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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 episode
nine of The GEO Show.
We are recording on August twenty-seventh.
I'm Paris Childress, your host,
the CEO and co-founder of GEOForge.
Full self-driving for AI visibility.
Check it out at getgeoforge.com.
All right, we've got a big docket ahead.
Let's get right into it.
First story of the day is about Profound,
and Profound's Summer twenty-twenty-six
Index analyzed nineteen point six
billion real user conversations.
In eighty percent of industries with
cross-market data, at least one European
market had a number one brand that
had never ranked first in the US.
Country-specific domains accounted
for forty-six to fifty-nine
percent of citations where a
new regional leader emerged
So what is this telling us?
Well, global GEO performance is
really a misleading KPI, especially
for companies that operate in
many different regional markets.
So for international companies,
particularly in SaaS, cybersecurity,
I think the advice here is to build
country-specific prompt sets, and that
could include even language-specific
prompt sets and different earned
media strategies and citation
ben-benchmarks per market, rather
than just simply translating your
US content and your US prompts and
assuming that visibility travels.
Next up, we've got a new product
announcement from BrightEdge.
BrightEdge has launched an agent
optimization layer at the CDN level.
BrightEdge has announced Agent Edge,
which detects AI agent requests and
serves reduced machine-oriented content.
BrightEdge says that ninety-seven
percent of the top twenty thousand
websites that it analyzed were not
serving optimized machine formats.
Early customer-- An early customer called
Arm reduced their payload size by about
ninety percent, while Bloomfire reported
a thirty percent lift in direct AI
referrals as a result of using Agent Edge.
And this is coming to
us from GlobeNewswire.
So I think that this is, uh, very,
uh, fascinating because this is all
about optimizing not just for agents'
retrievability of content, but for agents
to take action and to smooth the path
for agents taking action on your website.
So the market is now moving beyond just
can the model cite us towards can the
agent efficiently interact with us?
So this is all about adding agent access,
uh, payload efficiency, documentation,
APIs, and machine-readable delivery
to longer-term technical GEO roadmaps.
And I do think that this
is where it's headed.
We've spoken about this in previous
episodes where we're in the first
wave of AI agents on the web,
where, uh, in the lens of GEO, we're
trying to really optimize an agent's
ability to access and crawl and
understand and ingest our content.
But that's just the first step.
Uh, the next step is gonna be
a- these agents taking actions
on the human user's behalf.
And that is also another whole new
layer of optimization that websites
need to start thinking about.
Now, particularly e-commerce websites,
where agents in the future are gonna be
showing up to shop on behalf of their--
the human users that they represent.
Moving on to the next story,
which also involves Profound.
Uh, Profound and Influencer,
which is a creative agency,
launched Creator-First AEO.
Creator agency-- The creative agency
called Influencer has partnered with
Profound on August twenty-sixth to launch
Creator-First AEO, explicitly connecting
creator content and conversations with AI
recommend-- AI recommendation visibility.
So it's now, uh, GEO/AEO is
very quickly moving into the
sphere of influencer marketing.
So creator marketing, digital PR, and
GEO are effectively converging into
one authority-building discipline.
And one of the big goals or, or one of the
most effective tactics for GEO is to build
third-party citations and build mentions.
And of course, what better way to
do that than to enlist the help of
influencer creatives who can feature,
they can, they can make, uh, videos,
they can also create other types of
assets about your brand and showcase
that in their-- uh, to their audiences.
So I think for B2B, this version is not
necessarily the lifestyle influencers,
but my advice here would be that if you
are pursuing GEO, you should strongly
consider also having influencer marketing
and, uh, creator marketing as one of your
channels for off-site citation building.
So that means mapping YouTubers,
LinkedIn experts, podcasters, analysts,
and other practitioners that the
AI engines are already referencing,
and then try to integrate those into
your earned authority campaigns.
All right.
Next up in the docket Is research from
Kevin Indig and Search Engine Land.
A sixty thousand query study
says that listicles are down,
but they're nowhere near dead.
Kevin Indig an-analyzed sixty thousand
US Google queries and five point three
two million results, and he found that
listicles still appear in the top ten
for about fifty-five percent of queries.
Their share at position one fell
roughly four percentage points between
January and August, but sixty-two
percent of vendor-authorized or
vendor-authored listicles gained an e--
gained estimated organic traffic with
a median gain of thirty-eight percent.
So B2B software was
especially listicle-heavy.
They found sixty-two point five percent
of SERPs contained at least one listicle.
So it does appear that Google
is pruning weaker listicles, but
they're not banning the format.
And this is a pretty lively debate
happening right now in GEO because
listicles are really popular,
especially in B2B and software, SaaS.
Uh, they do tend to dominate, and it
is a very popular tac-tactic to create
your own listicle and then to reach
out to other listicles for inclusion.
Uh, my advice here would be don't
just go out and mass produce a bunch
of, uh, ten best X pages for GEO.
Um, keep the comparison and list
content only where you can provide real
methodology, testing, and differentiate
evi-- differentiated evidence
and credible third-party context.
So listicles are not dead.
Long live the listicles,
but keep them focused.
Next up, top-of-funnel content is holding
up unusually well in cybersecurity
and SaaS A Search Engine Land analysis
compared August twenty twenty-six
to August twenty twenty-five's
estimated traffic across thirty large
publishers in cybersecurity and SaaS.
Every sampled cybersecurity and
marketing sales software domain
improved its top-of-funnel traffic,
while finance, healthcare, legal, and
consumer tech publishers all declined.
The study used Semrush estimates
and a small hand-selected
sample, so it is directional.
Uh, what does this mean?
So we have been long thinking about
the top of funnel really being the most
susceptible to the zero-click trend
and, uh, so much of this top-of-funnel
traffic being taken away by AI
overviews, AI mode, and, and LLMs,
the shift towards LLMs in general.
But what we're seeing that is that
it is more nuanced at the category
level, and AI does not eliminate
informational content equally.
So when you have complex, fast-changing
B2B subjects, uh, I would advise
that you should still create research
depth that, uh, one generated answer
from AI cannot often satisfy in full.
So do not give up on your
top-of-funnel content, especially
if you're in cybersecurity and SaaS.
There is still a place for it,
and there is still a classic SEO
opportunity to get those pages ranked
and get traffic coming into them
Next up, this is about
Claude and Claude Code.
Claude and Claude Code behave
like different search engines.
This is research coming
again from Profound.
They analyzed twenty-four thousand to
one hundred and thirty-five responses.
With web search enabled, Claude,
regular Claude, searched in ninety-three
percent of responses versus only
thirteen percent for Claude Code.
The two products overlap on just
twenty percent of mentioned brands.
Among the observed agent visits,
nearly three-quarters of Claude
Code traffic went to documentation,
informational, and pricing pages
versus just five percent for Claude.
So this is really showing us that Claude
and Claude Code are very different in
the way that they retrieve information.
And the interface and the agent
harness may matter almost as much
as the underlying model itself.
So the advice here would be particularly
for developer-focused SaaS and
cybersecurity products, um, GEO really
does need a rich documentation layer.
Uh, that means precise compatibility,
pricing, API documentation and deployment,
authentication, and architecture facts
that coding agents can retrieve directly
because a lot of, uh, coding agents
that are being used by developers are
also gonna be the same answer engines
that need that type of, uh, rich detail.
So don't forget about that
documentation layer, especially if
you're in SaaS or cybersecurity.
All right, our final story of the day.
There are credible signals but
no confirmation yet that Google's
August spam update was directed
at scaled AI SEO content.
Search Engine Journal documented multiple,
multiple reports of mass-generated
AI sites losing visibility during
the August spam update and connected
the pattern to Google research on
detecting large-scale generated spam.
Google has not said the
update specifically targeted
AI-generated content, though.
Its official policy
remains technology neutral.
AI content is allowed.
Creating many low-value pages
primarily to manipulate rankings
is scaled content abuse.
Let me just read through that again.
On the one hand, AI content is allowed.
It is not penalized, but creating
many low-value pages, most likely
using AI, with the primary intent
to manipulate rankings is, in
Google's mind, scaled content abuse.
So the risk is not using AI here.
The risk is industrialized commodity
publishing with little original value.
So again, we come back to one of
our major themes on this show.
Using AI to generate content is not
bad in and of itself as long as that
content contains high information value.
That means information gain.
Uh, that means proprietary data
with subject matter expert inputs,
first-party evidence, technical
expertise, and genuine editorial review.
So if you can get those inputs into
your content and you still use AI to
help you to build and generate that
content, then more power to you.
That is the way we're doing it
with GEOForge, and I think that
that's the winning formula.
And with that, we'll wrap up episode nine.
Thank you all for listening.
See you on the next
episode of The GEO Show.