Is GEO worth paying for?

No. If you run a normal business, don’t spend a penny on GEO right now. Spend it on your website and you’ll turn up in AI anyway, as a side effect.

Every week somebody lands in my inbox trying to sell me it. Generative engine optimisation, AI search experts, ChatGPT ranking specialists. If you own a business they’re in yours too, so let’s have a look at what they’re flogging.

What is GEO?

GEO stands for generative engine optimisation. The idea is you pay somebody to get your business mentioned when people ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google’s AI answers about the thing you sell. Basically SEO pointed at chatbots.

Sounds dead modern. The trouble starts when you ask how it works.

Nobody knows how AI decides who to mention

ChatGPT doesn’t publish how it picks which businesses to mention. Neither does Claude, or any of the others. There’s no rulebook or algorithm document. I don’t know how it works, and I’m happy to say so. The people selling GEO don’t know either, they’re just less keen to say it.

The stories I hear first-hand contradict each other too. One person told me it took six months before they got mentioned in AI answers. Another reckoned they turned up overnight. Both of those can’t be a strategy.

So what’s an ‘AI search specialist’ a specialist in, exactly? If they’re guessing (and they are), you’re paying somebody to guess professionally on your behalf.

It keeps moving as well. New models come out every few months, and whatever trick worked on the last one might do nothing on the next. The ads are turning up too. As I write this, ChatGPT is showing ads in the UK and the US, and Google already puts ads in its AI answers in search. Google spent years shoving the free results further down the page and the paid ones further up, and I can’t see why anyone else would behave differently once there’s ad money on the table. So any GEO hack you buy today has a shelf life of about a fortnight.

Two GEO pitches in one week

The first one had the subject line “GEO for your clients”. It wanted me to sell generative engine optimisation on to the businesses we work with, and promised to get them featured and visible in AI. Very space age. Then I got to the small print. The company was a PR and affiliate marketing network. Take the buzzword off and they were selling paid placements in magazines and on websites, which is PR. We’ve had PR for about a million years.

The second was a slide deck of “urgent” SEO actions for the AI era. All of them urgent, apparently, so your website’s on fire. Some of the highlights:

• Add short summary sections to your content.
• Improve your site speed.
• Use testimonials.
• Get some Google reviews.
• Turn your articles into short videos.

That’s a description of a good website. We’ve been telling people to do most of it for years, and there’s nothing AI or urgent about any of it. Decent advice, mostly. Just old. The one or two tips that were genuinely about AI were guesswork at best.

And at the bottom of the free urgent checklist? A link to buy a book, and another to buy a course. Funny how the people who start the fire always have an extinguisher for sale.

So that’s PR with a new badge on, and a pile of website advice that’s been knocking about since MySpace with “AI” stamped on the front. Both wanted paying for something you’re either already doing or don’t need yet.

How much traffic are we even talking about?

Before you pay anybody to chase AI traffic, it’s worth knowing how much of it there is. I checked a year of analytics across about 70 business websites we look after. On most of them AI tools sent between 0.1% and 0.5% of visits, and the highest was just under 2.5%. I’ve written it all up in is AI killing your website traffic? if you want the detail.

So the actual question is whether you should pay somebody to ‘optimise’ for half a percent of your visitors.

Erm…

What does get you mentioned by AI?

Good information. When somebody is searching for something with AI, they’re usually looking for an answer:

• “What time does ABC Business open?”
• “How much does a typical project cost from ABC Business?”
• “Can you find me reviews or testimonials to see if ABC Business is any good?”
• “How many people work for ABC Business?”

The best place to begin is to become an authority on your own business. Make sure that you have all this kind of information on your website, and make sure it’s kept updated. Your goal should be to become the number one resource in AI for your own business, regardless of what the questions are. If you don’t have testimonials or case studies on your website, or any Google reviews, this is the first thing to suffer.

I asked ChatGPT this question about Genius Division. Other people will be asking similar questions about your business:

“I want to work with genius division for a new website. what can you tell me about them? Are they trustworthy?”

Look how often this very website is being referenced in ChatGPT’s response:

Make sure the answer is positive.

What to spend the money on instead

The same boring stuff I’ve been banging on about for years. If you were about to spend a grand on GEO, spend it here.

• Fix the basics. Pages that load fast, a site that works properly on a phone, and it’s obvious what you do and what happens when someone gets in touch. Wolf Laundry were paying £3,000 a month for Google Ads and getting no leads, because their site took ten seconds to load. After we rebuilt it, it loads in about a second and they’re getting 150 to 200 leads a month.
• Real FAQs. The questions customers ask you on the phone, answered properly on your service pages. Price, how long it takes, what’s included, who it’s for.
• Prices. Put them on your website. I’ve written about why. Nobody can quote a number you’ve hidden, whether that’s a chatbot or the person on your site at 11 o’clock at night deciding whether to ring you.
• Proof. Case studies, testimonials, Google reviews. Real ones, with real names on.

If you spend a grand on a secret AI trick and the rules change next month, that grand’s been pissed up the wall. A clearer, more useful website does better in Google and in AI, and more to the point with the actual human reading it. AI isn’t going to ring you.

If you’re wondering whether your current site is even up to the job, have a go at do I need a new website?

Am I sure about all this?

No. Nobody is, and anyone who tells you they are is lying. This is moving fast. There might come a day when there are real, specific things you need to do for AI search, and if it comes I’ll say so and eat my hat. It hasn’t come yet.

I did reply to that first email, by the way. I said no thank you, politely, because I’m British.