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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 exciting
episode of The GEO Show,
brought to you by GEOForge, full
self-driving for AI visibility.
I'm your host, Paris Childress,
the CEO and co-founder of GEOForge.
All right, let's get right
into today's top stories.
OpenAI is turning websites
into agent-operable interfaces
with something called WebMCP.
This is coming to us from
OpenAI's own help center.
ChatGPT's desktop browser now supports
site tools built on WebMCP, an
experimental and proposed standard that
lets websites expose structured actions
directly to AI agents instead of forcing
agents to navigate by clicking and typing.
OpenAI is actively running
WebMCP Developer Challengeâ¦
a WebMCP Developer Challenge and says
supported sites can let agents search,
edit, and complete tasks directly.
Very interesting stuff here.
So now the web is acquiring
a new optimization surface.
Not just can AI find
us, but can AI use us?
So, uh, we're really moving into this,
uh, world now of agent readiness,
and for people who are doing any
sort of technical audits for SEO
and GEO, I think agent readiness
is now a major component of that.
Uh, it dovetails nicely with the theme
we've been covering quite a lot on this
show already, which is that, uh, the
future websites need to be ready to
allow agents to operate efficiently,
and that doesn't necessarily mean having
agents, um, move around like humans
on websites, meaning, uh, scrolling
and, uh, highlighting and copy-pasting
and clicking and typing and filling
out forms the way a human would.
Uh, I do remember when, uh, in the
very early days of e-commerce, there
were actually websites that simulated
a grocery store experience where you
would literally move the, the mouse
and the cursor down a series of grocery
aisles and pick things off of shelves,
which is just absurd to think about.
And that just f- it reminds
me of this actually.
Um, websites should not
be built really, uhâ¦
W-websites that wanna be built for
agent use, uh, shouldn't necessarily
simulate how humans use them.
On to the next story.
A one hundred and seven million
answer study says that owned
websites barely register as top
citation sources for IT services.
So this is coming to us
from Search Engine Journal.
A company called Trendos analyzed
one hundred and seven million AI
answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity,
Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
Among the top citation sources for
IT and solution services, fifty-one
percent were community/UGC, forty-seven
percent independent editorial
reference sources, and just two
percent were brand-owned websites.
Now, keep in mind that this sampling
of a hundred and seven million answers
was specifically for IT services.
So frequently cited B2B sources here
included G2, Gartner, Clutch, Good
Firms, SourceForge, and Slashdot.
So that's kind of what you would expect
probably for IT services, um, and
particularly G2, Clutch, and Gartner.
I think Good Firms basically scrapes and
copies directly from those other sources.
So for B2B technology, uh, GEO is
increasingly an off-site authority
problem, and the answer here is not
necessarily, uh, publishing all of
your content on your website, but
maybe leveraging that information
gain as a valuable resource that you
can use to pitch other websites that
have more authority than yours and,
um, have a better chance of winning
the citations through, uh, partner
publications rather than your own website
All right.
Next up, first-party Google
data shows that AI visibility
is extremely concentrated.
What does this mean?
A ninety-nine-day search console analysis
of an established information site, we
don't know which, recorded three hundred
and sixty-five thousand nine hundred
and ninety-four Google Generative AI
impressions across one hundred and
thirty-six URLs, and just fourteen of
those pages generated roughly eighty-one
percent of page-level AI impressions.
Among pages with one thousand plus
search impressions, the median AI search
visibility ratio was twenty-three percent,
but individual pages varied dramatically.
AI impressions are already included
inside broader search impressions, so
this is not an independent traffic channel
All right, let's unpack this.
There's a well-known concept from the
SEO world, which is called the 90/10
rule, and I think this came from, uh,
Ethan Smith's agency a few years back.
And the basic premise says that 10%
of your blog posts are going to be
bringing in 90% of your traffic, or it
might be 90% of the search impressions.
And I do think we're seeing the same
thing here through this data and through
this study in the world of GEO, that,
uh, only fourteen pages out of 136
URLs generated 81% of
page-level AI impressions.
And keep in mind, these are now the
new Google Generative AI impressions.
So that means effectively that that's
how many times a page shows up as
a cited source in either Google
AI Overviews or in Google AI Mode.
But the same 90/10 rule seems to be
applying here, or maybe it's 80/20.
And what does that mean
practically speaking and for,
uh, for optimization purposes?
I think you do have to accept that
a small minority of the pages that
you publish will have an outsized
impact on your AI visibility.
And the key is to be able to identify
those pages and then extrapolate on
those pages and basically use that as
a roadmap for, uh, replicating that
success and taking that onto other pages.
Um, essentially doing
more of what's working.
And I will plug, uh, GEOForge here
because in SignalForge, which is our
reporting module, we do report on
the statistics at the page level.
So for every page that's published through
ContentForge to a website, we report
on the AI crawl activity for the page,
its, uh, generative AI impressions as
reported in Google Search Console, and
also the referral traffic that it sends.
And yes, we do see a correlation between,
uh, crawl activity and impressions.
So it's clear that the, the, uh, resources
that the, the pages that are getting
the most crawled resources are also most
likely to be winning the impressions.
And the reason we show that is so
that we can identify the cream, uh, at
the top and basically replicate that
success with other pieces of content.
All right, moving on to the next story.
Reddit now appears in 83.9%
of Google's discussions
and forums results.
Ahrefs analyzed 145
million US Google results-
And what they found was discussions
and forums appeared in eleven
point seven percent of them.
Reddit appeared in eighty-three point
nine percent globally within that feature.
Uh, following in distant second and
third place was Facebook and Quora.
So longer and informational queries
were particularly likely to trigger
discussion results, and individ-individual
thread backlink counts showed
little relationship with visibility.
Okay, fine.
What does this mean?
Now, we've just seen that Reddit has
fallen off a cliff in terms of its
overall share of citations in ChatGPT.
What we're talking about
here is something different.
We're talking about Google's discussion
and forum results specifically.
So it's not ChatGPT, and it's not
just Google results in general or
Google AI results, it's Google's
discussions and forums results.
What this means is that, uh, Reddit still
absolutely dominates the forum landscape.
It's effectively like, uh, Goo-Google's
share of search engines, uh, with about
eighty-four percent share globally.
And, uh, but that means that really Reddit
is, is kind of the main game in town.
You can devote some resources to Quora
and to some other, uh, discussion threads,
um, but Reddit is clearly the dominating
player within, uh, UGC right now.
Now, the next story is, is similar
to this, which is that ChatGPT
is sometimes targeting individual
subreddits before retrieval.
A captured ChatGPT search, this is
coming from Search Engine Journal.
A captured search-- a ChatGPT search
explicitly targeted, targeted a
subreddit called, uh, slash what not
app, retrieved forty-eight Reddit
threads among seventy-one results, and
gave Reddit six of eight citations.
Four days earlier, another query
retrieved eighty-four Reddit
pages but cited none of them.
So, uh, Reddit's recent aggregate citation
decline, which we've talked about here
a lot, does not mean that Reddit is off.
Um, source selection appears
to be highly dependent on the
underlying buyer question.
So, uh, I still think that this
adds a little bit more nuance.
Uh, we can't just say overall that
we'll stop working on Reddit or
try to have a presence in Reddit.
It's-- You still really need to
analyze the citations within your
category to see what has happened
with that Reddit citation share.
All right, now we have
the last story of the day.
Frost & Sullivan has formally
entered the GEO advisory market.
Frost & Sullivan launched an AI
brand equity and market presence
advisory service yesterday
using Optivara's GEO platform.
The offering benchmarks brands
against competitors, analyzes how
AI represents them throughout the
funnel, diagnoses external sources
shaping answers, and adds analyst
subject matter expert interpretation.
So this is really an indication of GEO
moving far upstream from just simply
dashboards that show, uh, share of voice.
Uh, this is getting into real
brand strategy and competitive
intelligence territory.
And it is-- it also is proving that
established advisory firms, even
consulting firms, are now entering this
category, uh, GEO consultancy, which
is giving, uh, strategic advice for
what it's finding in LLM responses.
So, uh, the implication here is that
raw share of voice monitoring is
unlikely to remain a premium feature.
In fact, we saw two episodes
ago that it's now even a free
feature in the newest tools.
So the agency, uh, differentiation here,
or the consultancy differentiation here to
add real value on top of a simple share of
voice dashboard is to look at the vertical
expertise, the proprietary knowledge
of the brand, the implementation,
which means the implementation
of deploying content and building
citations with off-site authority,
and last but not least, and probably
most importantly, the pipeline impact.
And that means looking at how many
people that came through your website
and filled out a form for that
first lead generation, answered a
question, "How did you hear about us?"
by saying an AI chatbot, such as ChatGPT.
That can also be confirmed
on the first sales call or
demo call with a salesperson.
That is still the only way
and the best way to determine
true ROI in this new channel.
Ask your customers, "How
did you hear about us?"
Uh, baseline those results, look at
the impact to your sales pipeline,
and then track it from there.
All right.
That's all for episode ten.
Thank you all for listening in, and
we'll see you all in the next one.
Have a great weekend.