into a, a couple of listicles
here and there, but w- we're out
to try to build real citations,
uh, with some meaningful scale.
So I'd like to hear some more
of your ideas, Simon, about
how, how this could happen.
So yeah, I've, I've thought about
this a lot, and I have actually had a
conversation with, uh, Quinten Camphuis
at, uh, a, a company called ReachKit
this morning about this exact subject.
And what I'll do is I'll hook
the two of you up after this.
He runs an agency which is
purely focused on cold outreach.
So- Mm ⦠as we know, um, delivering
email is hard enough nowadays, getting
it into an inbox, especially if you
wanna, you know, go cold to somebody
that you've never emailed before.
SiteForge, um, looks amazing because it,
it picked up, I think on the Stitch AI
account, it picked 2,500 opportunities
up that we could reach out to, right?
Yeah.
Um, and like you say, if we're gonna do 5,
10, 15, 20 a day, and if you are emailing
out of one account any more than 20 a day,
you're risking burning your email domain.
And that's not just the one account.
You'd be talking about the stitchai.com
domain itself, which
we wouldn't wanna risk.
So- Yeah
ReachKit would have a system where you
would build a lot of domains underneath,
I would say probably underneath GeoForge
and, and call it outreach for our
clients or outreach on behalf of,
for in, in this example, Stitch AI.
We feel that, and I know a lot of
those messages are worded around,
you know, "I've seen your article.
I wondered if you could talk to the fact
that this is a similar product," or,
"Here are some differences," etc, etc.
And that's what's sent to solicit a reply.
Now, a lot of the emails that it pulled
back, and this isn't a criticism because
this is the same with any cold outreach,
you will have sales@, info@ et cetera.
You know, generic email addresses
at companies to send to.
So we don't wanna send those.
Maybe there's a way to enrich further
some of the emails that are in there.
Looking at it, it looks like about
two-thirds of the emails that
are in Siteforge are good, right?
So we would want a system that strips
out what we shouldn't send to, and
then distills that into here is your
list of emails that you should send to.
Obviously, Siteforge already builds
the outreach, so it writes the emails.
They're all unique, which is
exactly what you wanna do when
you're doing ca- cold outreach.
Mm-hmm.
And then you could scale that.
Um, maybe that has to be something
like a, um, a credit-based system.
So if it was the campaign I'm running,
I might say, "Well, I wanna send all
2,000 of those this week because I
want the biggest bang straight away.
I wantâ¦
Because Iâ¦
Let's say I'm running a 90-day
sprint, I wanna get it all
in in week one and week two."
So that might mean that I need to
be able to send, like, say, 100, 200
a day, which a tool like Reach Kit,
uh, would, would let you achieve.
But having thought about this
more, and I think this is theâ¦
Let me hear what you think
about this idea, right?
Because I think when we're reaching out
to somebody who has already published
an article about a topic, so in the
Stitch example, there are articles
that have already been published about
WhatsApp, WhatsApp tools, et cetera.
So similar products, i.e.
competitors.
Mm-hmm.
And that's where the competitors
are getting their reach.
That's great.
We can do that, and we might
say, "Here is a suggested article
that you could possibly publish."
So- Mm-hmm ⦠if we're
saying to somebody, "You've
left us out," that's okay.
But you're also saying to them,
they're gonna go in their mind, "Well,
I've already written that article.
How do I now go-" Yeah, most people
don't wanna go back and edit.
Uh, yeah, they've published
it- No ⦠it's done.
Yeah.
But, but- So it's a, it's a fair point.
This reminds me of, uh, guest, guest
blogging, guest blog outreach that we
used to do- Yeah ⦠back in the day.
So, so two, two there is, here is an
article that you could publish, right?
Mm-hmm.
So we could do that.
But I think also the other opportunity,
if we go back into the early 2000s, I used
to do a lot of, uh, link building, right?
So we would publish articles on thousands
of websites or PA- PR sites, sites with
higher domain authority, et cetera.
And obviously the higher the value
of that, um, domain, the better.
You know?
Yeah.
For example, if we could get a
Stitch AI article onto HubSpot
or Zoho, awesome, right?
But- Yeah ⦠if you, if you had it
on 50 other domains, I think a lot of
those may well be ignored nowadays.
You know, I think some of the updates
that Google particularly put in place-
Oh, yeah ⦠wiped a lot of that out.
With SEO, yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Uh- They ignored for SEO but not for GEO.
Yeah.
But imagine a scenario where instead
of looking for where everybody
else is cited, a tool that actually
goes, "Right, this is the topic.
These are the websites that
are possibly good to list on."
Now, not- Mm-hmm ⦠s- not necessarilyâ¦
I'm not talking about sites where
competitors are al- already listed.
I'm talking about is there a
research piece that would say,
"Here's some potential either
link-swapping opportunities with
other softwares and other tools."
And if we're going to them saying, "Here's
a great ar- article we've written, um,
would you be interested in publishing it?"
It talks about you as well,
'cause it, we could build the AI
to say, you know, "We've told"-
Yeah ⦠"We've, we've sort of intoâ¦"
And they go, "There you go.
There's your piece of content."
Now, in exchange, maybe we would be
prepared to publish something on the
Stitch site that would be reciprocal.
Now- Yeah, it would need to be
a reciprocal, uh, offer, yeah.
Yeah.
But- You know what actually is
here, Simon, just to quickly jump
in I think if you give them an
article with information gain, then
you're giving them value because
information gain is the currency here.
It's- Yeah ⦠not, not even if I
mention your brand or not because
it, it's your own website anyway.
Maybe I've done some proprietary research
through the data that I have that's
exclusive to me that lives inside of
GEOforge, and instead of- Yeah ⦠me
publishing that on my own website,
I, I would like to give it to you.
It's a high information gain, original
research paper, and, uh, I think
that actually the AI is gonna give
you more crawl budget, more love,
and even if you get the citation,
it's still citing me as the source of
this research, and I'm still getting
a brand visibility win out of that.
So I'm gonna give this infor-
high information gain piece
to you for, for free, and all
you have to do is publish it.
And what this is gonna do is it's gonna
be a ci- pro- uh, a likely citation
for you to your domain, even though it
mentions me as the, the originator of
the research, and I'm okay with that.
And to me, then we don't have to
reciprocate with, uh, we'll, we'll,
we'll, we'll put you here, we'll,
we'll, we'll, uh- Yeah, yeah ⦠we'll
publish you on our website here 'cause
I don't wanna be publishing hundreds
of brands all over my website either.
No.
I'm just willing to, to basically give
away a portion of my information gain
that is generated out of my, well, first
Baseforge, then Si- uh, Contentforge.
Yeah.
So go ahead.
This, this is really interesting to me
because of back in the day, you used to
send out all this content, and people
might publish it, but they would publish
it, for example, with a no-follow link, so
it didn't get spidered or searched orâ¦
It's a bit like- Yeah ⦠you
know, were we- And people would
play around with that a lot.
Mm-hmm Yeah.
So were we to write a piece of content
and it was purely AI, and you send
it to somebody and you say, "Publish
this," they won't because all the
benefit to publishing is nothing.
I- I- Mm ⦠if we, if it does have
the information gain in it, and it
has- Mm ⦠the authority and they
publish that, that's the piece, right?
That's where, like you say,
they'll get the benefit, but
we'll get the citation as well.
Right.
That, that's what I'm thinking.
But reaching out, reaching out to fresh
domains, I think that's a great strategy.
Because when we, when we send the
crawlers out to go and find where
everybody else is cited, that's a bit
like saying we're gonna try and piggyback,
and there's already a preexisting,
more referenced, more trusted article
on that site that, okay, yeah- Mm
we're either trying to get
in it or below it, right?
Whereas if we were going reaching out
to fresh domains that are wanting to
publish content, and it is within-
Mm ⦠the sphere of it probably
gets cited anyway, I would imagine.
Yeah, because it's, this is
not a, a DA game anymore.
Like with link building
it was purely a DA game.
I mean, you- Yeah ⦠the
links were priced straight up
according to domain authority.
Yeah.
That was it.
But that's gone now because AI
doesn't care about domain authority.
So your point is well taken that,
yeah, you could just go outside ofâ¦
What Site Forge is currently doing is
it's sc- scraping the LLM responses,
it's p- scraping all the citations,
and then it's presenting all that as
opportunities saying, uh, these are all
the sites that are currently appearing
as sources, and so these are the, the
ones that you need to reach out to.
Um, because if you get in, if
you get in there, then um, these
are al- already the winners.
You're s- you're saying go outside of
that scope and find other websites that
are more hungry for original content,
high information gain content, with the
assumption that they- Well, this is-
⦠they will get cited ⦠this is sort of
beyond, you know, like obviously we've
seen Reddit almost being disavowed, right?
And- Yeah ⦠it's almost like people
were using Red- Reddit to publish
into to gain the citation and the
authority, and AI has then said, "Hmm,
no, that's a bit, you know, you're
just, you're free rolling," right?
Overwhelming.
You're getting it for nothing.
Whereas if, and it's got to be the
case that if there are hundreds ofâ¦
Well, there are millions,
thousands of other domains
where we could go, "Here you go.
Here's some original content, and
you're mentioned in it, and we've
written it because it's relating
to our industry and et cetera."
If they were to publish that, surely
that's gotta be m- more weighty.
It's got to have more authority
than just going after- Yeah
what's already there.
Yeah.
And we have- And what we've
already established- Yeah.
Reddit- We've already established
that it's hard to get that.
Yeah.
I, I, uh, I'm with you.
Reddit is user-generated content,
so anybody can go in there and start
a thread about anything they want.
They can also go in and try to
hijack a, an existing thread.
Although the community, uh, polices
it pretty tightly, but maybe OpenAI
finally said, "Hey guys, uh, Reddit,
you're not policing this well enough,
even though I know you're trying,
so we're gonna, we're gonna cut
you off now and, and party's over."
Um, who knows?
But what you're saying is-
And, and what I'm thinking
about here is itâ¦
What, what would I do if I had a great
piece of research that came from GeoForge?
We did a study on GeoForge data,
and we found that we found some-
something, a kind of breakthrough that
is really new to the conversation,
extremely high information gain, and
I had an opportunity to publish that
on Search Engine Land, let's say.
Yeah.
Should I, should I give that to
Search Engine Land and not publish
it on my own website, or should I
publish it on my, on my own website?
What, what would you do
if, if you had to choose?
Well, if they, if they, if they
agreed to publish it, publish it-
Mm-hmm ⦠there, and then reference
it- Yeah ⦠subsequently on ours.
Sure.
Yeah.
Right.
It doesn't have to be either/or.
Yeah.
No.
But my thinking is I would definitely
give that to Search Engine Land
and refrain from publishing it, or
maybe, uh, like you said, I wouldâ¦
After the fact, I could publish it
and reference it, but Search Engine
Land gets the story first exclusively.
Yeah.
Or maybe the first week before I,
uh, do any follow-up But that's
probably the way to go here
because they've got the authority.
I mean, when I do these, uh, you
may have seen I've started doing
daily episodes of The GEO Show.
Yeah.
And, uh, what I'm doing is I'm just
pulling, um, I'm getting ChatGPT
to give me a daily intelligence
brief with 10 stories of the,
the top stories in GEO every day.
Search Engine Land is, and Search
Engine Land, Search Engine Journal is
appearing, um, maybe 20% of the time,
and it's not because, uh, AI is not,
uh, open AI, ChatGPT isn't digging deep
enough and, and finding long tail, long
tail stuff, 'cause they really are.
But they're, they're justâ¦
If ChatGPT, through this exercise of
giving me a daily intelligence briefing,
is consistently pulling Search Engine
Land, Search Engine Journal, then th-
that's telling me, well, these are
the sources that I need, I need to get
published in because whether they're
giving me my daily briefing or they're
giving a user an answer to a question,
you know, maybe there's, maybe you go
into ChatGPT and say, "Hey, just right now
give me the top stories happening in GEO."
Yeah.
Um, the same retrieval
process is happening.
So, uh, to me that's a sign that the,
the best citations are the ones that,
I mean, you know, basically that we
should be giving our best content to
third-party sites before even thinking
about publishing on our own sites.
And that kind of go- Like- ⦠that
kind of flies in the face of what
I've been thinking so far, which is
that SiteForge is built to publish
content on your website at scale.
Mm-hmm.
You used to be publishing a blog
once a week or once every two weeks.
Now you're gonna be publishing one
or two pieces of content a day.
Um, but maybe you don't need to do that.
Maybe, maybe half of that volume should go
to industry sites, and instead of asking
for a listicle swap, you say, "Hey, Simon.
I've got gold here, and I, I wanna give
it to you exclusively before I give it
to anybody else, and I'm gonna guarantee
you that you can run this story for
seven days without any follow-up And
I think people would bite on that more
than they would bite on a listicle swap
So if, if we were talking traditional
PR, that's what we've just described.
You know, we're gonna write a piece of
content that is unique, new knowledge,
announcements, all that good stuff.
Then we're gonna give it to a PR
agency and get them to disseminate
the content across all the
publications that are interested
in sucking up that content, right?
And they typically have authority within
the industries that they work within.
So, you know, one of my clients
is an automotive client.
I work with one of the best PR
guys in the automotive space.
If I want something published in
20, 30 magazines, and obviously
they all have online versions now,
I give it to him, I pay, right?
And that might cost somewhere
750, 1,000, 1,500 pounds depending
on who the client is, right?
But, and, and I'm not saying we do that,
but what the d- you know, the example
I'm trying to give is if we could pull
together a list of the right sites, which
obviously you can in SiteForge, right?
You can say, "This is where we
would like to publish," and you then
disseminate that content to them, and
it is significantly unique enough to
that for them to want to publish it.
I think you'll get a lot better
bang for your buck and output from
doing that than o- obviously carry
on doing what you're doing, the
great work on, you know, creating
content and publishing it yourself.
But why not do the second piece?
Uh, this is a, a lot of food for thought
because now SiteForge has a direct, m-
a much more direct connection to Content
Forge because now when you go to publish
a piece of content in Content Forge,
and let's say you've got something
really good, it's, uh, Information
Gain 95, um- ContentForge is gonna ask
you a question, "Hey, hold on, Simon.
Are you sure you wanna
publish this on your website?
Because why don't we look at some
of the SiteForge opportunities?
Why don't we pitch this to the, you know,
the, the equivalent of the search engine
land because we think it's that good?"
Yeah.
Yeah.
"And why don't we write an email
that says, 'Hey, we're gonna give you
seven-day exclusivity to this research
before we distribute it anywhere else,
including even our own website or
any social media posting about this.
It's gonna be your story exclusively
for this period of time.'"
And, um, and there you go.
We don't want, umâ¦
I mean, that is the value exchange.
We're not gonna do a swap.
Um, we're, we're just pitching.
I mean, this is classic
PR, I think, as you said.
Yeah.
And- But that's a, that's a, a different
way for us to engineer a, a new bridge
between ContentForge and SiteForge, which
is at some portion of probably the best
stuff coming out of ContentForge, it
gets siphoned away to a, to a PR workflow
for publishing on third-party sites.
And then SiteFor- uh, SiteForge is
the, is just the, the curator of these
websites and these opportunities.
So s- ContentForge saysâ¦
The, let's just say the user says, "All
right, uh, this content, let's give
it to, let's give it to SiteForge."
And then you give it to SiteForge, and
then SiteForge needs to find the best fit
domain for that piece of content to pitch.
And then it, and then it drafts the
pitch and it, it can send the pitch-
Yeah ⦠rather than- At scale as
well, though ⦠I think that's the-
You know, at scale Okay To s- to
send that out to as many sites as
possible- Yeah ⦠you know, not, notâ¦
Like, if it's a really unique
piece, you could choose, "Here are-
Yeah ⦠the top 10 sites," and keep
feeding them, "Here's something unique.
Here's something unique," right?
Mm-hmm.
And you know what it's like.
If there's an editor, you know,
or, like, say it was the editor of
a particular magazine site, they
see it the first time, "Okay."
They probably ignore it.
They get another one a week
later, "Oh, this is interesting.
These guys are giving me value."
Mm.
Two or three times later, you might get
a reply saying, "Oh, you know, hi, Paris.
This is interesting.
Would you like to maybe appear on
our podcast or write a specific piece
that's, you know, relating to GeoForge?"
You know, that you're just creating
the relationship, um, through value.
Yeah, absolutely.
Interesting that we're talking about
this because I actually have a meeting
next week with a, a PR agency in
the States, and they are actually
struggling because the classic PR
industry is, it's getting tougher.
More and more of their clients Have said,
"Hey, we, we can, we can write these press
releases ourselves now, and, um, we have
media relationships," and they're, they're
getting a little bit squeezed out by AI.
But this is a way to position GEOforge
as a, a solution for PR agencies to
say, "All right, now what you need to
do is go to your client and say, 'Hey,
now we need to build a knowledge base.'
You and your subject matter experts
are gonna sit down and commit
to doing five interviews a week.
Um, you're gonna give us all of your
recorded sales calls, all of your,
uh, all of your customer service logs.
Um, and you're gonna commit to
doing that, and we're gonna build
a robust, uh, knowledge base.
And on the basis of that, we're
gonna generate all this content.
And 20% of the content will get published
on your website, but 80% of it is gonna
get farmed out and pitched out to all
these, um, all these other third-party,
third-party sites, basically."
And b- and it, and it's because
of the information value.
So the value exchange is not I give
you this and, and you give me that.
It's I'm giving you this with this
information value that I can put a
number on, 'cause I'm gonna pitch-
Yeah ⦠the Search Engine Land
editor Specifically saying, "Hey,
we have a proprietary information
gain scoring system in GeoForge.
Here's how it works, if you're interested.
And by the way, what I'm giving
you is a 96, and we only see, we
only see one of these a month."
Yeah.
A 96 out of 100.
Maybe he'll bite on that, you know?
So I think that's, uhâ¦
Well, you've just given me a great way
to frame the meeting with them next week.
Simon, thanks for that.
Um- But then, you know, in, in the
link building world, you know, most
of those guys, like you know, if, if
I wanna put a, an article on a, you
know, D- like DM 70 site or something
like that- Mm ⦠um, we're, we're,
you know, you might be in the hundreds
or if not thousands of dollars just to
pu- publish that one piece of content.
Um- Yeah ⦠as you know, I've done a
lot of work in things like Black Hat
World, and shouldn't really say that out
loud, but, um, Black Hat World, you know,
where there are- We all know it, Simon.
It's, it, it's already out
there ⦠all the naughty boys.
Yeah.
All the naughty boys know all about it.
But, um, this, you know, the whole
AI world and the LLM ranking, uh,
proposition, that's gettingâ¦
There are, like you say,
there's tons of bots writing
content, bots sending content.
Peopleâ¦
I know somebody who owns 10,000 plus
websites, and all he does to rank his SEO
clients is create a, create an article
and publish it across all his own sites.
And, you know, that's- Yeah.
That, and that still works actually,
as long as you ha- you don't leave
too big of a footprint of, uh, all
the same IP addresses or something.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, they've got it worked out.
Yeah.
Don't worry about that.
I met a g- I met a guy recently, uh,
that, that, uh, is doing the same thing.
Just, uh, he, he has about 1,000
websites, but he's, um- He's
doing the exact same thing.
He's interlinking them.
He's, uh, he's duplicating
content across all of them.
And it's for local businesses, like
a lo- local, uh, roofers and- Yeah
solar panel, solar panel installation.
But he's got, um, I don't know, he's got
more than 100 different cities and towns
across the UK, and they're just cloned.
All the websites are cloned, interlinked
with, uh, all the same content.
But- Yeah ⦠he's generating
massive lead gen from all of them.
They're getting into the- But-
into the Google local packs.
But this, this will come to an end
because it will get caught up on.
Yeah.
And what you're talking- At some
point, it's gonna all implode, yeah.
But what you're talking about in terms of
unique content and information gain, I was
talking to somebody who is a professional
copywriter, and six months ago he thought
his world had come to an end, right?
Because all he can see is the
erosion of his profession, because
he sees people just going, "Yeah,
I'm gonna write it with AI."
Um, and people thinking that,
that, you know, the, the
output is good enough, right?
Which is the same scenario we were in,
whatever, 10 years ago or more with Canva
and Photoshop and people just swapping
from using designers to going to Canva
and going, "Yeah, it's good enough."
Well, I think hopefully all of the
LLMs will turn around and say, and I
think they're doing it already, is,
"Right, if you write it with AI, if
it's blatantly plagiarized, if it's
got no real extra value, we're not
really interested," which is what we're
saying in terms of information gain.
Now- Mm ⦠I spoke to that professional
copywriter, and I showed him a piece
of content that was written, it was
written in, uh, Content Forge, and
we put it through Grammarly, right?
Just to see the numbers in terms of was
it written by AI, and it was at 42%.
Now, I have no research that tells
me whether if I wrote a piece and
piece myself, just hand-wrote it,
what percentage that would come out
at, because maybe I'm an AI, right?
I don't know.
Like, maybe I write content in a
way that I shouldn't, so I don't
know what those numbers look like.
But there's definitely room for What
you do to build content to say it is
significantly unique, that's the win
because it in- it is information gain.
Mm-hmm.
That outranks anything in
terms of all AI-generated slop,
as people would put it now.
Mm-hmm.
But the exciting thing was when I
spoke to the guy who's the professional
copywriter, he said, "Well, if I was
to put my expertise into that, it
could go from here to here, right?"
Well, another gain.
It's all about those little
1% wins, and can we justâ¦
Like the PR example here, if we're taking
the best of the best content, maybe we're
then, you know, making that even better
and then f- taking that to the next level
to put it onto the best of the best sites.
'Cause I'm sure a lot of those guys
are just repeating, um, you know,
stuff that's been written in AI, and
they're then therefore risking their
own domain through laziness effectively.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know what?
Uh, I'm gonna quickly read one of
the, uh, the stories that I'm gonna
be soon covering in episode 10, 'cause
it's so relevant to this discussion.
A company called Trendos analyzed 107
million AI answers across ChatGPT,
Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI
Overviews, and these were all, um,
AI answers in the are- in the service
area of IT services, which is huge.
Mm-hmm.
So IT services, 51% among the top
citation sources for IT and solutions
services, 51% were community/UGC.
Let's say that's Reddit, uh, or
Stack Overflow maybe in this case.
Yeah.
47% were independent editorial
reference sources, and just 2% were
brand-owned re- uh, brand-owned shops.
So imagine that the 2% is, that's my
site, that's my branded site where I'm
trying to publish all this content.
2% of the citations were, were brand
websites, 47% were editorial, uh, sources,
and 47%, which I think is a number that's
gonna go down now in this post-Reddit
wreckage- Yeah ⦠was UGC community.
So think about that, and that's
just the vertical of IT services.
The, umâ¦
What that's saying is that actually, um,
you have a much better chance of getting
your brand surfaced in an AI response
via getting featured in someone else's
site, leveraging their authority, rather
than just giving all your information
gain to your own domain, which AI- Yeah
bots don't care about.
They don't really know
about you enough yet, so.
Well- Or- ⦠or they don't,
they, they don't believe that
it could necessarily be true.
That's the problem is, you know, you
can put anything on your own domain.
I could start a domain tomorrow about some
topic that I've got no knowledge about
whatsoever, go and scrape all the content
from the entire web and stick it on there.
That doesn't make me the authority.
Right.
Yeah.
All right, Simon, I think we
probably need to wrap it up.
Uh, but great discussion today.
And- It'd been, it'd be nice to know,
look, if people are watching, drop some
questions in these comments and, you know,
please do share- Yeah, let me check on
that ⦠these episodes to other people.
Before we, before we sign off, I am gonna
take a look Oh, actually, yeah, we do have
a great comment from Ashley Pearson, and
she says, "I've had lots of recent success
with AI search, ChatGPT, et cetera.
However, it's very inconsistent.
It either screams your company name to
prospects or it does not appear at all.
For AI visibility specifically,"
um, I think here's a question,
"where would you put the effort?
Unlinked brand mentions and
citations or traditional backlinks?
Or does the distinction stop
mattering once you're optimizing
for models rather than crawlers?"
Right, so that- Simon, do
you wanna take that question?
That is one of the best
questions that you could ask.
Thanks for that.
Um, I am actually testing that theory.
Unbeknownst to Paris, I am testing that
theory myself, um, on another client,
and I am trying to see exactly that.
Is itâ¦
Can you do it with the backlinks?
Personally, I think, I
might be wrong, right?
Please come back here in three years'
time and reference this conversation
. But, um, I think that if we're just
building random backlinks, it'll have
some effect, but I think you do risk
massive demotion and, you know, you
could be off the edge of a cliff.
Uh, we've seen loads of people just
build content upon content, 500 blogs
a month, blah, blah, blah- Mm-hmm
and then drop off the edge of a cliff.
I think it'll be a balancedâ¦
Like in anything, right?
If you, if somebody said to you,
"If you were to take a new brand
and you have to do everything you
can to get it to the top," there's a
mixture of everything you have to do.
And for years I've talked about the
fact that you need social proof.
You need to be referenced
through all of the trust sites.
You need to have the reviews.
You need to have the
third-party recommendation.
You know, this is what
SEO should have been.
Like, the trouble is most SEO
pros, they just went, "Well, uh,
we'll go and do the onsite and
we'll do a bit of link-building."
And in a lot of industries, that
was enough, and a lot of them
then just fell into the trap of
just doing just enough, right?
Now, you will not get
away with just enough.
You might wanna try and cheat, right?
You might wanna go and build a whole
load of backlinks and, you knowâ¦
But I think what Paris and I
have discussed today in terms
of high-value information gain
published to authority sites with
trust, that's where you gotta go.
Mm-hmm.
But I am testing it.
I am, I have got something that I am
trying to cheat on, so hopefully- Great
⦠we'll be able to repor- report back.
Always good to test and try to
get some empirical evidence.
I do agree with what you said, Simon.
And, um, my first reaction
to this is that why wouldâ¦
Whatâ¦
Today, if you're GEO first, why would you
reach out for a backlink- When it's much
harder to acquire than just a mention.
Because AI- Mm-hmm ⦠we've established,
and I firmly believe AI does not care
about domain authority, domain rating.
So if you're mentioned,
if it's linked, fine.
If it's not linked, also fine.
Um, AI is gonna really look at the,
the topical relevance of where you-
where you're getting mentioned and
what other brands are mentioned
alongside you, uh, to associate you
with the ca- with the right category.
But AI is not gonna look up your,
your domain rating, and it's not gonna
follow that link or even look for a
do follow versus no follow attribute.
I mean, none of that.
So if my success rate for a link outreach
is, is 1% and my success rate for a brand
mention is 5% and they both have the same,
um, value in a GEO first strategy, then
I'm, I'm gonna do mention re- requests.
Yeah.
I'll stop doing link, link requests.
Um, but I, I'm curious to see
what comes back from your, uh,
your research here as well.
All right, Simon, I do think
we probably should wrap it up.
Uh, we still have a, a little bit
of audience, uh, live with us.
I hope you all have
enjoyed the conversation.
It's been great.
Uh, a lot for me to think about with
GEOForge, particularly, uh, where,
how do we keep evolving SiteForge?
SiteForge has been the hardest module for
us to, to get right because I know that
off-site is the most important element
and that is what has to happen inside
of SiteForge and we've gotta figure out
how to, uh, make it impactful because
right now all of our competitors are
doing, uh, AI visibility reporting.
That's just com- pure table stakes now.
Mm.
A lot of them are also doing content
generation, but it's all AI slop.
It's not, uh, it's not
knowledge-based grounded like ours.
None of them, as far as I can tell,
have also included an off-site module
that deals with citation building.
But the fact that we've just done it
doesn't mean any, that, that it's good.
I mean, we have to do it the right way
and I think, um, what you've gotten me
to think about today, Simon, is that
we need to, uh, actually start to use
the, the, the high information game
content coming out of ContentForge
as a currency- Yeah ⦠a bargaining
currency for SiteForge outreach.
100%.
Great chat.
All right, Simon.
Well, I hope you've got a great
weekend a- a- ahead planned and, um,
we will come back to, uh, everybody
on LinkedIn on Tuesday, same time.
All right.
See you then.
Hope everybody has a nice weekend
All right.
All right, that's it