@tjrobertson52

Recently, the internet has become flooded with people who want to sell you GEO or AIs SEO services. These are typically agencies that'll help you get recommended by large language models or rank in AI search. I've been doing SEO for 17 years, and I believe all search will be AI search within a few months, so I've effectively become one of these agencies.

And I know from talking with a lot of business owners that it's hard to tell if you're being ripped off, so I just want to give you all the warning signs I've seen so you can avoid being ripped off by one of these agencies.

The first warning sign is they present GEO as something entirely separate from SEO. The truth is the only way to get recommended by an AI is to first appear in a search engine, and that's because AI uses a search engine to find the information it needs to recommend you or your competitors. The differences are in how AI uses search engines compared to humans.

Now, personally, I think this is moving so fast that it no longer makes sense to optimize for humans. I think we're very near the point where AI is doing all of the searching. But at the very least, your GEO strategy needs to be integrated with your SEO strategy.

If they're presenting it as a completely separate service, that's a red flag to me.

Another warning sign is if they aren't tracking the websites that AI is citing when people are looking for your product or service. There are a lot of services that do this now. Some are better than others.

We use peak that AI. Profounds probably the biggest player in the space.

Services like hrefs will show you how often you appear for common queries, but the prompts people enter in AI are never actually common, which is why I think you need a service to let you track the prompts that you want to track. But why is this so important?

When someone enters a prompt into AI, that AI is then immediately going to do what's called a fan out query. It's going to do three to 12 separate searches in a search engine, then gonna look through 1 to 200 potential results, in site maybe a dozen of them. If your brand is recommended more often than your competitors on those pages that get cited, the AI will recommend your brand.

Otherwise, it'll recommend your competitor.

That's the entire game with AI search. So if you don't know which pages are actually being cited, you really just can't do GEO. So not tracking citations is perhaps the biggest red flag.

The third warning sign is that they talk about GEO as some technical implementation they have to do on your website. Just like SEO, 90% of GEO comes down to content. Content on your website and content on other pages that AI is citing.

If the campaign isn't focused on creating or editing content that gets cited by AI to recommend your brand, they're not really doing GEO.

Now, there are a ton of cool things you can do on your website from a technical point of view to integrate AI in your website or to let AI agents use your website more efficiently. But that's not GEO. That's not gonna help you be recommended by large language models or show up in AI search.