The GEO Q&A: the questions brands are really asking

GEO is a top priority for brands and marketers right now, increasingly discussed across performance meetings, quarterly business reviews, industry events, webinars and boardroom conversations. If you’re in the business of performance marketing, it’s pretty much guaranteed you’ve heard the term but perhaps aren’t totally confident on some of the finer details.

GEO has already reached the marketing tipping point, with 92% of organisations planning to optimise for AI search. Yet only 40% are actually doing it and an even smaller amount (23%) are currently investing in GEO measurement.

There are a number of reasons why this might be: overlap with traditional SEO, no clear traffic attribution, the shift from clicks to authority uprooting decades of best practice. But GEO is growing exponentially in the era of AI search, with our State of AI Search Report revealing that AI search engaged sessions have increased 392% year on year and revenue from AI search visitors grew 312%. While confusion is normal, failure to adopt equates to your brand becoming essentially invisible during the buying journey.

Adoption is rising quickly but understanding how to use GEO effectively is the foundation to using it effectively. Below, we’ll provide clarity on the common GEO assumptions and questions our clients have brought to us. 

1) I rank well on Google, so why am I absent from ChatGPT and AIOs?

If you’ve put in the hard work to achieve an impressive backlink profile and first-page rankings, only to see your competitors show up in AI Overview answers over you, your frustration is understandable. The good news is that traditional search visibility and LLM visibility are often closely correlated with high-performing sites in Google being generally better positioned to be referenced by AI systems since they tend to demonstrate authority and relevance. 

But strong rankings alone isn’t a guarantee for AI visibility – these systems rely on being able to easily access and interpret information across the web, so the most successful GEO strategies build on strong SEO foundations while prioritising:

• Content with clear, direct answers that addresses the questions before launching into details.
• Structured information onsite that is optimised for AI tools to extract. This includes bulleted lists, tables, diagrams and web structure.
• Technical elements that strengthen trust and EEAT (Google’s quality and credibility framework).
• Offsite authority like brand mentions and citations are important, but mentions need to be consistent, contextually relevant and reinforce positive brand sentiment.

2) How do I prove my GEO strategy is working?

Tracking comes up as one of the main concerns about GEO. AI responses lack the comprehensive established analytics that we’re used to seeing when reviewing SEO performance. Alongside the high volume of zero-click searches and conversational, long-tail questions asked, it can make it difficult to attribute and justify budget in board meetings.

It all just requires a different outlook on measurement:

• Visibility metrics: Prompt visibility, citation frequency and share of voice across LLMs and SEO help measure whether your content is being recommended and surfaced in AI platforms.
• Traffic and engagement: AI referral sessions, direct traffic, branded clicks and assisted conversions provides a clearer view on how AI citations contribute to revenue and help connect GEO to real business outcomes.
• Brand and entity metrics: Brand mentions and sentiment can indicate growing authority and awareness among both AI systems and human audiences as GEO efforts grow.

3) Do backlinks still matter?

Absolutely.

GEO might have entered the chat, but that doesn’t mean SEO gets blocked. Google still treats high-value editorial links as major votes of trust and confidence for a domain. They are categorically still a ranking factor, and answer engines rely on these cited web references to determine a brand’s credibility.

But brands should be taking a quality over quantity approach to backlinks – recognising that a single relevant, contextual link from a trusted site outperforms hundreds of low-quality ones. Automated systems are now exceptionally skilled at ignoring spammy or artificial link profiles, monitoring whether a linking site has a clear topical alignment with the content. 

4) Once my brand is cited, will it stay cited?  

Unfortunately not. Being cited one month is not a guarantee that your brand will show up the next. This is largely due to the short lifespan of AI citations, around 4.5 weeks, turnover rates varying platform to platform and the prompt used. Research by Yotpo demonstrated that citation sets are turning over between 70% and 81% every single week, depending on the engine.

But this quick rotation isn’t just something brands can’t influence. There are ways to maintain a level of visibility within AI citations through publishing fresh, consistent content complete with ongoing updates and deep subject-matter coverage. Also, ensuring you have a strategy for being frequently and accurately mentioned across third-party sources, allowing AI search tools to recognise your entity over time. 

5) Can paid media influence GEO visibility?

Yes, but not in the way we’re used to seeing. 

Historically, paid media and SEO can be unified to help brands fill visibility gaps across the customer funnel and capture audience through traditional search engines like Google and Bing. In the case of AI-powered search, paid media’s influence is more subtle, with a new focus on brand authority, relevant content and third-party validation.

Paid campaigns can drive a spike in users searching for your brand name on Google and social platforms and amplify earned media and owned content to build a stronger digital footprint. While this doesn’t directly influence AI citations, it contributes to the wider ecosystem of brand mentions and references that AI search platforms tend to draw from.

And the emergence of AI-native ads on platforms like ChatGPT and Google’s AIOs provide the opportunity for your brand to appear directly within chat interfaces. These placements sit separately from organic GEO visibility, but offer another way to reach audiences as they discover and evaluate brands.

6) What is the difference between being mentioned and cited?

Though both can happen to a brand simultaneously, being mentioned and cited in an AI search engine have two different functions. 

A mention means a brand name or product appears in the text of AI’s response, while a citation pulls information from a specific page on a brand’s website and provides a clickable link. The brand mention boosts brand awareness and puts you directly in front of the user, the citation signals authority to the model and provides a direct path to your website. 

The main thing to remember

While GEO can’t be ignored, it shouldn’t be used in isolation or sit in a silo away from SEO. A strong SEO foundation, made up of technical SEO, content, PR, analytics and the user experience, will influence a business’ AI visibility. GEO needs to be a part of your wider organic visibility strategy, but if you’re wondering where to begin, our experts can help. GEO auditing, AI-native ads – it's all in our toolbox. So, get in contact with us today to level up your approach to AI search.