Don't waste money on AI search or 'GEO'

Don't waste a single penny on Gio. Spend it on a good website instead. There, I've saved you a grand. You're welcome. It seems like every week right now, somebody is in my inbox trying to fogg me generative engine optimization, AI, search experts, chat, GPT ranking specialist wers.

So, in this one, I'm going to do three things for you. I'm going to show you the real numbers on how much traffic AI actually sends to your website. I'm going to pull apart two genuinely ridiculous geo pictures that landed in my inbox last week. And I'm going to tell you the one thing to spend that money on instead. And by the end, you'll know whether any of this is worth a single penny of your money.

Spoiler alert, it really isn't worth your money. Now, before you call me a dinosaur who doesn't really get AI, let's do one thing that nobody selling GEO is actually ever doing. Let's look at the data. I know it's a novel concept, isn't it? So, I run a web agency and we look after about probably 70 business websites, I'd say.

I look at all that analytics every single month. So, I decided to pull off 12 months of that analytics data across the entire lot of websites and I counted how much traffic actually came from AI search. So, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, all of the like. And the number of it, it's embarrassingly low. On most of those websites, AI sent between 0.1 and 0.5% of traffic.

The highest I found on any of our websites was a high 2.4%. The lowest of them, though, was 0.02%. Yes, that is it. That's the AI title wave everybody is currently wetting their pants over. And don't just take me and my poultry 70 websites.

The independent industry numbers say exactly the same thing across the whole web right now. That's the entire web. AI sends roughly 1% of all traffic. That's 1%. Meanwhile, boring old search engines are out there still sending half of all traffic.

So, just to clarify this, that's 50% of search engine traffic versus 1% of AI search traffic. So, the question for this whole video is dead simple, and I don't even really think I need to ask it now. Should you be paying anybody to optimize your website for that 1% right now? Right. So, here's exhibit A.

Last week, this hit my inbox. The subject line of it was GEO for your clients. It was a lovely pitch offering me generative engine optimization as a service to sell on to my clients. I could promise them that I could get them featured. I could get them visible in AI.

Paperclick. It sounds dead modern and all that, don't it? It sounds really cutting edge. But hold that thought for a second because what this company actually is and did, we'll come back to later. And don't worry, it's quite funny.

First though, the big problem sitting underneath all of that, including the email that I received. Here is the incredibly uncomfortable truth right now that nobody flogging go will say out loud. Nobody knows how this works. Even I don't know how this works. And that's why I'm saying it in this video.

ChatGPT doesn't publish how it picks what to mention in AI search. Neither does Claude. There's no algorithm document. There's no rule book. There's no here's how we rank you in ChatGPT.

They've not told anybody, possibly even their own employees. And all of the stories out there as well that I get firsthand, they all contradict each other. Somebody told me last month that it took them 6 months to get mentioned in AI Answers. Another one apparently showed up overnight. Both of those things can't be true and both of them can't be a strategy for your website.

So when somebody calls themselves an AI search specialist, what are they a specialist in exactly? You can't be a specialist in something that nobody understands. You can't be an expert in something that's a secret that no one sees inside. If you're only guessing, and trust me, these people are guessing, you are paying for a specialist to guess professionally for you, which is ridiculous. And all of this is getting even murkier by the day.

It's not getting clearer because ChatGPT just switched on ads. I mean like properly switched on ads. They're running in America since February and you can pay for ads in ChatGPT now. And in the UK right here, the trial for this went live last month. So let's think about what that does for a second.

The second a search engine, and let's call ChatGPT a search engine here, starts to sell ads, it stops being in their interest to tell you how to show up in them for free. Google spent 20 years making organic search harder and the ads bigger at the top of search. So, ChatGPT now has every reason to do exactly the same as that. So any geo hack out there right now and anything anybody tries to sell you about geo probably has a shelf life of about two weeks or something. I want another thing on top of that as well that shows you how shaky the advice is.

ChatGPT doesn't even use Google anyway. So if anybody's telling you anything about Google to do with ChatGPT, they're wrong. Because when ChatGPT is looking for websites, it pulls all that information from Bing. That's Microsoft's Bing. Yes, the search engine that you completely forgot existed.

That's what ChatGPT uses. So half of the optimized for AI advice out there is generic Google stuff which is aimed at the entirely wrong search engine because ChatGPT actually uses Bing. If you genuinely want a free 5-minute job that will help you rank better in ChatGPT, you just have to make sure your website appears in Bing. That's it. That's the big secret.

Don't tell the AI specialist though because they'll all have to go get proper jobs. Now, here is exhibit A again as promised. This pitch that they sent me via email sounded very space age generative engine optimization. Oo. Then you scroll to the small print of the email and it actually turns out that this company, it's just a PR and affiliate marketing network.

So, if you strip the buzzword of GEO off of this, what they're actually selling me is paid placements. They're actually selling getting clients featured in magazines and websites for money, which is just PR. And we've had PR for about a million hundred years. And it's not just dodgy emails like this I'm receiving in my inbox every single day. Let me present exhibit B.

The same week, I got sent this email. A whole single slide deck of 20 urgent SEO actions for the AI era. Hang on. Yes, it said urgent. All 20 of them.

It's urgent right now. So, your website's apparently on fire, and here is the extinguisher to fix it. So, let's read a few of them. Let's have a little bit of fun. Number four, add short summary sections to your content.

Number nine, improve your site speed. Number six, use testimonials. Number 18, get this one, get some Google reviews. Number 20, now this is one that you need to really pay attention to, turn your articles into short videos. Hang on a second.

All you've described there is a good website. Get some reviews. Be quick to load. Add testimonials to your website. We've been saying all of this since before the iPhone launched.

All of these things are the things I say in these YouTube videos every single week. There's nothing AI about any of that advice and there's definitely nothing urgent about that advice, but credit where it's due. It's not bad advice. Most of it is stuff I would tell you anyway. That's the whole point about this.

The good bits aren't new and the new bits aren't good. The one or two genuine AI flavored tips in this guide, it's all about filling with some file that almost nothing actually reads yet. And even that is speculative. It's guesswork at best. And guess what's at the end of this free urgent checklist?

There's a link to buy a book and there's a link to buy a course. It's funny that because the fire that these marketers always try to start always sell you an extinguisher as well. So that's two pictures for GEO in just one week. And trust me, I get way more than that. One of them is PR with a new badge and the other one is decades old website advice with urgent AI stamped on the front of it.

Both of them want your money for something you either already do or that you don't need yet. So, what does actually get mentioned by AI? Well, funnily enough, the boring half of that checklist I was taking the piss out of was actually on to something. There is an answer, but you're not going to like how dull the answer is. So, let's fly in the face of Gio again and actually return to the data.

The websites that AI lean on are overwhelmingly the ones that already have genuine authority. So that's sites people already search for, already link to, that they already trust. You can't trick your way in to JG GBT or AI search. You earn it by being a properly good, useful resource that already exists on the internet. None of this is surprising, but this is the things that none of these GEO snakeall salesmen can say to you because then they wouldn't be able to sell your GEO.

And if you want proof that chasing a hack is a Mug's game, here's the proof. Around about a year ago, a study found that about 3/4 of Google's AI citations came from pages ranking already in its top 10 search results. That sounds pretty sensible and obvious, but this spring when they ran the same study, it's down to about roughly a third of the same data now. And this has happened because Google swapped in a new model like everybody else is doing all the time. So the whole thing shifted under everybody's feet.

And that's the problem right now because every ranking AI playbook from last summer went wrong overnight because of the way that Google has now decided to rank AI citations. That's my entire point. You can't sell a reliable trick or a hack for a thing that renews itself every 6 months. There's a new model for Jack GPT, a new model for Claude every single week right now. Even the people selling geo would quietly admit if they were honest that all of these tips are just good SEO for your website with a few extra steps.

So the way to win at AI search is to just have a genuinely good website. The same thing I've banged on about for 20 plus years. The same thing I say in these YouTube videos all the time. All you need is honest, useful content, real facts that answer what people are actually asking right now. proof, case studies, testimonials, your actual prices on your website.

Please put your actual price on your website. Trust basically, that's all we're trying to build. A website full of trust. If you do all that, the AI tools will pick you up as a side effect because you finally give them something worth quoting in their AI search. So, here's what to do with all that money you were about to waste on a GEO specialist.

spend it on improving your website, the boring basics, basically because right now that's a bet that you can't lose. If you spend a grand chasing some secret AI hack, and the rules change next month, that grand has been pissed up the wall. If you spend that £1,000 making a website clearer, cleverer, more useful, more trustworthy, and it works in Google better, it'll work better in AI, and it'll work better for the actual human that's reading the website at 11:00 at night trying to decide whether they want to call you. Because the other thing is AI aren't going to call you. They're not your customers.

There's no version of the future where a good website is a bad idea. Now, am I 100% certain on any of this? No, I'm not 100% certain on it. And anybody who says they are is lying to you. This stuff right now is moving incredibly fast.

There's new models. There's the ads thing coming in in ChatGPT. And who knows what next year is going to look like. There may actually come a day where there's real specific things you have to do to improve your website in AI search. And if that day comes, I'll make that video and I'll happily eat this hat on camera.

But that day is not today. And today the smart money is on the boring thing which is just improving your damn website. So should you spend money on GEO right now? No. Don't don't spend a single penny on GEO.

Build a genuinely good website, a useful, honest website full of proof and then you'll show up in AI anyway without paying a single penny to a single snake all salesman. And if you want the full data behind all of this, me actually digging through those 12 months of traffic that I referred to in this video, I made a whole video about this. I called it no AI hasn't killed your website traffic. Go watch that next. It's the receipts that I'm referring to in this video.

And that email I received, I did reply to them. I said, "No, thank you." Politely because I'm a British person. So, as a British person, I'm going to say, "Please go spend the money on a good website instead." And I'm going to go keep the hat handy just in case I get proven wrong.