Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and SEO share most of their tactics but are measured on different goals: SEO on rankings and organic traffic, GEO on how often AI answers mention or cite a brand. In this debate, Paris Childress argues that the different goal makes GEO a separate discipline, while David Quaid of Primary Position argues it is still SEO.
Is GEO just SEO under a new name? Paris Childress, founder of Hop AI and co-founder of GEOforge, says no. David Quaid of Primary Position says yes. The two debated it on The Edward Show, hosted by Edward Sturm, just after brightonSEO, and agreed on more than either expected: the tactics overlap heavily. Where they split is what those tactics are for.
Paris's position is that a discipline is defined by its goal and its scoreboard. SEO exists to rank pages and earn measurable clicks. GEO exists to position a brand in the mental model of AI so that it gets recommended in the right conversations, which makes it brand marketing rather than performance marketing.
Not according to Paris, because they are scored differently. His analogy: powerlifting and bodybuilding use the same gym and much of the same training, but one is judged on how much weight you lift and the other on how you look. David's reply is that SEO was never about clicks; to him it means visibility in any engine, so GEO is simply SEO applied to a new interface.
"The goal of GEO is not to rank anything anywhere." Paris Childress
Share of voice. Paris contrasts an SEO report, built around organic traffic and conversions, with a GEO report that counts how often a brand is mentioned or cited in AI answers versus its competitors. David says his own reporting focuses on leads and business inquiries rather than traffic, and that rankings are just one input.
Paris argues yes: AI corroborates a brand through mentions on reputable third-party sites, so GEO outreach chases mentions whether or not they carry a link. David's counter is that the sites AI cites, such as G2 and Capterra, are there because they have done SEO well for years. The debate also covered:
This is where the two disagree most. Paris argues SEO kept two decades of investment because clicks made ROI attributable, and that GEO budgets lag because there is no click to measure. David says SEO attribution was already broken by consent opt-outs, return visits and multi-session journeys, and that GA4 cannot model the gap for organic traffic. Paris points to GA4's modeled conversions as a partial fix.
David's answer is Bing first: Bing Webmaster Tools for the queries behind AI answers, and Microsoft Clarity prompt reports for share of voice in Copilot. He also argues that LLMs are as easy to manipulate as early-2000s search, with exact match domains as his example.
This debate originally aired as episode 1,196 of The Edward Show with Edward Sturm and is republished on The GEO Show with thanks.
Neither side moved. Both did agree that the overlap in tactics is real, which leaves the question this show keeps returning to: what are you actually measuring?
We are joined by Paris Childress and David Quaid. We're discussing, maybe doing a little bit of debating, GEO versus SEO. And, Paris, you said to me over email, you said, "Generative engine optimization and search engine optimization are very different, contrary to popular opinion. GEO is not performance marketing, it's brand marketing. While some tactics may overlap, GEO does not share SEO's primary goals, namely ranking pages and driving traffic.
GEO is fundamentally about positioning your brand in the mental model of AI. I could go on much longer, but let's save it for your audience." And then I invited you on for a debate against David, who believes SEO and GEO are the same things. And you, you, Paris, were gracious enough to accept, and with a great attitude, I will add. So I wanna start by thanking you for stepping up to this podcast, Paris.
Thanks for having me. I think you nailed my argument already before we even get started, but, let's, let's mix it up. I'm ready. Could you expand o- on it a little bit? Yeah. I just came from brightonSEO. I'm still here in Brighton, actually. And of course, no surprise that the biggest SEO conference in Europe is now all about GEO. And of course, the natural inclination is for people to think about GEO as a evolution of SEO, or in some cases, maybe just another layer that you, that you stack on top of an SEO foundation.
And I think, it, it l- it makes logical sense, yes. But as you said, Ed, it is fundamentally different because the goals are different. It is a different discipline. I believe it's brand marketing because it is about positioning a brand in AI's mental model rather than ranking pages and measuring, clicks and traffic to those pages. So that, that's your, that's your statement, right? How do you, how do you support that statement, is, is what I think, Adrian is asking for.
How do I support the statement? Well, I, I've now been immersed enough in GEO to know that, first of all, LLMs aren't really giving you many clicks. So we're, we're in a zero-click world now, and SEO was all about clicks. I mean, that, that was how you measured- I think, I think that's rather superficial … that was how you measured success was by traffic. I think that's a bit superficial, right?
I think you, you said that SEO and GEO are fundamental, and that you've got to position a brand inside the mental hubris of an LLM. But that, that's a statement. That's not a fact, right? So you're, you're saying it's different, but how, how have you, how have you proven that it's different? You're, you're saying it's not the same as SEO, it's not the same as an evolution or stacked upon SEO.
David, David, I wanna, I wanna… I'll, I'll ask you, how do you see GEO and SEO being the same thing? sure. So it, really simple. LLMs are at a synthesis layer up, above searches. So before you would do a search, you would get 10 results or 20 results. You would go page to page, and AI Overviews instead fetch those results, synthesize them, and give you a single page back.
and for a lot of users, that's a big shortcut. the way it synthesizes and the way it uses information gain and the way it uses… It drops, say, information that's wrong, for example. So for example, if you were searching for something very super narrow, it can understand that some of the pages are talking about a different topic, and it can weigh in on the one you need, or vice versa.
If one of the pages disagrees, it can break out the disagreement and argument. So it saves you having to, to read 10 pages, but it's ex- exactly the same thing, right? an LLM has a body of knowledge that gives it vocabulary, understanding, understanding of, of concepts, but it's a… It still requires a search engine to go and fetch the details on something to answer a question or a prompt or to have a discussion with you if you're asking it how to do something.
So for example, you ask it, "How do I change my microphone for a podcast?" And it will either… You know, if you're saying, "I'm, I'm using a Mac. I've got a podcast coming up. I want to change my microphone," it will look at how do you go in and change which device you're using or how to help you set up your device so that it's ranking. and it does that by querying an index.
Right now, the world's largest indexes are Google, Bing, and now we're seeing Common Crawl and Exa, being used slightly. I think what, what you've described there, David, are mechanics of search retrieval, which i- isn't basically what happens, 100% of the time when you, when you put a prompt into an LLM. either it's, you get an im- immediate answer from its training data set where it's, basically predict… It's gonna predict the answer immediately and serve that up from its training data, which does not involve any type of search retrieval.
Or option two is it, it goes through a query fan-out process. It conducts search retrieval, like a user would do, but in much, much greater, and synthesizes what it finds into the answer. Those are two different mechanical processes that happen when a user initiates a prompt and, and gets the answer. And what you've described also so far, I, I would classify as tactics. But if we're talking about the discipline of SEO versus the discipline of GEO, I think that they are two different disciplines because they fundamentally have different goals The goal of SEO is to rank a page so that you can get a measurable click.
The goal of GEO is not to rank anything anywhere. I mean, you do need to be indexed, so that you can be retrieved in the cases where retrieval matters. But you're not trying to rank a page, you're trying to, train AI on your knowledge via passages of knowledge or chunks of claims that you're making about your brand, with the goal of getting AI to better understand your brand so that it will recommend your brand in the right conversations so that your brand can become more popular.
And that's brand marketing, it's, it's not performance marketing. And what I would ask you, David, I'd, I'd, I'd put this question to you. Do you think that powerlifting and bodybuilding are the same things? So I, I'm not interested in a straw man. I'm going back to your definition of SEO, which I completely disagree with. To me, search engine optimization is about reverse engineering a search engine for visibility.
that could be in YouTube, that could be in TikTok, and it's about getting visibility. It doesn't necessarily have to be for clicks. Clicks are one of the measurable outcomes of SEO, but that, but that isn't SEO, right? SEO is like, how do I get visible in an engine? And to me, this, the, the mechanisms to be visible in generative, search are the same. In other words, you have to do the same things to get into generative search.
So- Mm-hmm … I think maybe the… It's nothing to do with body lifting and power building, right? That's… It's an interesting side analogy, but it's not in any way complete or sophisticated enough of a comparison. I think where it comes down to is you said that, that, that GEO… You, you were saying that I was describing the query fan-out process, which I was, because LLMs have a limited amount of memory.
They have to mem- remember all of these tokenized sentences and paragraphs. They have to remember what they're taught in their training. That's much, much, much smaller than the World Wide Web at large. Everybody's brand isn't going to be stored in that tiny, tiny little body of knowledge of a couple of billion parameters. So if you have a way of getting into that corpus of training that's pre-built and trained offline, w- we'd love to hear it.
Um- Yep … but 90% of, of, of prompts are going to rely on a query fan-out for 90% of things because of the memory size allocation issue Yeah, yeah, you're probably right about the percentage. The majority of prompts are gonna trigger a, a search retrieval process. Query fan-outs. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, let me just, let me flesh out that analogy a little bit more. It might be a crude analogy, but, I think it drives home my point.
Power lifting has a very different goal than bodybuilding. The ultimate goal for, and I'm sure that you know this, powerlifting is about, getting a certain amount of weight up and, it's, it's scored by, by weight. I mean, the KPI here is how much weight you can lift. Whereas bodybuilding, you're… It's more about the, the visibility. It's how it makes you look. And those tactics and the way that you train for bodybuilding and powerlifting are very, very similar in the same ways that the tactics of SEO are very similar to the tactics of GEO.
But the KPIs and the goals are fundamentally different, which is why I argue that the disciplines are different, because the dis- the disciplines have to do with the goals and the KPIs, not the tactics. The goal of, of SEO, and, and I would ask you, David, I, I presume that when you present a client with a, a dashboard for SEO, you're showing them-- You're not showing them rankings 'cause that's a vanity metric.
You're showing them traffic. People invest in SEO so that they can get organic traffic. And when you show a dashboard for GEO, you're showing a sh- a share of voice metric. You're s- You're saying, "This is how many times your brand appeared i- in a mention or in a citation versus your competitors." You're not showing rankings and you're, you're not showing traffic. So in that sense, the discipline is more aligned with the goal, the end goal, not with the tactics.
And the end goal is very, very different here. So now we know that you don't know how I present to my clients, which is understandable because you've never been there, and I don't know why you were taking a presumptive guess at it. However, if I want to get my clients to, and/or myself, let's just deal with myself, right? If I want to get visible for [the other label], I will look at what are the query fan-outs, and I will know that I need to rank and be visible in those query fan-outs, right?
Why is that? Because that's who's going to be cited back, right? If I'm not visible in those query fan-outs, if I'm not being visible when Google or Bing or ChatGPT or whatever does a search, I'm not going to be visible. So I need to know what do I need to be vi- visible for. And the only place I can actually get a share of voice is from Microsoft Clarity from Bing, or which is connected to Bing data, right?
That's not really available in any other tools that I'm aware of. whereas that is available in search, right? Because I can see how many different queries my competitors rank for. I can see the total number of queries that are available that people search for, and I can determine what my percentage visibility is, and I do the same for LLMs Then when you, when you do present a dashboard for SEO to your clients, what, what's on the dashboard?
Okay, but the dashboard is the, is, is just what I'm reporting on, right? it has nothing to do with the way, in SEO and GEO is different. My, my dashboard and every other [the other label]'s dashboard is gonna be different. I'd like to focus on how you get companies- But does it include organic traffic? It might do. I, I, I don't look at organic traffic. I'm not interested in organic traffic.
Um- For SEO? It's n- not, not in our, that's not in our dashboards. We're looking at leads and inquiry in business for the client. Oh, that's e- that's even better. And those leads are coming through clicks on organic, through organic traffic. So you have a- Not necessarily. If you come through- You have a ranking, you have a click, and then you have a lead. Not nec- A- again, you're playing a game of, like, what does David do, and it's not really interesting to the audience.
What we're talking about is how is GEO and SEO different, and what you're trying to do is present a straw man where your definition of SEO is different or your definition of an SEO dashboard is different. I don't feel that's very interesting or relevant to the audience. What we're here to figure out is how do people become visible for an LLM? So somebody says, "Look, I need to be visible when people are searching for an SEO consultant or an [the other label] consultant or SaaS applications or whatever." And so that's where we'd like you to begin, or where I'd like you to begin on behalf of the audience, is what is d- what is it that you're doing that's mechanically difficult or tactically difficult or strategically difficult, however you want to word it, that you don't do in SEO, that you do in GEO, that gets you cited in GEO?
I can give you one example, which is not about optimizing your content for query fan-outs or keywords in this case. It's about I've never optimized content. So if you stop guessing what I do, that might make, might be very helpful Okay. I'll, I'll take another example of a tactic since you're, you're mainly focusing on tactics but not on goals and outcomes. The tactic of g- of getting visibility in GEO is primarily about getting your brand mentioned in reputable places around the web so that AI can corroborate your, your brand as a, as an entity so that it can have trust, and it gets that trust from reputable third parties that mention your brand.
In SEO, that is links. basically if- Yeah … wait, let me just finish the point, please. if you have… Basically, when, when you're trying to build that cor- corroboration in, in an SEO world, you're trying to get links so that you can flow the domain authority of the site that's linking to you into your domain, and that, that is not really the same way that you would do that, that sort of outreach for GEO because you don't care as much about links.
If you get a link, it's, it's fine because it will help your SEO, but you're more focused on getting brand mentions so that AI can see your brand corroborated by, by that, that site that links to you, that brand that links to you. So again, it's more about brand association, not links passing, link juice from one, from one page to another, basically. So you're talking about PageRank, right?
So I'm, I'm not talking about PageRank. so for example, there's a huge discipline within SEO called ORM, and ORM has nothing to do with, optimizing your content. It's about optimizing your brand name across the internet so that the most authoritative pages that are returned talk about your brand in a way that you can control that narrative, right? which is nothing about links. You don't need a backlink, but if you might want to get news articles, you might wanna do press releases, you may wanna build up wherever the most authoritative domain's about your name and sites discussing your name or potential queries that will bring up your name.
And so- Mm I think, yeah, PageRank is a, is an element of SEO, and it's certainly an element of GEO because how do those sites appear that, AI's going to cite? AI doesn't have a different way of assessing sites. I think that's one of the big misunderstandings in the GEO community, is that AI is built as a sort of brand recognition tool, which is just completely untrue.
Neither, neither Google nor ChatGPT are brand recognition tools. They're built as engines to understand content that's out there. It's easy for marketers, and I can see why GEO wants to push that narrative, as flawed as it is, to say, "Look, it's about LLMs are a brand understanding." but they're not. They're trying to understand all kinds of things like travel, destinations, food. Branding is just an e- a way of looking at SEO or GEO for a marketer and, and, and for marketing purposes, but that's not how they're built or designed.
ChatGPT isn't going around the world trying to assess every single brand, and I think that's a danger that, that's being pushed as well. they're not-- They don't have reputable sources, right? Because not every brand is recommended by the same sets of websites. You might be on… We had a, another person try to start talking about Better Business Bureau because to them that was a trustable area, right?
But that-- being on B- Better Business Bureau doesn't mean you're a trustable resource. They also li- list a lot of people who break the rules, right? Being an LLC doesn't mean that you're a legit business, right? Most companies that are sued are LLCs, right? Because an LLC is a firewall between a user and a company. So, you don't know what a, an LLM is gonna base its research on until it does a query fan-out, which it gets from an end index, which up to now for ChatGPT has been Bing and Google.
Now it's more Bing, right? Okay. I wanna come back to your point about online reputation management that you mentioned. Mm-hmm. 'cause it, that's, that's another whole topic here. I, I don't necessarily think that that is a, a direct part of SEO. I've always thought, and, and that's, I, my recollection of ORM is that you, you do that when you have bad PR that's outranking your good PR in Google, and the goal of ORM is simply to just bury the, the negative press by getting positive press to outrank it and push the negative results down.
And it's a very, very specific, it's a very specific strategy that, I think isn't necessarily part of, of SEO. again, I would come back to the goals here. So how, how does ORM work then? ORM works by getting, typically by getting pages, building links to pages that mention your brand in a positive way where you have positive PR, so that you can push down negative stories that are, that are outranking them.
I don't have any, I don't have any negative stories, right? But there's, I, I, I manage my own ORM. If, if, if people are searching for my name, I want them to find me, right? So I have- Yeah … more than 10 sites. I, I don't publish good news. I just maintain that when people are looking for me, that they find the best podcasts about me or the best information about me, or my brand, right?
And that's a continuous process. Yeah, that's, that's GEO, by the way. That is GEO. I think ORM- I, I- … classic ORM is- I do, that is- … mu- much more similar to GEO than SEO … I think you're hijacking a term to suit your narrative, which is clever. I, I, I do admire it. You, you brought up, you brought up ORM. I'm just saying that it is- But O- more similar … but OR- ORM has been with us for, for 20 years, right?
It has, yeah. Yeah, and I've been sailing ORM for 20 years. my, my opinion of ORM is that you only do ORM if you need to bury a negative story. I think you're- But otherwise you're doing GEO basically today. I think you're- It, it's- … you're saying that a, a, an SUV is not a car because it's higher up off the ground I don't understand that at all.
In, in other words, to me, an SUV is a car because it has four wheels and a steering wheel and an engine. to me, ORM is SEO because there are millions of pages competing with each other, and I have to do certain things to make those pages appear in a search index, and that's SEO. But you're trying to pretend that now ORM is GEO, even though ORM has been around with us since the very earliest days of SEO.
You then try to reclassify through the optic of bad PR, which is a, a terrible argument, and then you try to steal it and say it's actually just GEO, but it's not. It's very much about controlling how pages show up, and it shares all of its activities and how it's done with SEO. I think you're fo- trying to pretend that, oh, well, GEO has a different outcome 'cause I don't necessarily care if my page ranks or not.
I just need to be on someone else's page. And I'm saying SEO is a better, more holistic place to look at it because not only can I control my pages, therefore I don't have to pay someone else's pages, which could be more intermittent or fluid and not present all the time, and I have better control. But at this end of the day, how those pages appear in a search index are based on the same fundamentals, whether it's your page or not.
Well, yeah, if, if, the R in ORM is, is about reputation, and I think that that is much more similar to GEO, a brand's reputation, than SEO, which I, I again think SEO has a goal of getting measurable organic traffic- Give me an-- Give me an example of a site- … and GEO doesn't share that goal. Give me a si- an argu- Give me an example of a site that shows up in-- That, that you think clearly differentiates or delineates SEO from GEO.
So you're trying to make a, a website or a brand appear. You're gonna avoid using any SEO tactics or techniques. What, what are you doing? Show me what kind of sites we'd, we'd, we'd, we'd be, be talking about. Well, let's say I might wanna lean heavily on review sites if I'm doing- Okay. Can you name any? … GEO or, or, um… Sorry? Could you name one? Could you name one as an example?
Yeah. Let's say I'm a B2B SaaS brand, and, probably I would lean very heavily on getting G2 reviews- Okay, great … in G2. So- Yeah … I've met the head of SEO at G2 in New York. How, how do you- how is G2 so prominent across all of these search queries? What is it that they're doing? There's like a name for it. It's not ORM. It's like, there's like a word, begins with like an S, that they do.
They have a team that's been doing that for a long time that gets backlinks from other sites that makes them authoritative so that they rank in search engines so that LLMs can cite them. It's called? It's called? It's called? You lost me. So what, what is it that G2- I, I know you're trying to, you're trying to equate ORM with SEO, but we should- No, no, I'm not … we should drop the ORM discipline … I'm trying to… No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm- I haven't heard that in like 10 years anyway … Paris, Paris, hang on a second. That's, that, that's really, that's really disingenuous. I just said it begins with an S. What is it that G2 do to make sure that their site ranks all the time, that it is cited by LLM? It's called… They get backlinks from other sites, right? They build content. Yeah. It's SEO- Yeah.
It's called SEO … to build backlinks- Thank you and ranking. There we go. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So they do- But- So- No, no … so they use- My, my point was not how is G2 doing SEO for G2. I'm saying how does a software brand do SEO versus GEO. Right. They do, they do GEO by getting G2 reviews. They do SEO by getting links from other places because they wanna rank- But you just- their pages.
They wanna get traffic … you just said they're completely different, but you just said that you want to get quotes from G2. So what if G2's not ranking then? Then what do you do? Do you use Gartner? If it doesn't matter if G2's talking about GEO here. If, if I'm a software brand- I'm talking about G2. Mm-hmm. Yeah. If I'm a software brand- But what if, what if the- … and I wanna be visible- But what if that- … I would get G2 reviews even if it meant that those weren't links and those weren't necessarily directly gonna push up my rankings.
I didn't ask about links. I said, what if G2 had- were covering a software segment that it didn't rank for, and it was Capterra that was ranking instead of G2? What would you do then? Well, what, what is my goal here? Is it to … Is it a GEO goal with brand recognition or is it an SEO goal with rankings? To me it's a s- to me it's a search visibility goal.
I want to be visible as a b- as a brand. So I said G- the G2 page isn't showing. Capterra is showing. Mm-hmm. So what, what, how does your GEO strategy change? I assume you want to then get visibility on Capterra. Of course I would, I would try to get reviews in Capterra and G2 regardless- Okay … of which ones are ranking because I know that- But why those- … AI is gonna read those reviews and- But it doesn't read those reviews until it comes to a query fanout.
It doesn't That's what I'm trying to say. You keep relying on this idea that it, that they're going out and they're investigating every single brand and they've built this huge brand database That exploring for every copy of G2, well then how… So then it must be done in pretty fair act. They're, they're looking for- Hang on a second AI is looking for evidence that your brand- No, it's not … they're looking to corroborate claims that you're making.
That's a claim that you- that's a claim that you're making that you- we'll get to later, 'cause that's even easier to break down. What, what you're s- what you're trying to avoid is that both Gartner, which owns Capterra, and G2 are doing SEO and that's why they rank. And they're very, very often ranked with SaaS products, and that's why you named them. Whether it's about links or not, they only get there through SEO.
If you take other sites that you haven't mentioned that also do product reviews, you didn't mention those because they don't rank because their SEO isn't very good. Mm-hmm. And that's why it's an SEO discipline. If you wanna take apart the argument that they're out there looking for trustable sites, G2 and Capterra are no more trustable than each other. They're just reviews. They're just a collection of opinions of other people's opinion So is the main disagreement that ORM and SEO are not the same things?
Is that what we're arguing about? I think it was a bad analogy- Ca- I, I think, I think, yeah, a, a good question is, like, what are, what are you both doing to get covered in large language models? Maybe th- maybe there's a lot of crossover. Yeah, I, I think that's, that's exactly the point, is that in e- every site that's in a large language model is either doing SEO by itself or is using SEO by proxy by someone else, which is what Paris is saying.
And I think maybe I'm rushing ahead in assuming that Paris thinks that they're building a database of brands, which he obviously can't admit to because we've already established that they don't have the memory to do that. but clearly what's happening is that when you search for a product category and a recommendation, the sites that are doing SEO rank highest, and that then leads on to the brands that they cite or mention being recommended by the AI.
And that's gonna change- Well, let, let me- And if, if the, if the pages- Let me just jump into that point in the, if the pages in that query fan out change and they're no longer Gartner, Capterra, but they're now just straight competitors, then Gartner and Capterra's content doesn't matter. let me, let me, let me just, follow on a quick point that you made about the rankings.
I think what you said, David, is that you need to rank high. The higher you rank, the more likely it is that- I, I didn't say that … AI is gonna discover you and sy- I- … synthesize. I didn't say rank high But if the, the goal, even if your goal is to be discovered, it's… There's a lot of evidence now, and I've, I've covered this a whole lot on, on my podcast, that your rankings, your SEO rankings don't correlate to your GEO visibility, your AI visibility, whether it's mention rate or citation rate.
As long as you get indexed and you can be found through this process, you could be on page two or page three but have the best answer. Which process? You could be synthesized in. Wait, which process? Mm-hmm. GEO. Okay. So, so again, what, what is the difference in the GEO process and the SEO process? The difference is that I'm not chasing links, number one, and also I don't care about rankings That's not a difference.
I said, what is it the difference that you're doing in GEO that you're not doing in SEO? I'm, I'm building brand mentions. I'm not chasing links first and foremost. Where are you building those brand mentions? Just randomly across the internet? No, I'm building them… Well, it depends on the, on the industry, but let's put the reviews aside- So other pages- … and the software industry aside … other pages, other pages that rank, right?
Yeah. I, I think that you would be more pursuing a classic PR strategy of getting your content published by reputable parties or getting mentioned in, in some cases even getting mentioned in a listicle, but you're not pursuing a link. If you were to pursue that approach without a link- So being mentioned in a listicle… How has being mentioned in a listicle- Mm-hmm … trustable, authoritative source? I mean, anyone can build, build and publish listicles.
Right. But they're, listicles still are dominating a lot of, a lot of citations in LLMs. There's a lot of evidence for that. They, they are. Why? That's, well, that's because they're retrievable and, but they're, but they're not linked But any, any page is retrievable, right? It's not, it's not because of a listicle format. We, we, we stopped using the list- well, actually we almost never use the listicle format.
It, it's, it's not the listicle format, right? AI isn't out there indexing every listicle in the hopes that it's going to somehow provide a trustworthy list of, of, of brands Yeah. Well, listicles provide a, a, a shortcut for AI, and a lot of times the listicles are self-serving, and I think it's not- Who's- It's not good for, for GEO. Right, but anyone can- The fact is many listicles are- Anyone can publish a- Mm-hmm … anyone can publish a list, right?
B- being in a list isn't a sign of authority, right? I agree with that, but unfortunately LLMs are citing listicles quite a lot now- Are they citing listicles- … because it's a shortcut for them or are they citing pages that, that rank? Probably not. No. In other words, if I, if I just publish it- They're, they're getting listicles because it's, it's just where there are lists of brands where your brand is included alongside other brands that it associates to your category.
Okay. But so l- let's say there's 100 competitors out there, and each of them writes a listicle. AI isn't gonna choose all 100 listicles Yeah. Mm-hmm. So what are the cri- w- how does the, how does the LLM find the listicles it's using in its citation? Well, it, the LLM will discover a lot of these listicles through a, through a search retrieval process, right? Okay, so from a search engine.
But it's not gonna be the, it's not necessarily gonna be the listicles that rank, that all rank on the first page of Google. Right. But on the first page of Google- Often it's not … for what? But on the first page of Google for what? Let's just take a representative keyword that, that is a good representative, representative prompt. But the query fan-out process changes the query into a series of… Sorry, it changes the prompt into a series of queries.
If you put the same prompt into Google, Google's- Mm-hmm … going to run the prompt as a query. Gemini isn't. So for example, if you say like, "Who's the king of [the other label]?" Google will list a site number one, but Gemini will have its own set of sites because the query fan-out adds things like 2026 to it. So it ends up using a different- Mm-hmm set of results.
Same as ChatGPT, same as, Copilot, same as Claude. Yeah. Well, what you're gonna… The difference that you're gonna get is that you're gonna get 10 ranked links on Google, and the LLM response, it will not be those same 10, let's say if they're listicles. I just… But I just said that. They're gonna be different. Yeah. Yeah, because the query fan-out changes the prompt. I, I think what we're arguing here is still, is still about tactics, and I will, I will concede that there is a lot of overlap in tactics, especially with regard to on-page technical work, and having your content become, be very accessible and, and crawlable.
Um- How, how do you make your content more crawlable? Sorry Well, by making it accessible, basically. By facilitating, crawlers- So, so basically if you publish a web- … to access that content. So basically if you publish a webpage Well, not always, no. I mean, if your web- Okay, well, what, what- … if your webpage is in JavaScript, then Google can probably parse it much, much better than most LLMs can parse it.
Yeah, maybe it can. May- So it's not a good idea to publish JavaScript pages if you care about GEO. If you care about SEO, you shouldn't worry too much because Google can- I- pretty much decipher- I think you're talking about- … JavaScript and rank those pages pretty well by now. I think you're talking about server-side rendering versus client-side rendering, and that, most LLMs are bad at it.
Actually, so is Google. Server-side rendering is a terrible option. But I said publish a webpage, not… I wasn't- Mm … talking about JavaScript. So if a webpage is publishable and, and, and retrievable, right, and you can get at the content, what else can you do to make it more crawlable? Well, essentially that's, that's the main thing to make- That's about it … make sure that it's accessible.
Yes So that was a, a red herring. Okay. So effectively SEO and GEO are the same things, it's just that you prefer a definition of GEO where it's focused on outcomes and you don't like me saying that SEO's focused on outcomes, but that's always what it's been. And when I introduced ORM, which has been around with us for as long as SEO, you said it's not actually SEO, it's GEO.
I leave it up to the audience, but I'm pretty sure the audience is going to say, "Well, actually I've been doing ORM 'cause I'm in SEO and I do ORM at my SEO agency." And we do that by making sure the pages we prefer come up in rankings. And if you look at GEO and the reason that we rank in GEO, it's because we made our page outrank the other pages.
And so I've been running competition or participating in a competition called the King of [the other label], where we've been doing press releases and SEO and all those other good things that are a part of it. I actually just did a podcast last Friday about how press, press releases work for SEO, and that if you do a press release, for example, that just focuses on your brand and doesn't rank for anything, you haven't done anything good.
However, if you do your press release and your press release brings your brand into visibility for the industry you're in or the, the, partner that you're working with or whatever, that's how you will get cited and that is SEO and that is the fundamentals of SEO. Well, you just said that's how you get cited. Yeah. But you get cited in an LLM, not in a Google search result page.
But you can be cited, you could be cited if, if somebody… If, if I go to USA Today and I say WP Tonic is the best SEO or WordPress community builder and it ranks on USA Today, that's, that's an SEO win, then people will search for WP Tonic How, how does it rank on USA Today? I don't understand that By doing a press release Okay. I, I understand your point about a press release, but I, I didn't-- You lost me when you said ranking on USA Today.
USA Today is not a search engine. Yeah, so I mean ranking- How do you rank on USA Today? The, the, the… Okay, s- semantics. In other words, the USA Today page ranks in Google. That's what I meant. What David is saying, what David is saying is, when you put out a press release, it gets syndicated to a bunch of different websites. not every press release provider includes USA Today, but lots of ones do include USA Today as- Mm-hmm … a syndication, just as a place where your press release is syndicated.
So you put out a press release- Mm-hmm … and that press release appears, on USA Today, and then you see them getting cited in AI Overviews. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. A- actually, I think this is another case where tactics overlap. PR distribution is a good tactic for SEO. It's also a very good tactic for GEO. My fundamental argument though is that when you're saying two disciplines are the same thing, you have to also agree that the goals and the outcomes and the KPIs are the same thing, and they're absolutely not, because the goal of SEO- That's again, that's your subjective decision … is traffic.
The goal of GEO is, is pure visibility. No, that's, that's your subjective choice to, to cast the definition of SEO that way. That's never been my definition of SEO. Like I said, I include ORM, I include YouTube, and I include press releases, and I include anywhere my brand is cited. and I know that because I also do paid search, right? So to me, paid search and SEO fall under, SEM, search engine marketing.
And I have clients that we have used G2 to influence their recommendation in Copilot, and then we've used Bing Ads on Microsoft Bing search to capture branded search that came from that. And we can test because we know exactly who those clients are, and we know that we're not a good fit because unfortunately G2 recommended us in the wrong business category as a replacement for a SaaS fintech product.
And that brings me to another interesting juncture that I think we've tripped over, that somehow LLMs have this understanding that something is more authoritative, and I think that's a very dangerous play, for b- businesses and consumers alike. unfortunately, LLMs will regurgitate whatever is fed in front of them, and I think this idea that GEO's pushing that if you build a brand or you have a well-defined brand that LLMs will pick you up, that's just not true.
There's a lot of, lot of brands out there that are very well-defined, have their ICP, have their branding very well done that don't get, quoted. A good example is Nike. Nike have done a terrible job with their SEO, and they're being outclassed and outflanked by a lot of competitors, and we can see the outcome of that. They've also been ruining their other offline channels, and they actually came very, very close to being delisted by the S&P 100, right?
And one of the many things they could have done is allowed their SEO agencies and SEO inputs to, compete with places like HOKA and Adidas and so on, but they didn't. Um- And so this narrative being pushed by the GEO discipline, if you want, that LLMs can decide what's more authoritative just because it's online is the most important thing to debunk. And it's important because we've created completely new categories, vetted information, and it just regurgitates it.
Edward and I literally created a term on the fly and published a page for it, and they just ran with it. Because the internet is not big enough. It doesn't see everything that's happening in our lives. so I, I asked people on X over the weekend to go and find out from an LLM that there was a journalist who made up a story that they were embedded with a squadron during the Iraqi war.
I didn't say which country. I didn't say what gender. And one person went and found the movie that was based on two journalists that pretended that they were in a war zone but weren't. And I said, like, "That's not the person I'm talking about." It was actually a non-starter. They weren't ever going to find them. They weren't ever gonna find it because those people had never been exposed.
So if they're not exposed online, there's no way for the LLM to tell if it's real or not. There's, there's nothing in G2 or Capterra that tells you whether one product is objectively better than the other, and not everything com-- sort of fits in. Secondly, having more reviews isn't necessarily an outcome of a better product. It's just an outcome of a product with more people that are willing to leave a review Okay.
Well, let me ask you this, David. I think we're, we're both trying to grow our businesses and get clients. Do you think that you'll grow faster by continuing to- So if, if you could stop Can I finish? Can I just finish my statement, please? Yeah. Will you grow your agency faster by continuing to sell SEO services to, into SEO services budgets? Or do you think you would grow your business faster by selling to brand marketing budgets, which are nine times bigger than SEO services?
I think that- Because, because you would position- You would, I think- GEO as brand building and brand visibility- I think you could- … which is brand marketing … I think you could, I think you would do a lot better if you just tried to answer the question that you came on here to us answer, right? And tell people how what you're doing is differently instead of just saying, "Oh, well, it's tactical." If you wanna talk about tactics, then it's different, right?
It's, like you said, it's the same thing, and it just doesn't suit your narrative. So you- Oh, the tactics, the tactics overlap a lot. Yeah. Okay. So the- But I'm talking about the goals. Okay. So if, if, if, if- The goals are different … if there's, if there's cycling in a, Ironman competition and there's cycling, in a street event, how are the cycling different? those are the same things, I guess.
Okay. Yeah, exactly. But that's not the same as my bodybuilding versus powerlifting analogy. But the bodybuilding powerlifting analogy isn't a good analogy. It's a, it's a, it's a good analogy for powerlifting and bodybuilding. the- You're, you're just trying to class- Yeah SEO in a different, state. Well- And when I add an ROI, you d- David, the way that you w- But, so basically you're- The way that you win at powerlifting is by li- is by something- I, I don't- … that's measurable, amount of weight that you're measuring … so Paris, to me, I just wanna stop you.
The way that you win at bodybuilding- I don't, nobody cares is the way you look, it's visibility. Yeah. That's, that, that's why you- Therefore, they're different sports. They're different disciplines … that's why you use it. But no one's arguing with you. Because they have different goals. No one's arguing your s- The prize is different … but nobody's- The KPIs are different but Paris, nobody's arguing your- Therefore, they're different … nobody is arguing your straw man with you.
We're both agreeing that they are two different sports. What we're agreeing on this side or disagreeing is that SEO and GEO are the same thing. And I get it, your subjective- SEO, GEO are different sports- Okay. We get it … in the same way that bodybuilding and powerlifting are. We get, we get that it's your subjective choice to choose that they're different. We, we get that. Like you subjectively chose that- Well, everything you've been saying is, is your subjective opinion too.
No, it's not. That's why we're debating. But it's not. I mean- So I'm saying that the, the things that you do for SEO and the things that you for, do for GEO are the exactly the same things, and they're in, in fact, in no way different. Just like when you lift weights for powerlifting and for bodybuilding, you're doing, you're doing the same things. You're going to the gym, but they're different sports because they have- So- … different measurement and different prizes … how- The way you win is different.
How- You're judged differently. But, but you're talking about two different sports that have two different- You're judged by the client differently you're, you're talking about two different things as a sport and how they're measured. But as an, as an f- exercise to get more muscle, they're both the same thing Right, but they're different, they're different games- Okay … they're different sports- So, okay … just like SEO and GEO.
Well, then that's great. Like you, we could just sit… You could just join any argument and say, "Well, I say they're different, so they're different." Right? I think that's kind of where, where we're both… Yeah. Well, I've, I've demonstrated and you've agreed- And, and my, my main point here is also- But you've, but you've agreed already- I, I- … that SEO and GEO are the same thing.
By, by, by extension of the fact that you're doing exactly the same things. There's nothing you can do in GEO that is different from SEO. In SEO, you c- you still have outreach. Mm. You can still email someone and say, "Please, can you write a story about me," or, "Please, can you put my brand." Yeah. Also, with SEO, instead of paying someone else, I could just outrank them.
Not so. Yeah. I think- Yeah … I think fundamentally you're saying they're the same things because of the tactic overlap. I'm saying that they're different things because of the goal, the difference in goals. And that's- I'm saying the goal's the same … pretty much where we have to agree to disagree I'm saying the goal, the goal, the goal for search engine optimization isn't search engine clicks, it's search engine optimization.
It's about visibility in search engines. I think you're just trying to change the definition of SEO. That means rankings, right? No, it doesn't. So your, your SEO KPI dashboard is just rankings. You're visible- No, it's not … in position one- Can you, can you- … position two … please stop telling me what my things are? It's, it's, it's very insulting. Very. I'm assuming based on what you're saying that- You're… No, no … you're reporting SEO results on visibility, which is rankings.
I have never… Paris, I didn't say that. I am not talking about what I do at work. That's what it implies. That's unfair. It, it sounds like you go on every work call then and just argue with everyone if they don't agree with your subjective opinion on things, right? And so it's, that's, a- again, it's a pointless argument. We came here to discuss what is it that you do differently for GEO, and you couldn't name anything that you do for GEO that's different for SEO.
Actually, I, I came on here to argue why GEO is a different discipline. Okay. I didn't come to argue tactics. I didn't read disciplines. Because tactically- I read GEO is completely different … you do a lot of the same things. Yeah. Okay. You do a lot of the same things. There we are. I think we agree on that. I think we agree on that point. Yeah. But, I, I… If… Go into Google Images and, and type in SEO dashboard and tell me how many of those results will show you traffic.
That is how SEOs report. They report on traffic. That's why people pay. No. I, I do not- That's why you get ROI from- No … measurable traffic. We… Same as paid. And go and type in GEO dashboard- Sorry … and you'll see share of voice- I'm sorry … not clicks. That, again, that's your opinion. We… I don't know any SEOs who- No, it's not my opinion. Go and Google it.
Go to Google Images- I- … and compare all the results for- Paris, Paris … dashboards SEO, dashboards GEO. I, I run one of the world's… Paris, I run one of the world's largest SEO- we can do it right now … I run one of the world's largest SEO forums. I can tell you now that if somebody comes in and says SEO is about clicks, everyone will remind them it's about business Right, through measurable clicks which drive revenue.
It's attributable Doesn't have to be through measurable clicks. We- GEO is not attributable … a lot of, a lot of, a lot of SEOs will tell you that most of SEO conversions, especially in B2B, will come through paid search or also through AI, AE. That's an entirely different argument if you wanna go to paid search. But- Oh yeah, now it's a different argument … when people invest- I mean, it doesn't suit you.
I get it. No, that's great. Okay, awesome Let's, let's, let's go to the ROI point So you know, I, I, I would- David, let's go to the ROI point. How do you prove ROI in SEO and how do you prove ROI in GEO? Visibility Are those two things different? Yeah. They're visibility. It's about visibility. I, I- But how do you prove visi- how do you connect visibility to revenue?
Okay, let's, let, let's, let, let's let you answer that. Can you answer that? How do you prove visibility? No, no, I'm gonna turn that back on you. Well, oh, exactly. You prove vi- you prove for SEO- I- you prove visibility through rankings which drive clicks. Those clicks convert and can be attributable to revenue. It's a very clear attribution path. But not necessarily. Not necessarily In GEO, you don't have the attribution path because you can't measure the click.
Not necessarily. In, in, in ORM- Another reason why they're fundamentally different- in, in ORM it could be- … because attribution is totally broken with GEO … it could be, in ORM, it could be press releases, it could be affiliate links. You haven't answered my question. I said it's about visibility. Attribution. I answered your question. No, I said it's about visibility. It- Tell me how attribution is the same.
Attribution in SEO is h- incredibly broken, if even a thing anymore. It's not really a thing. So you can't look at your conversions from organic traffic and say, "This is the revenue- Not anymore … I got from my SEO investment"? Really? It's very difficult to do that. Mm-hmm. Very, very difficult to do that. But, yeah, because it's all becoming GEO now because there's no more clicks. Not because it's becoming GEO.
S- Google, the amount of traffic flowing through Google, the amount of ads it's selling, and the amount of traffic that sites like Shopify, which sit above all of these e-commerce sites, hasn't changed. That's a different argument. Now you're arguing about the percentage adoption of GEO, of Google's traffic. It's a different set of traffic which we've gotten from the one and only, place to get that, which is Shopify.
I'm saying to you the attribution- All right. You kind of lost me on Shopify … in SEO was broken before LLM. I've, I've got another question for you, David. When Google finally switches on AI mode as the default, and there will be no more SERPs, will SEO continue to exist? Will that experience be called SEO? Yeah. Will that be a search engine? Or are you answering- It is still a search engine.
I… You're… So it does, it, it, it's just semantics. Uh. You can call it what you like. Mm-hmm. If you don't wanna call it search engine optimization, you don't have to. You c- Mm-hmm … if you, if you just wanna rebrand it. So like I said, if you just wanna pretend an SUV isn't a car, that's fine. You're allowed to do that. I believe something like 12% of Americans believe that the Earth is flat and less than 6,000 years old.
People are allowed to believe that. That, that's… We're not here debating your right and, your, your freedom of speech. It's out there in the audience. If you're doing the same things in S as, as you do for SEO and you wanna call it GEO, that's fine, but it's still the same thing. I think we, I'm still looking for an answer from you, David, is on attribution. Because you can attribute ROI in SEO and you can in GEO.
You can. I said to you already that attribution in SEO is, I said attribution in SEO is very, very broken. I have no visibility- How is it broken? For the last 20 years we've been measuring conversions from organic traffic. It's pretty straightforward and it still is. I've, I've just- It's just that the clicks are way down. Can I answer the question? Can I answer the question? Can I answer the question or not?
I'll answer the question. The reason we have no attribution is because somebody can come in and do a click today, and then they might return on a completely different search phrase, and Search Console can't tie them together, and so we can't see the attribution channel. We can't see it in G- Google Analytics 4 because 50% of people opt out, otherwise we'd have more of an attribution channel for GEO as well.
Well, Google does a pretty good job of modeling- Not having attribution, having- … in GA4 with conversions. No, it doesn't. No, it does not. Absolutely it does not. No, no, it doesn't. And absolutely just because you can't track the attribution doesn't mean it's different. I'm sorry. Attribution is broken in a whole as- aspect of, of marketing, including advertising. Attribution is the fundamentals of ROI measurement for the channels.
That's up, that's your opinion. That's the foundation of ROI. That's, that's… I'm sorry, I'm sorry that you're miseducated about digital marketing and you don't understand how broken attribution is, and then you wanna borrow something from 24 years ago, like a lot of, unfortunately, CMOs do today. But that attribution does not exist today You're welcome, by the way. For your, for what? I'm happy to help educate you or teach you that if you look at GA4, because of cookies, because of GDPR, because of, opt-outs, because of return visits- Mm-hmm … attribution has been broken for a very long time, and SEOs have known that and dealt with that for a very long time.
Attribution from advertising is broken. That's a branding play. okay. The, I think the reason why- Attribution in ads is, attribution in ads is broken. I have clients that get two generic ads and 57 branded ads in a week, and they cannot tie the branded ads back to anything. Yeah. Well, you can say either broken or not broken, attribution is a lot more clear. I think what we- There's still gaps, but for SEO- No, not at all.
This, this- … it's a lot more clear when you have clicks … no. I think maybe in your mind there is, and I think what we're learning today is that ignorance is not really a good enough reason to say that SEO and GEO is different. Now, when I say ignorance, I mean ignorance of how SEO works. Mm-hmm. So why is it that so many people are still investing in SEO and expecting an ROI, and they're not investing yet in GEO?
Which, where are these many people? And it's because they can't find the ROI. They can't prove the ROI. In SEO, they believe they can prove the ROI or get a, a lot closer to ROI- Again, I can- because you can attribute the click. I, I think you're making an invented, uh- In most cases, I know there are gaps, but you can still attribute most organic search clicks land on a page with high intent, and they convert, and you can measure that, and there's ROI.
But they, but they don't convert. That doesn't exist in GEO. That doesn't, but that, I'm trying to tell you that that doesn't happen. A lot of searches, people don't buy on a single search. It's gotten way more complicated. A lot of people might go to an airline and look at the price and then go to 10 other, websites, aggregators, and compare the prices there and buy. There is no way to attribute that.
That, that channel is broken as well. And- I, I'm not saying it's all last click attribution. You can have different- You didn't. That's- … attribution models, um- Those attribution models are dead 'cause they mostly exist with inside GA4, and I'm, that's what I'm trying to say to you. If you, if you've been in digital marketing the last 10 years, you'd know that. well, yes, I have. And I think GA4 does the best job of anyone else at, at data-driven attribution.
It doesn't. It doesn't. And, and it exists in Google Ads too. Matomo, Matomo does much better job. There are tools that you can build yourself that does a better job. GA4, GA4 doesn't have the cookies. It doesn't track them, and if people opt out, which is, in some areas, 60% and higher, and on mobile even higher again, you don't have those- Mm-hmm … attribution models. But yeah, GA4 models those lost conversions- No, it doesn't … with machine learning.
You think it does or you read an ar- No, you think it does. It, you think it does for Google Ads. It absolutely doesn't. If you've… Like, like I said, this is where you're gonna lose. You're listening, you're talking to people who use GA4 for a living. It doesn't actually model them. That's, that's a unicorn you're inventing. Mm-hmm. It'd be lovely if it does, but it doesn't have the audience.
So is Google lying to us then? Is Google lying to us- I'm not saying Google is lying to us … about our ability to model conversions? I'm saying Google, it doesn't model conversions for, for organic traffic. I'm sorry And it doesn't say it It models conversions in, in paid- No … in Google Ads. Why, why can't it do the same- Yes, but, but paid- in Google Organic?
But, but paid isn't SC- but paid isn't SEO. It doesn't use the same fundamentals. It uses money instead of authority. But the same machine learning that is modeling- It's not the same machine learning … lost conversions from opt-outs in Google Ads- No. I'm sorry … the same exists in Google- Paris organic as well. I, I'm… Paris, I've been doing this for 26 years. GA4 does not model- I've been doing it for 20 … organic, does not mo- model organic conversions.
If the user opts out, you have absolutely no visibility on their conversion path. I'm sorry. But you can apply the same conversion rate from your opt-in users to your opt-out users, and you can get- No pretty close that way. N- no, you can't. Can't you? There's… You, you, you will ha- You could have as many us- Because the opt-out users are fundamentally very different. You can have as many- do they behave differently?
You can have as- They've just opted out, that's all. No. You can have users that come in and read your supporting material, that read your com- data competitive material that don't return. You can have users that return but don't buy. You can have users that go to another site, maybe a competitor, and buy from them. You have no idea what's happened. Mm-hmm. We can sometimes g- get a, get a glance of it by listening to and automating, sales call re- recordings.
But the, the land where you're living in where Google is m- using AI to model, organic traffic, sorry, but, but that doesn't happen. Also- It's, it's not perfect … GA4 doesn't. Surely. It's not, it's not there. But it gets you closer. I'm, I'm… It's not there. Mm-hmm. Sorry. Well, let, let's compare that entire attribution with all the gaps and flaws that it has to GEO where there isn't even a click.
Then how do you- And, well- … attribute ROI for GEO? Because there- So GEO- … are no clicks. Do you look at brand search- GEO is basically- … impressions? It's basically like… It, it's basically like looking at GA4 where the users opt out. The user could ask 10 questions, 20 questions. They could read your content or content that's derived from yours. You don't know if it's, if, if you're mentioned or not.
You can't even tell if you've been mentioned or not. Mm-hmm. Right? A lot of them are, are- Yeah … really, really… So you may not even have visibility. So all you have to rely on is, how do I increase my visibility against my competitors for the known pages that they are visible on? Yeah. I- in the SEO world, there are, there are clicks, and i- it is flawed, but there are a lot more clicks.
In the GEO world, there are no clicks, therefore there's much- Yeah, so you could- … more broken attribution … you could have people drop in on SEO on a branded term, and you have no idea what the top, what, what the last 10 things they, they did. We've, we've heard of people hearing about us on a webinar in an Aus- in Australia, and I've never been on a webinar in Australia, or with anyone with an Australian accent.
Mm. so, that happens in branded, search all the time. um- Yeah … that doesn't mean- Well, if, if we- … that SEO's different. Yeah. I, I'm, I'm with you- I, I would actually accept an argument from you that, that ads and SEO are different. I, I would, I would… I could almost go along with that argument for a while, except that it's the same user. Yeah. What-- Okay, I'll, I'll, I'll come back to this point and, and I'll do the best I can one last time.
There's a reason why SEO has gotten a lot of investment for the last 20 years. It's because there's-- people believe there's measurable ROI. Okay, so we're using conjunctions now. That investment has not shifted to GEO, and the reason is because there is not measurable ROI. And the reason, and the reason for that is because- I don't think that- … there are far fewer- I'm sorry … measurable clicks.
I don't know anyone who's doing SEO because of measurable- Because the goal is not about getting clicks. I don't think anyone is doing SEO because of measurable ROI. I think people are doing SEO because they have no choice, because that's where 90% of the market goes. Google drives 70% of the world's traffic. If you're not on SEO, you're gonna miss it. A lot of people don't do SEO.
A lot of people do TikTok that don't do SEO at all. It's not an r- it's not because of ROI. Well, not-- we're not talking about those people. We're talking about people who have invested in SEO- We're not talking about those people and are not investing in GEO. Fantastic. And what is the reason for that? There's, there's different people. Well, I don't wanna talk about social or TikTok right now.
I wanna talk about SEO versus GEO. SEO has gotten a lot of investment because of perceived ROI. No. I'm sorry, that is not why SEO- GEO has not gotten that investment because- I'm sorry, SEO does not- of perceived lack of ROI. It's not why SEO- Am I right? And that's not why SEO and GEO get different… No, SEO is not, is not picked on because it gets better ROI.
SEO gets chosen because it results in more sales. I, the number of companies- Which measures- … I work with, m- number of companies I've helped grow beyond 10 million that when I met them had no analytics, had no search console, we don't use analytics. Analytics is the least last tool I use. and that are also using SEO to grow their [the other label] is all of them.
We don't even use the A- we don't even use the AI reports anymore that come with tools like Semrush because they're so useless Okay. Yeah. Well- We just basically look at- Most- … how often our term is used. One of the best tools for actually, understanding AI is actually Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. And Bing Webmaster Tools is phenomenally important because it tracks the query fanouts, but also it shares- Yeah … the percentage share of voice with your competitor, and that's done in big web- Bing Webmaster Tools, not in an AI- Yeah, I've seen that there framework.
Yeah. It's, it's actually the only thing- Yeah, Bing, Bing Webmaster Tools is, is better in that case- It is. Yeah … than, than Search Console … it's the only tool that you can, that you can get data that gives you competitive metrics against your competitors, right? Yeah. The only problem with that is who… I mean, it's, that it's just Bing, and I, I think Google Search Console- It's not just Bing … is gonna- It's actually- … eventually share- It's actually ChatGPT … Copilot.
It's ChatGPT. It says Copilot and select AI partners, and the only one I know of is, is ChatGPT. And ChatGPT can't use B- Google anymore, right? So this is one of the, the other interesting things that I think a lot of GEO, enthusiasts miss as well, is that one of the, the mo- one of the biggest changes between SEO and Google SEO versus Bing SEO that's happened in the last kind of month, is that because of Google's war to block SERP API, it's actually made SERP reports completely unusable.
So you can get a, a Semrush report that says, "Hey, you're in position one," and you may not be in position one at all. You may not even be in pa- in the top 10 results or the top 100 results, and so you can't use it anymore. But the only place I can think of to go to to see where I'm more visible in ChatGPT is to go to Bing Webmaster Tools Whereas I would-- used to have get- getting that in, in Search Console.
But because Google has kicked SERP API out, to kick ChatGPT out, I have to go… And so the only way I can increase my visibility there is to look at what I'm not visible for in Bing, and then as I add those topics, I can see immediately that I'm now be-- that I'm now ranking for those query fan-outs, and then I can see the mentions in the AI chat, and then I can go and check ChatGPT, and I can log in using browser stacks.
I can set up anonymous browsers with anonymous IP addresses from different countries and from different states. And then I can do a test. Am I being recommended? And then I can take Microsoft Clarity, and I can set up those prompts, and I can see what's my percentage share of voice. I cannot do that with any LLM tool. and I think that's really useful for, for companies to know.
If you wanna see, how you're doing in, in, in, Claude, where you wanna do is, is, is look at Bing, because Claude uses, Brave Search, and Brave Search uses Bing's index as a quality control. ChatGPT uses Bing and Common Crawl, and it seems to have a slightly different query fan-out than, than Claude. And if you wanna see what your share of voice is in ChatGPT and Bing… Sorry, in Copilot, you use Microsoft Clarity, which gives you an unlimited number of, prompt reports where you can enter at least 10, but 10 to 15 prompts per report.
And then what it'll do is it'll give you your percentage, share of voice versus other brands in those citations from a Bing query fan-out. And so at the end of the day, if we see that we have 99% lack of visibility across all of those, the only way I can fix that is to increase my ranking in Bing, and that will automatically fix the, the outcome of those reports.
Mm-hmm. And for-- What about for Google AI Overviews and AI mode? Do you do any of those things? yeah. And, and so I, I, I have hundreds, I have hundreds of ranking positions, and what I do is I, I realize that the prompt and the query are not the same thing, and that the query fan-out changes and then is fluid, and I try to gather up as many of those query fan-outs, and then I take my content and I can, for example, add H2 or I can buy a placement on another page, which is the last thing I'm gonna do 'cause I would prefer to outrank that page, and then I don't have to pay them anymore.
I get… You wouldn't believe the number of emails I get each day. one, sending me backlinks, which is highly annoying 'cause I don't buy them, and two, is other GEO brands that have no presence in Google that wanna do, a mention exchange in one of my top 10 [the other label] or top 10 SEO or top 10 GEO lists that I have either on my site or s- or elsewhere.
And I'm like: Why would I do a link swap with you? You have no authority or standing in Google. You don't ha- rank for anything. If you have a page that ranks, sure, maybe I'll consider it, and I've heard of your brand, and it's something I wanna recommend. 99% of the time it's a brand I've never heard of, so I'm not actually gonna recommend them. 'Cause I know that the LLMs at the end of the day will just cough up what- whatever is statistically more interesting, and it has actually nothing to do with trust Because trust in, in, in the World Wide Web is, is impossible.
And, and again, we can look to Google, we can look to Google for three things in this area. One is Google have been… While they were late to deploy Gemini versus, OpenAI, they're the only one who've released an AI guide, right? Everything that, that, that GEO tells you about GEO is, I don't wanna use the word fabricated, but because there is-- it has no grounding in, in reality, I'm gonna use the word fabricated.
Whereas Google's, for, for AI Overviews anyway, and Gemini being one of the largest LLMs, is good SEO equals good GEO. The third thing that they've released that's very, very interesting is that because it also undermines people who believe that, that Google is a fact-checker, content grading site, which again, a lot of GEOs lean on, right? A lot of GEOs lean on E-E-A-T and knowledge graph entities and have repositioned them for OpenAI even though none of this is, e-exists in the OpenAI universe, is that they've said that Google cannot… Nobody, then they just publish as a general white paper as a problem for LLMs as a future AGI, is that it looks at the sample set of documents and assumes that the sample set of documents that fit into a set of heuristics are within what it's looking for.
But it cannot substantiate or validate the quality of information in any one single document. And that tells me that anyone can do this. Anyone can create a l-listicle. Like you said, AIs like listicles. They don't like listicles. I-if, if there's, if they're fed 10 listicles, they'll, they'll quote 10 listicles. And people should stop producing listicles 'cause they're sta- they're, they're statistically pushing themselves out of the list, right?
If I, if I had to pick a number one [the other label], GEO, SEO strategy, and I have 'cause I'm doing it right now, is to build an EMD because EMDs rank in Google and Bing just as well, and in Brave Search and in Common Crawl. And they will do that- What is an EMD? So it's an exact match domain. It's basically where you move from a branded domain- Ah … to a domain that m-matches a, an organic keyword, right?
So if people are searching for- who's the best [the other label] out there? Who's the best GEO out there? If you, if you build a site that's like best GEO or best EO dot [the other label].com, those will tend to rank at the highest end of the, of, of, of the indexes because of relevance to authority. So authority is just one part of SEO. Relevance is another part.
If you can make yourself statistically more relevant, you only need a tiny fraction of authority, which could just be in the form of, of clicks maybe or, or, or of, of other s- backlinks. Yeah. And- No, the- You actually can- I think LLMs are acting kind of like, like search in the early 2000s where there was a lot of m- manipulation. It was easier- I think that they're- … to manipulate.
You c- you would manipulate with exact match domains, like in 2005. You still can. B- but you still can. And for SEO, and now you can do that- Absolutely … again now for GEO. Mm. Because there is no, because there is no objective truth on the internet. That's the problem that LLMs have, right? They're very good smoke and mirror tricks, but they're not able to say that this page is more authoritative than this page.
The only authority that exists really in the web is unfortunately, backlink authority. That's why OpenAI has to use or was, or had to use Google as a quality control, right? Because the quality control of Bing's index is so terrible Yeah. All right. Well, it's a good debate. Paris, thank you for- And I'll leave this thing … Paris, thank you for, for sticking with it and coming on the show.
You host- Mm-hmm … the GEO Show, which is a- Yeah … daily podcast, and, going daily is hardcore. And so, yeah, like, uh- It's, yeah, it, it's a commitment. Yeah. I need to, I wanna try to get it established, so I think I need to go every day for as long as I can. Well, that's what I've done- … with this show. I, this is, actually 1,196 days in a row doing this podcast.
Wow. Yeah. Congrats. And, and I'll, I'll tell you- It's amazing from experience, it is real commitment. It is crazy. Yeah. Great job. But, but Paris, no, great job to you, and I, I really… You know, David's been on m- many times. This is your first time on and, and you were great. And so I, I really thank you for coming on the show. Yeah, you threw- Yeah.
Thanks, Paris. It's been fun me right in the shark tank here. Yeah, it was good. Well- Good to meet you, David. Thanks for the lively debate. I hope, I hope the email, 'cause I, I said it was, it could be a heated debate, so I hope, that we had done a few of them. I'd say, yeah, the audience probably got what they, what they bargained for on that front.
but Paris, you're, seriously, you're, you're great, and I, I really appreciate you for, for coming on. You also have GEOforge. That's your site, right? It is, yeah. GEOforge. It's, it's an all-in-one platform for AI visibility. So we've got, of course, we've got share of voice measurement. We have a con- content generation, which is grounded in a knowledge base, and then we have an outreach and citation-building module as well called SiteForge.
So yeah, for anyone listening, please check out, it's at trygeoforge.com. Thank you, Paris, and, for David, David of Po- Primary Position. David's been on the show many times. If you're a listener of the show, you've heard David. everybody's links will be in the description for this episode. So yeah, this is episode 1,196 of the podcast. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching.
If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.
