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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 another edition of The
GEO Show, brought to you by GEO Forge,
full self-driving for AI visibility.
And I'm your host, Paris Childress.
Let's get into today's top, top stories
for episode 12 Recording on August 30th.
First up, Searchable is
making an aggressive US move
with former Scrunch talent.
UK AI visibility startup Searchable opened
its first US office in Salt Lake City
and hired two former Scrunch employees,
including Scrunch's former sales lead.
Searchable says it has grown from nearly
one thousand customers in May into the
thousands and plans a September product
called Prompt Universe to identify which
prompts brands should actually monitor.
Company growth numbers are self-reported.
All right.
Well, this is interesting from a couple
of angles, but most notable for me is this
product called Prompt Universe, because I
do think that G- uh, GEO software, which
is already a hyper-crowded category,
uh, the s- the fight in this category
is shifting from just tracking prompts
towards deciding which prompts actually
matter, which is a much harder problem.
And we refer to this
internally as prompt discovery.
And I think that this is gonna be really
the secret sauce of a lot of tools
going forward, which is this prompt
discovery or prompt selection methodology.
I think this is gonna become the
critical IP for GEO software providers.
The way that we handle prompt discovery
at GeoForge within SignalForge is
that we have an AI agent that goes
out and, and does a lot of research.
It looks at the brand's website, it
looks through its competitor sites.
It also goes to Ahrefs and does
independent keyword research and tries
to understand what are the highest
demand keywords and how do, how does
that intent translate into prompts.
And then, of course, it's looking at
competitors because a lot of these
prompts are also prompts that include
things like competitor X alternatives
or competitor A versus competitor B.
Uh, these are very common
bottom-of-the-funnel prompt types that
are typically very high intent, that
have an above average, uh, click-through
rate from mentions and citations, and
a much higher conversion rate because
it indicates people are really at the
end of the journey where they're, uh,
comparing known products head to head.
But in any case, prompt discovery is,
I think, is one of the hardest things
in, uh, AI visibility right now, and
the companies that get this right are
really gonna be the winners, I think.
On to the next story.
Seventeen thousand four hundred
AI citations produced just
one hundred and seventy s- one
hundred and sixty-seven clicks.
So this is from Wito, who reported
Microsoft Copilot cites, cited
it's seventeen thousand four
hundred times Across one hundred
and twenty-seven pages over three
months, while Bing generated only
one hundred and sixty-seven clicks.
So that's basically one hundred and
four citations per one single click.
So citation volume here is
clearly not correlated, or
it's really not a traffic KPI.
Um, this is an important lesson 'cause GEO
success should never really be positioned
as citation growth or citation volume
because it still, a massive citation
volume still does not deliver traffic.
So what's important is to tie
visibility, such as mentions and
citations, to downstream branded search,
assisted conversions, AI-assisted
conversions via self-reported
attribution, and then finally demos
and pipeline that result from that.
So really that full journey.
But looking at citation volume alone
is not even a, a good predictor
of any sort of click volume.
Next up, AI crawler traffic can
swing violently without anything
changing on the site This is from a
single-site field study on August 29th.
Across 36 days of server logs, AI tools
recap saw its ChatGPT crawl index fall
from one hundred to thirty-one, while
Claude rose to two hundred and forty-two.
Google remained near baseline.
The site says nothing material--
that nothing materially changed
technically during that period.
What is this telling us?
Uh, AI visibility is extremely volatile.
This is not at all like SEO
search rankings that tend
not to move around too much.
In the SEO days, if you got a top three
ranking, you were able to defend that
and stay there in some cases for years.
Uh, but AI visibility, particularly
with citation appearances,
is extremely more volatile.
So it's important to really to monitor
the crawler mix by engine because the,
the volatility also is very different
across ChatGPT, Claude, Google.
So it's important to, to monitor this by
crawl mix-- monitor the crawler mix by
engine, and avoid interpreting a sudden
ChatGPT decline as a big problem until you
see that other crawlers follow suit and
that you check other technical signals.
All right, next up.
A new GEO entrant is trying to standardize
the category around three variables.
This new entrant is called ksmmodel.ai.
They launched an assessment framework
built around three variables.
Number one, structured extractability.
Number two, entity salience.
And number three, citation authority.
With metrics such as share of model and
entity recognition rate, the methodology
originates with its founder and has
not yet been independently validated.
So what's happening here?
Uh, GEO vendors are increasingly
competing on framework ownerships,
not merely data collection
So these different frameworks are
emerging, um, and a defensible
agency framework really needs to have
evidence that ties its recommendations
and its philosophy to outcomes,
not just having another proprietary
zero to 100 score for something.
Now, that said, we have some proprietary
scoring, uh, first of which is called
information gain score, which is a, a
score from zero to 100 that measures
the degree to which a, uh, piece of
knowledge that is uploaded into our
knowledge base, Baseforge, contributes
net new, uh, knowledge to LLM crawlers.
Um, but beyond that, we are starting
to develop our own, uh, framework,
which is based on this whole
principle of information gain.
And I think what the framework that makes
us most unique in our space is that we
insist on grounding all generated content
from a knowledge base so that it delivers
high information gain to AI crawlers.
So this is, this is really our framework,
and I do think it's important for the
leaders in this space to have a unique
opinion and a, a unique framework
that they build their software around.
All right, next story.
Link building, digital PR,
and GEO are collapsing into
one earned authority motion
Search Engine Land argues that 2027
link building should move away from link
volume toward earned stories, original
data, journalist relationships, brand
mentions, and placements that are capable
of influencing both people and LLMs.
So the historic organizational
wall between SEO link building and
PR, uh, really makes less and less
sense in an AI search environment.
That wall is starting to collapse, and
it really makes a lot of sense here,
um, because PR, uh, digital PR is,
you know, one of the best ways to get
high quality citations, third-party
citations And I think now it's, it's
important to really think of this
all as one activity, uh, one combined
earned authority program where you're
simultaneously optimizing for links, for
third-party mentions, and to try to reach
referral audiences and AI citations.
So I do think that particularly,
uh, digital PR agencies and
link-building agencies are going
to kind of merge together, uh, into
what are now gonna be GEO agencies.
Next up, more than one hundred major
companies are warning that AI-enabled
cyberattacks are about to accelerate.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft,
Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Okta,
Fort-Fortinet, and others have signed
a joint call for stronger cyber
defense, warning that AI-enabled
attacks will become more widespread
and sophisticated in coming months.
This is coming from TechCrunch.
The interpretation here is that, uh,
website security is increasingly-- it
increasingly belongs inside of GEO risk
management because compromised sites
can create spam and redirects, they can
poison and create false information that
directly damages retrieval and trust.
So for cyber clients especially, I
think that a comprehensive GEO audit
or, uh, on-site GEO health monitoring
should include technical SEO, classic
technical SEO, uh, like, uh, crawl
accessibility and, uh, information
architecture, plus AI crawler monitoring,
which we've talked about in previous
episodes, making sure that the right,
uh, bots are able to access the site,
but the malicious bots are excluded.
Plus website security, which is mentioned
here, and brand integrity monitoring.
Because if, if a site gets hacked,
of course, that definitely is gonna
impact its, uh, brand integrity, which
flows downstream into how an AI might
answer questions about that brand.
Next up, former Google AI Search leaders
have raised forty-three million dollars
with Zscaler as a customer and investor.
DeepCogito, I guess it's pronounced
Cogito, C-O-G-I-T-O, raised forty-three
million dollars in Series A, taking its
total funding above fifty-six million.
Its founders previous-previously
led Gemini post-training and
product work for Google AI Search.
Cybersecurity company Zscaler
participated as both a customer
and a strategic investor.
All right, why is this interesting?
Well, enterprise AI is increasingly
using post-trained models f- on
proprietary company knowledge, uh,
rather than one general public model
So proprietary knowledge bases,
which is the core of GEOForge.
So to take a step back, the, the entire
premise of GEOForge is that you build
content that is grounded in a proprietary
knowledge base, and until you get that
proprietary knowledge base built and
robust enough, um, you don't even bother
trying to generate any other type of
content because it'll just be AI slop.
So here, proprietary knowledge bases
could become valuable, not just for
public GEO, like in the case of what
we're doing with GEOForge, but also
as training and evaluation assets
for clients' own AI systems that
they will develop for themselves.
I do think starting with enterprise
companies, and more and more they'll
be building internal AI systems, and
in order to do that, it needs to start
with a comprehensive knowledge base.
Next up, different generations
are already choosing different
AI discovery environments.
YouGov data reported by Search Engine
Land-- I'm sorry, Search Engine Journal
shows ChatGPT remains the preferred
AI tool across every age group.
But Claude preference reaches ten point
six percent among Gen Z versus one
point four percent among Boomers plus.
Copilot shows the reverse
pattern, performing considerably
better with older users.
So this is one of the first times
we've looked at LLM preference
through the lens of age.
Um, but again, AI visibility can't just
be, uh-- you, you really can't separate
AI visibility from audience composition,
and it against-- it again brings up the
importance of, uh, ICP development and
persona development, and that includes age
for some different brands and products.
So engine prioritization, let's
say for SaaS, it should reflect the
personas who are buying the product.
So developers may warrant having
heavier Claude measurement, while
corporate users, uh, you might
wanna lean more towards Copilot.
But one thing is for sure that
everybody is using ChatGPT.
All right, the last story of the day.
Fresh Korean data reinforces that
there is no universal Reddit strategy.
This is a small observational study
from RankIt AI, who tested thirty-three
Korean market purchase intent responses
containing four hundred and ninety-two
citations and found zero citations from
Reddit, Naver Blog, Tstory, or Namu Wiki.
Roughly eighty percent came from
vendor and official sources.
Okay, what is this telling us?
Why, why are we bringing up a
Korean Reddit story today here?
Uh, the broader point here is that the
source ecosystem, citation source
ecosystems can differ radically
by market, by language, um,
query class, and LLM engine.
So if you are running an international
GEO program, um, you really
have to parse out each market.
Um, you need to map, uh, local
sources for each country.
Um, you can't just simply, uh, translate
a US Reddit/digital PR playbook because
it's not gonna be localized enough.
All right.
That's it for today.
Thank you for tuning into episode 12,
and we'll see you all in the next one